The archive.

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.

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.”

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.

"You cannot eat your cake and keep it too" - the English proverb frames Schumpeter's cool assessment of Austria's credit plan and its League of Nations supervision. Foreign oversight may be humiliating, he concedes, but Austria humiliated itself; control is the consequence of an inability to stabilize alone, not an external injustice. His central move shifts the argument from honor to sequence. Domestic consolidation would demand restoring the budget first, then creditworthiness, then the currency and a note-issuing bank - a very painful path. Foreign credit reverses that order, letting stabilization begin with the currency rather than end with it, provided the krone is merely stabilized and never raised. Even so, an industrial crisis is unavoidable, and the slightest fiscal error could yield a catastrophe worse than the present.

Ein Geschenk wird uns sicher nicht gemacht.

English translation: “We are certainly not being given a gift.”

The scandal, for a scientific mind, is moral philosophy: dozens of competing systems, nearly identical practical conclusions, demonstrations built on undefined terms. Rueff's remedy, in this 1922 essay prefaced by Clément Colson, is to deny any real division among the sciences. Geometry, mechanics, physics, morality, and political economy share one structure — empirical laws drawn from experience, then "causes" constructed through axioms and definitions so that deduction can recover those laws; building a science is thus a création des causes. Moral doctrines become géométries morales, and utilitarianism, interventionism, and Marxian socialism appear as non-Euclidean systems, logically coherent yet untrue to present social conditions. Drawing on Walras but recasting need and utility as created causes rather than psychological measurements, Rueff sketches a statistical mathematical economics: no more a political economy of the individual than a thermodynamics of the molecule.

Dire qu'une théorie morale est vraie, c'est une affirmation qui n'a aucun sens.

English translation: “To say that a moral theory is true is an assertion that has no meaning whatever.”