The archive.

A stamp on a banknote could declare monetary independence, but could it determine who should bear an empire’s debts? In this March 1920 article, Karl Schlesinger examines the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian currency as a struggle over inherited liabilities, fiscal needs, and the location of circulating money. His attention falls on the gap between legal separation and practical enforcement: counterfeit stamps defeated border controls, while Czechoslovakia’s attempted monetary contraction produced shortages without promptly lowering prices. The same scrutiny informs his criticism of the peace treaty’s liquidation provisions, which assigned rights according to histories of individual notes that officials could not establish. Readers encounter monetary sovereignty not as a clean administrative act, but as a contested redistribution of wealth whose consequences depended on confidence, credit, and enforceable rules.

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.

Could inheritance become a means of equalizing life chances rather than perpetuating family advantage? In this brief German review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines Rich. Bondam’s proposal to pool estates within districts of roughly 200,000 inhabitants and distribute the proceeds equally. His account makes the institutional cost concrete: inherited property would have to be converted into money, with real estate sold at auction. Schwiedland’s clearest approval, however, goes to Bondam’s criticism of existing society and especially of schooling, informed by his experience as a secondary-school teacher. The review lets readers distinguish sympathy with an egalitarian diagnosis from endorsement of the machinery proposed to remedy it.

Numerical strength does not automatically confer political skill. In this brief 1921 review of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s expanded history of trade unionism, Eugen Peter Schwiedland pairs admiration for their meticulous, lucid scholarship with attention to the difficulties of exercising labour’s growing power. Union membership has doubled, organization has become more elaborate, yet leaders remain overworked and insufficiently prepared for parliamentary struggle. His selection of these tensions gives the review its particular interest: institutional growth leaves questions of strategy and purpose unresolved. The closing warning, explicitly attributed to the Webbs, sharpens that distinction by condemning cooperation between workers and employers when its object is to exploit consumers.

A world congress of scholars and technicians might coordinate production—but who would enforce its decisions? In this brief 1921 review of Anaxagoras’s Das Ziel der Weltbewirtschaftung, Eugen Peter Schwiedland tests a proposal to replace competitive exchange with worldwide cooperation directed toward human needs. He challenges its diagnosis as well as its remedy: the division of labour blamed for exploitation also sustains technical and economic progress, while organizational reform cannot simply bypass human self-interest. His appeal to Dostoevsky’s insistence on inward transformation sharpens that disagreement. The review’s concrete interest lies in its shift from expert planning to political authority: identifying a common good does not settle who may judge conflicting interests or compel unwilling nations to comply.