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.”
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.”
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.
Nature becomes power through technique, and technique becomes consequential only through the purposes that select it, such is the moving relation this compact essay sets out. Schwiedland defines Technik as purposive, rule-guided practice, distinct from science yet inseparable from it: science discovers laws, technique invents and shapes, and technical devices often run ahead of theory and compel it to catch up. In economic life the decisive test is not technical elegance but profit; the entrepreneur, not the engineer, decides whether an innovation pays under constraints of capital, labour, and demand. Technical possibility, he argues, is broader than economic possibility. Enlarged capacity in turn opens new markets, steam, railways, dyes, electrolysis, aviation, while free competition turns every profitable advance into pressure on all producers, making Wirtschaftlichkeit the ruling principle of modern life.
Stets ist indes die Technik Mittel zum Zweck: sei dieser eigene Selbstbefriedigung oder die Erreichung äußerer Ziele.
English translation: “Technique is always, however, a means to an end: whether that end be one's own self-gratification or the attainment of external goals.”
Where the profit-seeking merchant and the ordinary banker once stood between small producers and the market, the cooperative interposes collective self-help. Schwiedland's second edition anatomizes the whole family of Wirtschaftsgenossenschaften: purchasing and consumer societies in the Rochdale tradition, agricultural sales and machinery associations, building cooperatives, mutual insurance funds, and the rival credit systems of Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen, analyzing their share capital, their three grades of member liability, and their tendency to displace the entrepreneur's profit. He is candid about limits: nineteenth-century hopes that productive cooperatives would abolish wage labor were largely disappointed, since such ventures still demand capital, discipline, and commercial skill. Throughout, cooperation appears as both economic instrument and moral education, a movement toward an order governed by shared interest rather than gain alone.
Die Produktivgenossenschaften sind daher keine Vorbilder für die Aufhebung der Lohnarbeit.
English translation: “Productive cooperatives are therefore not models for the abolition of wage labor.”
Rural depopulation, in this 1912 Vienna lecture, is neither moral decay nor the inevitable price of progress but a structural failure of property distribution. Schwiedland joins attraction and expulsion: where large estates or dwarf holdings dominate, the ambitious young see no credible path from wage labour to ownership, and so they leave. He reframes the rural labour question as a land question, surveys the lesser remedies — cooperatives, credit institutions, rural schools, better housing — and subordinates them all to Besiedlung, inner colonization on the Prussian Rentengut model, where a holding is acquired through long-term rent rather than crushing capital debt. The purpose is not to furnish hands to landlords but to anchor capable labourers as owning citizens, giving them a visible prospect of ascent.
Für diesen Abzug kamen also nicht bloß die Reize der Städte, sondern auch die verhältnismäßige Erschwerung der Existenz auf dem Lande in Betracht: die Stadt zieht die Leute seelisch an, während zugleich das Land sie wirtschaftlich abstößt.
English translation: “For this exodus, then, not merely the attractions of the cities came into consideration, but also the comparative aggravation of existence in the countryside: the city attracts people psychologically, while at the same time the countryside repels them economically.”
Overcoming distance is the social work that Schwiedland makes the object of this 1918 treatise on Verkehr — transport understood not as machinery but as the bringing together of people, goods, and messages that need completing, and the separating of those tending apart. Technical possibility, he argues, is generative rather than merely serviceable: once paths, vehicles, and motive forces exist, they create relations where advantage can be won. The decisive historical threshold is the professional carrier; from there the account runs through roads, railways, canals, ocean liners, ports, post, telegraph, and press. Railways make bulk goods mobile and translate geography into calculable tariff and schedule, while cheap freight levels prices and forestalls famine even as it exposes weaker regions to distant competition. Transport, he insists, must serve a livable order, not become autonomous circulation.
Der Telegraf überflügelt die Erde in ihrer Umdrehung.
English translation: “The telegraph outstrips the earth in its rotation.”
Unemployment, on the eve of the First World War, was still widely read as pauperism or personal failing; this 1914 lecture — the first pamphlet of the Austrian Association for Combating Unemployment — insists instead that it is a socially produced market risk, unverschuldet, obliging the community to both prevention and relief. Schwiedland weighs three existing models: the Belgian or Ghent system of subsidised union funds, which he judges a mere surrogate reaching only the better-situated skilled worker; the Scandinavian public funds open to the unorganised; and the English compulsory insurance of 1911. For Austria he proposes a fourth, municipal path outside poor relief, aiding organised and unorganised alike. His deepest claim is institutional: reliable relief is impossible without a public labour-market infrastructure to test willingness to work and measure involuntary idleness.
Arbeitsnachweis ist die erste Form der Arbeitslosenfürsorge.
English translation: “Labor exchanges are the first form of unemployment relief.”
Trade, defined here as 'the acquisition of goods for the purpose of their resale,' is distinguished from the social type of the merchant and reconceived as an economic function: spatial and temporal distribution between producers and consumers. In this fourth edition of 1918, Schwiedland tracks that function from armed caravans and colonial companies — long-distance exchange long dependent on protection and force — to the modern apparatus of railways, banks, exchanges, brokers, and standardized samples that detach commercial dealing from the physical presence of goods and make markets comparable across distance. His fullest analysis is of retail's revolution: the branch system, mail-order house, consumer cooperative, and above all the department store, emblem of rationalized distribution running on mass purchasing, rapid turnover, and narrow margins. Every commercial layer, he warns, imposes its own cost on the consumer.
Der Handel und der Frachtverkehr haben nun das Bestreben, die Welt zu einem einzigen weiten Markte zu gestalten.
English translation: “Trade and freight transport now strive to fashion the world into a single wide market.”