The archive.

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.

Can economics judge the effectiveness of human action without judging its aims? In this brief English review of Robert Wilbrandt’s Oekonomie, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents a reformer’s answer: economics should address deficiencies in the means required to achieve practical ends. Schwiedland follows the move from that apparently neutral task to national efficiency as a standard for criticizing economic arrangements. His concise account also brings a tension into view: Wilbrandt excludes political opinions from his deductions, yet links forms of economic organization to conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and anarchism. Rather than testing the system independently, Schwiedland makes its governing commitments legible, allowing readers to examine how a science concerned with means becomes a programme for economic reform.

Gold backing is not the same as gold convertibility: this distinction sharpens Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1922 review of Elemér Hantos’s Die Zukunft des Geldes. Schwiedland explains two arrangements for Europe’s weakened economies—one holding gold without freely redeeming notes, the other holding claims payable in gold-based currencies—and insists that both remain forms of paper currency. Yet this disagreement over classification leaves practical agreement intact. He endorses Hantos’s emphasis on moderate currency stability, increased production, and exports rather than an immediate return to the gold standard. The review offers a compact account of why monetary reconstruction cannot be separated from the availability of goods, transport, machinery, and labor.

What makes statistics dependable—and their meaning unmistakable? In this brief 1922 review of Franz Zizek’s Grundriss der Statistik, Eugen Peter Schwiedland highlights the connection between statistical principles and the questions they serve. His notice emphasizes how Zizek returns from tables of population and economic life to methodological choices, rather than treating figures as self-explanatory. Banking, stocks and shares, and balances receive particular attention as subjects Schwiedland identifies as previously untreated statistically. Readers encounter a concise contemporary assessment of the textbook’s scope and practical orientation, not a detailed test of its methods or findings.

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.

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.

Italy’s economic modernization and its postwar vulnerability stand side by side in Wilhelm Röpke’s brief 1922 review of Credito Italiano’s anniversary survey, L’Italie économique. Against what he sees as German underestimation of Italy, Röpke emphasizes the simultaneous expansion of industry, finance, and modernized agriculture. Yet his praise turns on the publication’s refusal of economic triumphalism: diminished German purchasing power, tourism receipts, and emigrants’ remittances expose the international dependencies beneath national achievement. The review offers a compact encounter with Röpke’s standards of economic judgement—recognition of productive development tempered by attention to the cross-border flows that sustain it—and his hope that economic realities might overcome political passions.