The archive.

Money can still settle a debt while buying far less—and gold itself need not provide a stable measure of value. In this compact 1922 double review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland pairs Edwin Cannan’s explanation of wartime monetary expansion with J. Shield Nicholson’s account of inflation’s unequal social effects. His presentation connects the depreciation of paper currencies and gold to a pointed distinction between rising money incomes and actual purchasing power. Nicholson’s threatened middle class brings the distributional stakes into view: not everyone can compensate for higher prices by securing higher income. The review’s closing appeal to productive expenditure, restored note convertibility, and moral strength shows how monetary stabilization becomes, in Schwiedland’s treatment, a problem of social discipline as well as currency management.

Can economic interdependence restrain the rivalries it helps create? In this brief 1922 double review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland pairs Seligmann’s explanation of Britain’s changing great-power adversaries with Demangeon’s account of Europe’s diminished economic position after the war. The decisive uncertainty is Britain’s response to American ascendancy: renewed competition or accommodation. Schwiedland’s own voice emerges as he turns from Europe’s lost advantages to its future livelihood, insisting that productive service, reflection and work must replace inherited privilege. His closing hopes—for constructive American leadership, an Anglo-American settlement and goodwill among European peoples—give this compact review its distinctive tension: European effort is necessary, but recovery also depends on international arrangements Europeans cannot determine alone.

Psychological inquiry and factory experience offer complementary approaches to easing industrial work in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief double review of Frank Watts and B. S. Rowntree. Schwiedland credits Watts with seeking compatibility between social ethics and economic benefit, while finding his exposition insufficiently clear. Rowntree supplies the practical contrast: employee participation in management, tested in his own enterprise, alongside demands that production and the distribution of returns serve the community. The review’s concrete interest lies in this pairing of psychological hopes with workplace institutions—including the York chocolate factory’s works council and company magazine—through which readers can trace two distinct approaches to improving relations between employers and workers.

Giolitti’s proposal for compulsory works councils gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland a concrete point of departure from George D. Herron’s confidence in Italian national renewal. In this brief 1922 review, Schwiedland turns from Herron’s vision of overcoming individualism to the practical history of industrial reform. He recalls his own advocacy of compulsory workers’ committees in 1891 and Emil Steinbach’s Austrian legislative projects, defeated, he reports, by an alliance of bureaucrats, industrialists, and Social Democratic labor leaders. His hope that Italy will prove more receptive gives the review its distinctive stake: a reform advocate tests an apparently new Italian initiative against earlier Austrian proposals and the resistance that frustrated them.

Public ownership need not mean the exclusion of private enterprise. In this brief 1922 review of A. E. Davies’s The Case for Nationalization, Eugen Peter Schwiedland records proposals for state banks, insurers and shipping companies to compete with private firms. His concise account, which offers no explicit verdict, also singles out a practical legal change: municipalities would receive general authority to establish businesses, with legislation defining exceptions rather than authorizing each venture separately. The review lets readers distinguish these arrangements from outright communal ownership and from bounded worker participation in management—different institutional choices within the English workers’ socialization programme as Davies presents it.

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.

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 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?