2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
In Victoria and New Zealand, colonies Schwiedland reads as freer than Britain from aristocratic ballast and therefore bolder in social experiment, a new type of wage rule was taking shape against the sweated trades. Victoria's wage boards delegate rate-setting to expert representatives of employers and workers under an impartial chairman; New Zealand instead channels disputes into compulsory conciliation and binding arbitration awards. Neither, he insists, sprang from abstract formulas of a living or family wage, but from concrete trade practice, often union standards. Evasion through double books and collusive underpayment does not refute the system; it proves that law needs organized labour behind it. The result is neither old maximum-wage policing nor doctrinaire socialism, but an authoritative lower boundary governed by Billigkeit, a public standard of fairness.
Dabei wetteifern beide Gebiete miteinander im socialpolitischen Fortschritt. Dessen höchste Blüte bilden derzeit die Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung unzureichender Löhne.
English translation: “Both regions vie with each other in socio-political progress. Its highest flowering at present consists in measures for raising insufficient wages.”
The 1896 Vienna enquiry into women's labour filled seven hundred printed pages, stirred the press and public, then dispersed without producing a single practical measure. Sympathy, Schwiedland argues, was never the point: the distress of seamstresses and home workers stands in causal connection with their lack of organization, and the hardest case is the trade that is almost wholly female and dispersed across private dwellings. Marriage expectations, domestic burden, mistrust, replaceability, and dependence on a husband's wage all weaken association at the very moment they depress pay. His remedy is a hybrid of law, compulsory or state-aided representation understood as education, and the Berlin Christian-social Gewerkverein as a model in which bourgeois women initiate a union and then withdraw, culminating, where a sales cooperative bypasses the Verleger, in structural change.
Da frägt sie nur um den Auftrag, nicht mehr um dessen Preis.
English translation: “There she asks only about the commission, no longer about its price.”
Economic theory must begin not from an abstract calculator but from the acting person, whose bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution shapes conduct in advance. Dedicated to the psychiatrist August Forel, this essay builds a layered anthropology, reflex, instinct, character, habit, suggestion, and traces economic behaviour to instinctual complexes of nutrition, protection, possession, power, and vanity that differ sharply in urgency. Schwiedland's sharpest tool is a distinction economics had blurred: Begier, desire, generates its own activity and seeks heightened pleasure, while Bedürfnis, need, is provoked by deprivation and drives toward its removal. The essence of economy, he insists, lies not in consuming but in procuring goods for future satisfaction. Culture is the refinement of striving; luxury is ambiguous, capable of both waste and invention; and economic reform, he concludes, must include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: “Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.”
A state that had suppressed workers’ associations now proposed to guarantee their representation inside the workplace. Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines this contradiction in his 1908 essay on compulsory workers’ committees in Austria. His account of Emil Steinbach’s proposals shows how institutions intended to foster loyalty to employers could also give workers a recognized voice in disciplinary grievances, welfare administration, and workplace rules. Defending statutory representation against reliance on employers’ goodwill, Schwiedland nevertheless takes seriously the danger of managerial control and workers’ historically grounded distrust. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish representation from paternalism: compulsory establishment matters only if committees have substantive functions. Its legislative controversies expose why both employers and organized workers could resist the same institution for opposing reasons.
No economy is governed by interest alone: conduct is formed by moral sentiment, custom, and law, each carrying its own sanction, conscience, public opinion, state force, and its own historical rhythm. Drawing on Schaeffle, Wundt, Westermarck, and Schmoller, Schwiedland traces how inward feeling hardens into Sitte, the socially expected form of conduct, and how custom in turn sustains, softens, or defeats written law even after its repeal. The deeper ground of both is collective self-protection, which is why acts condemned as selfish between individuals may be praised when done for the state. Applied historically, the argument shows guild rules and price ordinances confining commerce until the eighteenth century, liberal freedom then loosening them, and the modern state re-entering through factory protection, wage regulation, and social insurance to subordinate economic voluntarism to the community's sense of the fair.
„Sitte ist stärker als Recht“.
English translation: “Custom is stronger than law.”
