The archive.

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.

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.

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?