The archive.

The last portion of bread a person buys may matter greatly even when another portion would be almost worthless. For Oskar Engländer, this gap exposes a weakness in theories that infer proportionality between prices and marginal utilities from rational choice. In this 1920 article, directed principally against Schumpeter and Liefmann, he argues that choosing the best available action does not necessarily equalize marginal returns. Drawing on Brentano’s psychology, he treats preference as ranking rather than measurable intensity and distinguishes actual sacrifices, such as labor’s discomfort, from benefits forgone. His concrete examples make the stakes of seemingly technical assumptions visible: continuity and substitutability must be established, not smuggled into the economic principle. Readers can discover why rational purchases may constrain price relations without uniquely determining them.

Schumpeter measures Max Weber not by any single doctrine of parliamentarism or social policy but by the seriousness he forced upon a cautious, convention-bound German academy. Written as an obituary in 1920, this appraisal locates Weber's importance in a methodological achievement: the insistence that science cannot tell us what ought to be, that knowledge must be separated from political willing and from metaphysical presupposition. Weber's studies, Politik als Beruf, Wissenschaft als Beruf, and above all Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus and Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, are read as comparative inquiries into how belief, interest, discipline, and conduct interpenetrate, extending yet correcting Marx's economic interpretation of history. Economics supplied many of Weber's problems, Schumpeter concludes, but the governing form of his mind was sociological through and through.

Er war nicht konventionell. Er war nicht zugeritten. Er gehörte sich selbst.

English translation: “He was not conventional. He was not broken in. He belonged to himself.”

When does a change of terminology become a change of argument? In this polemical reply to Robert Liefmann, Alfred Amonn makes that distinction a test of economic reasoning. His sharpest example is money: he charges Liefmann with moving between an actual means of payment and an abstract accounting unit without distinguishing the two concepts. Amonn’s perspective is that of a critic who demands continuity of meaning across formulations, not conformity to a preferred vocabulary. His challenges to Liefmann’s claims of originality likewise turn on what predecessors actually wrote. The article offers a concrete encounter with the work of theoretical criticism: separating available resources from actual expenditure, checking quotations against interpretations, and asking whether a newly introduced distinction resolves a contradiction or merely conceals it.

When does an illuminating historical analogy become an unwarranted prophecy? In this 1920 review essay, Siegmund Feilbogen tests Spengler’s diagnosis of Western decline without dismissing his gifts as an interpreter of cultural forms. The decisive problem is the model of a culture’s lifespan: why should it resemble a human life rather than a tree capable of flowering repeatedly? Feilbogen challenges the chronology and selective comparisons supporting Spengler’s prediction, while asking what such predictions encourage readers to do—or abandon. His concern is practical as well as scholarly: a doctrine of inevitable decline may channel ambition into imperial power and commerce while discouraging artistic creation. The essay offers a discriminating encounter with Spengler, separating the capacity to perceive historical patterns from the authority to pronounce a civilization’s fate.

A short foreword to L. Galin's study of Russian courts and penal practice becomes, in Lederer's hands, an occasion to ask what law can be under Bolshevism. He opens by admitting he has never been to Russia and depends on sparse, contradictory reports, then advances a striking claim: even a revolution that ruptures every legal continuity generates continuity of its own, as old institutions, trained specialists, and popular habit reassert themselves. The dictatorship of the proletariat, he argues, has become institutional — sustained by leadership, propaganda, and transformed consciousness — yet has produced no genuinely new legal idea, an answer even Galin can give only unsatisfyingly. From that dissatisfaction he draws the essay's sharpest question: whether the Rechtsstaat itself is possible only within the bourgeois world.

So öffnet diese Darstellung den Ausblick auf die Frage: ob und inwieweit auch der Rechtsstaat nur in der bürgerlichen Welt möglich ist.

English translation: “Thus this account opens up the prospect of the question: whether and to what extent the Rechtsstaat too is possible only in the bourgeois world.”

