The archive.

Italy mediating between Europe and the East, Spain squandering American conquest, Holland rising on shipping and colonial cultivation: this third edition of 1918 reads world history as a relay of commercial supremacy, in which wealth is the medium that turns collective capacity into cultural and political rank. France succeeds through centralized manufacture, England through the durable synthesis of sea power, colonies, industry, and finance, and then Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan press against the British system. Reading the World War as proof that great powers' spheres now collide everywhere, Schwiedland argues for large, contiguous, autarkic Weltstaaten. A second part traces the dissolution of medieval corporate bonds into an individualism whose enormous energy also breeds crisis, class polarization, and the acquisitive Americanismus he indicts.

Erwarb früher der Mensch, um zu leben, so lebt er jetzt um zu erwerben

English translation: “Whereas man formerly acquired in order to live, he now lives in order to acquire; Americanism, the view that sees in acquisition the purpose of life, has seized broad strata who sacrifice their life in order to die rich (Müller-Lyer).”

Two 1917 lectures at Vienna's Technische Hochschule trace economic history as a movement from small, self-sufficient units toward ever wider and more fragile webs of dependence. Adopting Bücher's clean sequence of house, city, and national economy, Schwiedland argues that each stage requires an organizer — household head, municipal authority, modern state — and on that ground denies that a true Weltwirtschaft yet exists: world trade flourishes, but no universal authority orders it. The second lecture turns to specialization, which enriches humanity even as it binds every farmer, exporter, and official into a vulnerable net of contracts and credit. Against the liberal faith in a harmonizing international division of labour, he reads imperialism as a struggle for secure food, raw materials, and markets, and wartime controls as a possible route beyond economic anarchy.

Trägerin und Ernährerin des Lebens ist die Erde.

English translation: “The earth is the bearer and sustainer of life.”

How does collective life form, discipline, and yet depend on the individuals who compose it? These two 1917 lectures pose that question across sociology, ethics, law, and economics. The first, on social discipline, treats custom, morality, and law as graded forms of regulation distinguished by their sanction — conscience, public opinion, coercion — with law crystallizing from older custom once authority enforces it; the state, tellingly, demands morality of its citizens while suspending it in politics and war. The second turns to the forces that bind persons into associations — religion, homeland, common interest, the state — and argues that social processes, though interindividual, are supra-individual in their effects. Schwiedland resists both crude collectivism and unbound individualism, seeking instead a practical harmony between the happiness of the person and that of the whole.

Sitte ist äußere Übung, Sittlichkeit innerliche Gesinnung.

English translation: “Custom is outward practice; morality is inward disposition.”

Technique is never self-legitimating: it is a means, and its social form depends on the purposes that command it. That claim organizes this expanded 1918 essay, which runs from prehistoric tool use to modern industry and the cultural crisis of efficiency. Schwiedland distinguishes older empirical craft from scientific technique — mastery of nature attained through knowledge — and, borrowing Sombart's stages, shows how inherited recipes are reorganized by experiment and systematic control of forces. Within the firm the technician is the oarsman, the economist the helmsman: the best process counts for nothing unless it can be financed, sold, and scaled. The century's real engine, he argues, was not sudden genius but cheaper transport and wider markets, which made every technical advantage urgent. Efficiency thus develops its own technique and comes to dominate — a rule before which culture must assert itself.

Kultur ist Selbstentfaltung und Beherrschung der Umwelt.

English translation: “Culture is self-unfolding and mastery of the environment.”

Property, in this second edition of 1918, is an institution 'of overriding, all-dominating effect' whose usefulness is inseparable from its dangers — dependency, class power, and duty. Schwiedland separates factual possession from socially recognized right, then follows the tacit proviso that binds ownership — Paulsen's clause that the community may dispose otherwise where welfare requires — through agrarian history: from village use-rights, Flurzwang, and Allmende to the conquest-born great estate that concentrates power and hardens social ranks. Urban land becomes speculative capital, movable wealth becomes securities and industrial enterprise, and inheritance law carries wealth and position to descendants. Surveying personality, legal, labour, and utility theories, he finds each partial and settles on social usefulness as the only decisive ground, defending rent limits, inheritance restrictions, and expropriation where ownership threatens the common welfare.

Der Großbesitz ist der Ausdruck, aber auch ein Anreger der gesellschaftlichen Klassenscheidung.

English translation: “Large property is the expression, but also an instigator, of class division in society.”

