The archive.

A modest provision in Greece’s 1910 banking law allowed the National Bank to issue special notes to purchase gold and foreign exchange. In this brief review of C.-J. Damiris’s three-volume study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland singles out the mechanism’s achievement: well-backed currency responsive to demand and stable exchange rates. Its abandonment under fiscal pressure around 1920 gives the account its tension. Schwiedland reports Damiris’s case for restoring the arrangement and his inquiry into its possible relevance to international exchange-rate regulation, without presenting that possibility as a settled solution. The review offers a compact contemporary assessment of a specific monetary experiment, attentive both to its institutional workings and to the theoretical and documentary value of Damiris’s study.

Scholarly impartiality surviving wartime hostility is the opening concern of Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1922 review of the third, revised and expanded edition of Gide and Rist’s history of economic doctrines. He praises their unchanged objectivity toward German research, then identifies a precise methodological choice: they trace the ancestry of present-day economic ideas, drawing only sparingly on economic events and institutions. His favorable assessment lets readers see what he values in this approach—the capacity to make older doctrines intelligible through their continuing intellectual life—without mistaking it for an economic history. The review offers a compact example of how Schwiedland links cross-national scholarly fairness with attention to the historical development of ideas.

For Eugen Peter Schwiedland, an introduction to economics can be both elegant and intellectually deep. His brief 1922 review of Charles Gide’s Premières notions d’économie politique praises precisely this combination: vivid exposition, stimulating prose, and insights that go beyond elementary instruction. Rather than discussing Gide’s particular doctrines, Schwiedland judges the book by its capacity to attract students to economics. The review offers a compact glimpse of his pedagogical priorities: introductory writing should awaken interest without sacrificing depth.

Blame war profiteers, or reduce the supply of paper money? In this brief 1922 review of Edwin Cannan’s The Paper Pound of 1797–1921, Eugen Peter Schwiedland welcomes the reprinted Bullion Report and praises Cannan’s lively historical-theoretical introduction. His emphasis falls on the practical conclusion he draws from the book: burn paper currency until its purchasing power recovers and it can again procure gold. The notice offers a sharply compressed example of monetary-policy judgement, setting a currency remedy against the demand to punish profiteers without elaborating the theory behind that choice.

A revolution credited with freeing individual initiative also imposes compulsory forms of communal life. This tension gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1922 review of H. N. Brailsford’s The Russian Workers’ Republic its interest. Chiefly reporting rather than testing Brailsford’s favourable assessment, Schwiedland traces Bolshevik support to peasants’ acquisition of land, workers’ personal freedom, and Lenin’s adaptability. Yet the account of released energy and opportunity sits alongside revolutionary atrocities and intrusive government control. The closing hope that peace and productive work will loosen these constraints lets readers see how a sympathetic interpretation of Bolshevik rule could make individual emancipation both its achievement and its unfinished promise.

A weak currency can stimulate exports while fostering production that stabilisation will render untenable; a strong currency can depress exports when recovery demands more goods. This double bind anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief English-language review of Richard Kerschagl’s monetary pamphlet. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the productive consequences of monetary disorder, rather than currency stability considered in isolation. He values Kerschagl’s comparative account of national reconstruction efforts and identifies statistical tables covering 1913–1920 as its means of connecting inflation, domestic prices, and exchange rates. The review offers a compact view of why neither export growth under depreciation nor monetary strength necessarily signals a sound recovery.

Family organization may underpin communal life without making the state an enlarged family. This distinction anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Richard Thurnwald’s study of the Bánaro of New Guinea. Schwiedland foregrounds kinship as a structure of reciprocal duties and political association as a means of mutual protection, while tracing the account’s links between marriage arrangements, chiefly power and economic inequality. His appreciative notice also conveys Thurnwald’s conjectures about early marriage forms, including group marriage, which the review acknowledges is nowhere demonstrable in the present. Readers encounter a concise reception of Thurnwald’s research in which concrete descriptions of kinship pass into speculative institutional history—and definitions of social groups receive particular praise.

Must economics explain people’s preferences, or judge whether they are reasonable? In this comparative review of textbooks by Gustav Cassel, Karl Diehl, and W. Gelesnoff, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction concrete through a dispute over choosing food for parrots rather than meat for oneself. His defence of subjective value theory turns on the chooser’s ranking of satisfactions—not an observer’s approval or an arithmetic measure of pleasure. Mises presents Austrian economics as part of an international development of classical problems, rather than merely a reaction against German historicism. His differentiated judgments reveal what he considers legitimate theoretical progress: criticism may supersede marginal utility theory, but cannot simply bypass its explanations of choice, production, and exchange.

Advocating deflation is not the same as confronting the difficulties of carrying it out. This distinction drives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief collective review of three monetary pamphlets by Lancelot Hare and Yves-Guyot and Arthur Raffalovich’s Inflation et déflation. Schwiedland finds Hare’s theoretical foundations thin and the French authors’ historical account incomplete, but singles out a telling contrast: threats of the guillotine for refusing assignats did not prevent their eventual abolition. His compressed verdict offers neither a rival monetary theory nor an account of specific implementation obstacles. It instead exposes the practical question he finds unanswered by all four works: what does a commitment to deflation demand beyond arguing in its favour?

Economy does not begin with hunger, appropriation, or consumption, this economic-anthropological treatise insists, but with foresight — the moment human groups anticipate future want and deliberately store, produce, and allocate. Schwiedland traces that emergence across horde, family, clan, and tribe, through hunting and totemism, hoe agriculture bound to mother-right, and patriarchal pastoral nomadism, drawing on Thurnwald and Wundt. He rejects the 'golden age' of natural simplicity as a fiction: the earliest human condition is insecurity and scarcity, without stores or provision. Language, tools, fire, and settled life become the structural levers of a new organized existence, while labor divides by sex and status and property layers common tribal land over personal possession. Exchange grows from raid, gift, and ceremonial reciprocity into barter and money — 'treasure' made mobile — yet its essence remains planned provision, not the market alone.

Der Tauschverkehr ist neben der Herstellung von Gütern die zweite große Quelle des Wohlstandes.

English translation: “Alongside the production of goods, exchange is the second great source of prosperity.”

A machine produces goods—but does that explain why its owner receives interest? In the substantially revised 1931 Aufriss der ökonomischen Theorie, Emil Lederer separates technical productivity from the social relations that turn output into income. His introduction brings labour-value and marginal-utility theories into critical conversation, asking what each can explain about prices, production, and capitalist distribution. Individual valuations matter, but consumers’ purchasing power already depends on wages and ownership: preferences cannot simply explain the income structure that makes them effective. Readers can discover why apparently elementary categories such as cost, capital, and profit require historically specific explanations, and why an account of market equilibrium may leave the persistence of capitalist returns unresolved.

Die Maschine kann eben keinen Zins produzieren, sie produziert nur Produkte.

English translation: “A machine cannot produce interest; it produces only products.”

If money has no intrinsic value, what determines how much of it a buyer will offer for a good? In this 1922 article, Oskar Engländer argues that monetary nominalism leaves this question unanswered. His alternative begins with purchasing priorities: a buyer’s maximum bid depends on the funds remaining after more important needs have been provided for, not on an independently valued monetary unit. This approach makes unequal purchasing power central to price formation. Less urgent wants backed by wealth can prevail over more urgent wants backed by little income. By connecting these individual spending limits with competition and scarce productive resources, Engländer offers a route between cost and marginal-utility theories—and distinguishes conditions that determine a price from those that leave room for bargaining.