Promises of equitable commerce sit uneasily beside the exclusion of Germany and Austria from the institutions meant to secure them. In this 1920 article, Emil Perels tests the League of Nations Covenant against German and Austrian proposals for international economic cooperation. His concern is concrete: what protection do transit rights and commercial guarantees offer states denied an equal voice in their administration? Comparing treaty obligations with proposals for a world commercial treaty, he links economic rights to institutional participation rather than treating them as self-enforcing rules. His defence of the defeated powers also has limits: criticism of colonial mandates does not become a rejection of empire. The article exposes the tension between European economic interdependence and a settlement that, in Perels’s judgement, preserves the victors’ instruments of economic leverage.

Collective control can expand without simply restoring communal ownership: this is the tension Eugen Peter Schwiedland brings into view in his brief review of Waldemar Mitscherlich’s economic stage theory. He presents Mitscherlich’s account largely through exposition rather than criticism, tracing how private initiative emerges from customary restraints and then encounters new forms of corporate authority. The concrete interest lies in the final stage, where state factories, trusts, trade unions, shop stewards and works councils all figure within an enlarged concept of “corporative” economy. Readers can discover how this scheme distinguishes renewed collective power over developed capitalist enterprises from the communal regulation of early economic life—and how cautiously the review describes its possible movement toward “social capital.”

When does competition for world markets become economic coercion, and what obligations might restrain it? In this brief review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Adolf Lenz’s proposal to place international economic relations under legal regulation. The concrete stakes are food, raw materials, labour, and manufactured goods: Lenz would direct surpluses beyond domestic needs toward common provision, guaranteeing each national economy a subsistence minimum and access to loans that do not obstruct its development. Schwiedland praises Lenz’s legal precision and command of existing regulations, while expressing hope rather than certainty about practical results. The review offers a compact encounter with a proposal to make national economic security compatible with enforceable duties toward other peoples.

Can public ownership curb excessive drinking without denying ordinary people their drink? In this brief German review of Arthur Greenwood’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland foregrounds the British Labour Party’s proposed answer: remove the commercial incentive to sell more and stronger alcohol. His favourable account centres on wartime Carlisle, where an influx of munitions workers was followed by overcrowding and increased drunkenness. Public administration of drinking establishments, withdrawal of licences, and the provision of food and light refreshments supplied a practical precedent for reform. The review offers a compact account of how changing ownership and the services a public house provided could be presented as an alternative to prohibition.

Can tracing the origins of psychic life advance the study of society? In this brief review of Aurel Kolnai’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland questions both the conceptual links psychoanalysis offers and its capacity to reach readers beyond the Freudian school. He singles out the connection between delusional formations and philosophical systems as speculative, while acknowledging Kolnai’s fluent exposition. His practical objections—specialist terminology, no summary of findings, no table of contents—give the notice its particular interest: explanatory credibility and usability become linked tests of psychoanalysis’s entry into social inquiry.

An economist can educate a generation while remaining an institutional outsider. That contrast shapes Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1921 review of the sixth edition of Charles Gide’s Cours d’économie politique. As Gide’s former co-editor, Schwiedland brings personal knowledge to his account of a cooperative advocate whose postwar political stance, he argues, obstructed an intended appointment at the Collège de France. His praise of Gide’s clarity and fairness leads to a concrete feature of the textbook: a hundred pages devoted to consumers, expenditure, saving, and related questions. The review offers a compact view of what Schwiedland valued in economic teaching—independence from established schools, serious attention to opposing opinions, and recognition of consumers as economic actors.

Worker control of industry need not mean freedom for every worker—or protection for consumers. This tension shapes Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s paired review of G. D. H. Cole’s defence of guild socialism and G. C. Field’s critique. Presenting the programme through Otto Bauer’s sympathetic account, Schwiedland singles out its institutional machinery: national worker guilds, joint producer–consumer decisions, and state levies to equalize incomes. His description of the remaining authority as a “shadow state” sharpens the problem to which Field’s objections return: who restrains powerful industrial groups? Without delivering a separate final verdict, Schwiedland gives those objections the closing emphasis. The compact review allows readers to distinguish the democratic claim to industrial self-government from the questions of expertise, public accountability, and individual freedom that its implementation raises.