Not an abstract mechanism of labour, capital, and exchange, but a formation shaped by land, climate, water, mineral deposits, borders, and neighbours — that is the national economy as this 1918 essay conceives it. Schwiedland turns each physical condition into an economic form: coastlines invite navigation, mountains isolate and obstruct, alluvial plains concentrate population and cities, poor soils drive emigration. Water is the most expansive medium — rivers that irrigate, carry, and power, canals and isthmian cuts that rewrite routes, the sea that lifts history from river civilizations to Atlantic and Pacific world traffic. Coal and iron ground industrial modernity in subterranean endowment. The racial and climatic idiom demands critical distance, yet the argument is not fatalism: environment sets possibilities and resistances, while labour, breeding, mining, and organization remake nature, so that man becomes a co-creator of the economic world.

Der große Handel und Verkehr ist Seehandel und Seeverkehr und die große Politik erstrebt die Beherrschung der Meere.

English translation: “Great commerce and traffic are maritime commerce and maritime traffic, and great politics aims at the mastery of the seas.”

Not goods and wealth but human qualities and relationships form the true subject of economics: so runs the governing thesis of this first volume of a revised three-volume course, rewritten after 1918 for readers who now demanded critical reflection on inherited institutions. The old sweep remains, the competition of states from Italy to England, the passage from feudal order to industrial capitalism, but the postwar edition weighs capitalism and socialism at length, dissecting Marxism, syndicalism, guild socialism, and Bolshevism, and refusing historical materialism's reduction of culture to the mode of production. Value is grounded in marginal utility, capitalism defined as both purposive organization and a pervading spirit, and the whole framed by a demand for realism about grown conditions joined to idealism of aims.

Mit Freiheit allein ist dem einzelnen nicht gedient, es bedarf auch der Lebenssicherheit und einigen Behagens.

English translation: “Freedom alone does not serve the individual; there is also need of security of life and a measure of comfort.”

Economics begins, for Schwiedland, in reflection on why some peoples prosper while others fall behind, and wealth, he warns, is relative, unstable, and worth having only as a condition of cultural and political power, ruinous to the nation that mismanages it. From that premise a sweeping course unfolds: the rise and fall of Italy, Spain, Holland, France, and England; the passage from medieval estates to liberal industrial capitalism; then a systematic doctrine of environment, population, value, and price. Economic activity he defines as foresighted provision for future wants, value as marginal utility (Grenznutzen) after Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. Against the materialism, speculation, and inequality that economic freedom breeds, these lectures to Vienna's engineering students end in an appeal for conscious idealism and reform.

Der Antrieb zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker ist der Drang der Einzelnen nach Bereicherung.

English translation: “The driving force behind the economic development of peoples is the individual's urge for enrichment.”

Amid the collapse of 1919, with the monarchy gone and proletarian parties newly powerful, the demand to socialize the means of production had to be tested against its own practicability. Socialization, Schwiedland insists, is less a matter of ownership than of use: large enterprises should be withdrawn from private greed and directed to public needs without destroying the incentives that make them productive. He reads wartime cartels, forced syndicates, and Richard Riedl's Austrian control apparatus as precedents for socialization by administration rather than expropriation, and he sifts which sectors, mining, coal, electricity, transport, suit public monopoly and which must stay competitive for export. Cautious and experimental throughout, this lecture to Vienna's engineers and architects concludes that the success of any Kontrolismus depends finally on the moral quality of the population.

Die Bändigung der Unternehmenschaft unter Erhaltung der Vorteile, die sie der Menschheit errungen hat.

English translation: “The taming of entrepreneurship while preserving the advantages it has won for humanity.”

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.”

Against theories that lodge value in labor, cost, or the object itself, this short monograph — later folded into Schwiedland's Volkswirtschaftslehre — grounds value in a subjective consciousness of dependence on useful and scarce goods. Utility, he argues, names an objective suitability, whereas value is the felt dependence of the economizing subject; hence his correction of both 'objective value' language and the Austrian preference for 'Grenznutzen.' Price, by contrast, is external, negotiated, social — an actual counter-performance received in exchange, one requiring not equal values but divergent valuations, so that barter enriches both sides. Translating usefulness and scarcity into supply and demand, Schwiedland tracks seller competition in abundance, buyer competition in shortage, hoarding, panic selling, cartels, and monetary policy, yet ends in methodological modesty: no single theory can capture every real price.

Wert ist ein Gefühl, Preis eine tatsächliche Gegenleistung: die Menge von Gütern, die man beim Austausch für andere empfängt.

English translation: “Value is a feeling, price an actual counter-performance: the quantity of goods one receives in exchange for others.”

Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.

Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.

English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”