Adolescence is neither childhood nor adulthood but a vulnerable passage, bodily growth, sexual maturation, emotional volatility, unfinished judgment, and industrial society, Schwiedland argues, throws working-class youth into adult labour, lodging-house life, drink, and disease before they can withstand them. He reads juvenile mortality, delinquency, and institutionalization as effects of environment rather than innate depravity, and faults courts and prisons for deepening the damage they claim to correct. Against this he sets a coordinated Jugenddienst: vocational guidance matched to health and aptitude rather than mere vacancies, placement offices, youth homes serving as substitute family, medical supervision, thrift schemes, and legal protection. The Jugendhort must feel like a large family, not a school or barracks. Care for the earning young, he closes, matters more than relief for those already broken, because the future lies with them.
Was in erster Linie benötigt wird, ist also ein Nachweis nicht der Stellen, sondern der richtigen Berufe.
English translation: “What is needed first and foremost, then, is a placement not of positions, but of the right occupations.”
When does apprenticeship amount to training, and when is it merely a name for juvenile labour? In this brief 1911 review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland dismisses Charles Berteaux’s study as overlong and library-bound, yet singles out a striking estimate it cites: only 60,000 of 600,000 young people of apprenticeship age held proper apprenticeship contracts. The rest entered oral arrangements or worked as juvenile auxiliary labourers. His selective appraisal draws attention to the distance between France’s legal provisions and young workers’ actual circumstances, while distinguishing the book’s useful evidence from its scholarly execution.
What should beginning economists learn to notice? In this brief 1911 review of Édouard Driault’s Le monde actuel, Eugen Peter Schwiedland values the book’s combination of economic history, economic geography, and world history as a means of training attention to concrete conditions. His favorable notice turns on a specific educational judgment: broad historical and geographical surveys can help students see how economic processes shape contemporary politics. The review offers a compact statement of what Schwiedland wanted economic reading to cultivate—habits of observation extending beyond the discipline’s boundaries.
A tax intended to restrain department stores may instead sharpen their organization—or simply be passed on to suppliers. This reversal anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1911 review of Henry Vouters’s study of small retailers confronting department stores and consumer cooperatives. Schwiedland endorses the turn from penalties on rivals toward collective purchasing and retailers’ credit cooperatives, but finds Vouters’s emphasis misplaced: demonstrated successes of constructive organization deserve more attention than attacks on obsolete tactics. The review offers a compact distinction between protecting traders by burdening competitors and strengthening their own capacity to compete.
Can a persuasive explanation of economic crises also yield workable remedies? In this 1911 review of the second edition of Jean Lescure’s study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland separates admiration for historical inquiry from confidence in policy prescriptions. He presents Lescure’s account of declining entrepreneurial profits and interrupted investment, but tests proposed safeguards against concrete experience: the American steel combination lowered prices after improving production in one downturn, yet maintained them during later weakness. Schwiedland finds a public statistical service more attainable than compulsory reductions in working time or state payment of insurance contributions during crises. This compact review shows how endorsement of an empirical method can coexist with pointed reservations about the remedies it supports.
A forceful critique of the state is not yet a strategy for replacing it. In this brief 1911 review of Paul Louis’s Le syndicalisme contre l’État, Eugen Schwiedland acknowledges the value of Louis’s attack on the “class state” but challenges his denial that it can change. His decisive objection is practical: Louis does not explain how radical trade unions would acquire power or what they would do with it. The notice offers a compact distinction between concrete social criticism and a revolutionary programme whose means and consequences remain unspecified.
An agreement to end night baking could fail because innkeepers ordered fresher bread from elsewhere. This episode gives a concrete edge to Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1911 review of the Austrian hearings on bakery working hours. Reading the testimony against sharp local differences, he distinguishes journeymen’s demand for regulation, master bakers’ resistance, and industrial bakeries’ conditional acceptance. His preference is practical rather than uniform: give legal sanction to the respective collective agreements. Yet the examples he selects also expose obstacles to negotiated reform, from customers’ expectations to employers’ objections to replacement workers. The review offers a compact view of how shorter hours and weekly rest depended on arrangements extending beyond agreement between masters and journeymen.