3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A country’s need for workers need not mean good prospects for immigrants. This distinction drives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1921 review of August Sartorius von Waltershausen’s study of the United States as an immigration destination. Endorsing the book’s warning to prospective German emigrants, Schwiedland stresses a double vulnerability: employers exploit and dismiss workers, while trade unions seek to exclude newcomers. His concern with social legislation and Taylorist discipline gives the review a concrete focus on how labour is used rather than merely demanded. Yet his economic criticism also incorporates racial and gender prejudices without critical distance. This brief review shows how advice about earning a living abroad becomes entangled with anxieties about American power and continental Europe’s political fragmentation.
Foreign assets could stabilize the drachma—but what happened when those assets depreciated or could not be accessed? In this 1921 review of C. J. Damiris’s three-volume study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland explains how Greece’s 1910 monetary arrangements allowed note circulation to expand with seasonal demand while preserving exchange parity. His account focuses on the mechanism’s wartime vulnerability: blocked credits, disrupted trade and restrictions on capital exports prevented notes from returning to the bank, contributing to rising prices. Schwiedland praises Damiris’s study and reports his recommendation for restoring the system with supplementary gold backing. This compact review offers a concrete distinction between reserves that cover a currency on paper and reserves that can actually sustain its exchange rate.
Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review values Charles Gide’s account of alternatives to wage labour for its concrete French examples rather than for a single institutional prescription. Praising the clarity, factual richness and economy of Gide’s twelve lectures for American listeners, he places cooperatives, profit-sharing and employee share ownership alongside the prospect of abolishing the wage relation. The review offers a compact record of Schwiedland’s favourable reception of Gide as an expositor, without claiming to adjudicate between the arrangements surveyed.
Relief from international financial control, rather than economic description alone, is the purpose Schwiedland identifies in Tsouderos’s account of Greece’s recovery. In this brief review, he judges the controls imposed at the German Reich’s instigation especially oppressive and places the book’s proposals against that constraint. Two concrete prospects stand out: the conversion of Ottoman-era estates in Macedonia and Thessaly into small peasant holdings, and Tsouderos’s hope for closer Balkan trade relations culminating in a customs union. Without testing that programme independently, Schwiedland offers a compact reading of its political purpose, connecting Greece’s domestic economic reconstruction with the terms of its international relations.
A currency can retain a connection to gold without, in Schwiedland’s judgement, becoming a gold currency. This distinction gives his 1921 review of Elemér Hantos’s Die Zukunft des Geldes its critical edge. Schwiedland presents Hantos’s programme for postwar monetary reconstruction as dependent on revived production and international credit, not merely on reducing the quantity of money. Yet he challenges Hantos’s classification of gold-core and gold-exchange arrangements, placing them among paper currencies instead. The short review offers a focused encounter with a practical and conceptual difficulty: how to stabilize money in economies short of goods and burdened by debt, and what a promised return to gold would actually mean.
Industrial arbitration needs more than durable institutions: it needs unions whose authority workers accept. That reservation gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1921 review of Lord Askwith’s Industrial Problems and Disputes its edge. Schwiedland credits Askwith’s official experience in conciliation and wartime administration, and presents his preference for steady legal development over the politically expedient settlements of Lloyd George’s government. But he questions whether established unions can retain their influence as syndicalist and guild-socialist currents gain ground. The review offers a compact distinction between designing mechanisms for settling industrial disputes and sustaining the allegiance on which those mechanisms depend.
Does distinguishing human dependence on nature from dependence on other people justify a separate economic discipline? In this brief 1921 review of Max Schmidt’s two-volume Grundriß der ethnologischen Volkswirtschaftslehre, Eugen Peter Schwiedland tests that claim against the books’ contribution to economic theory. He outlines Schmidt’s distinction between material and social economic inquiry, but finds the theoretical yield surprisingly meagre. The review offers a pointed instance of disciplinary scepticism: for Schwiedland, organizing economic activity around social relations does not, on the evidence of these volumes, establish the need for an independent field.
A household’s economic independence need not mean freedom from domination. In this brief English-language review, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents Richard Thurnwald’s account of state and family formation, in which families gain autonomy from the clan while producers become subject to landlords, soldiers and priests. Schwiedland’s emphasis falls on the connections between political scale, social hierarchy and exchange: collective work can coexist with individual ownership, just as centralized taxation can coexist with private commerce. He conveys Thurnwald’s developmental scheme largely without criticism, adopting its hierarchical classification of peoples. The review offers a compact view of how this scheme links the widening reach of political organization to changes in household dependence, occupational specialization and trade.
Three questions of the moment frame this 1921 newspaper interview: how to value securities as the krone depreciates, whether industrial finance bills are inflationary, and whether a reversal of the business cycle threatens. The finance secretary reframes the fashionable talk of Substanzwert against Ertragswert, since 'substance' names only assets whose prices have lagged behind depreciation, defensible so long as future earning capacity is plausible, for an unviable enterprise has neither. He concedes that a finance bill unmatched by new goods is, in principle, as inflationary as state note issue, yet distinguishes credit to industry from direct state emission. Against England's deflationary example, he pleads for stabilization without liquidationism: ample but high-interest central-bank credit as a bridge until world recovery arrives, plus relief from the taxes and controls that stifle private adaptation.
Ein lebensunfähiges Unternehmen hat weder einen Ertrags-, noch einen Substanzwert, denn ein produktiver Apparat, mit dem man nichts machen kann, ist überhaupt wertlos.
English translation: “An unviable enterprise has neither an earnings value nor an intrinsic asset value, for a productive apparatus with which nothing can be done is wholly worthless.”
Because money satisfies no need directly, a buyer's maximum bid can only be the wealth left once more urgent wants are secured—never the monetary measure of a good's value. From this psychological foundation, drawn from Franz Brentano by way of Marty and Kraus, Engländer rebuilds price theory around ranked preferences, the 'price-willingness paradox' by which the bid per unit can fall faster than quantity rises, and prices that settle below a buyer's maximum. Competition among unequal buyers, he shows, fixes only upper and lower limits set by marginal and excluded strata, never a unique price; the missing determinant comes from the seller side and the cost law, in which labor stands as the terminal factor whose own price rests on the quantity actually employed.
Der Käufer hat keine Möglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Schätzung des Geldes in der Art, wie er eine unmittelbare Schätzung eines Gutes erster Ordnung nach der von diesem Gute abhängigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung vornimmt.
English translation: “The buyer has no possibility of directly appraising money in the way in which he directly appraises a first-order good according to the satisfaction of needs that depends on that good.”
The greatness of a life's work, this 1921 obituary proposes, can be tested by whether one decisive achievement alone would suffice to secure it, and Carl Menger passes. That achievement was the refounding of economic theory on subjective value and marginal utility, worked out in the 1871 Grundsaetze alongside the independent discoveries of Jevons and Walras. Menger did not attack the classical school from outside; he overcame Ricardo on his own analytical terrain by grounding price formation in the laws of human need and scarcity, redefining economics as a theory of prices. Schumpeter sets his originality above mere precursors like Gossen, credits the Methodenstreit writings as a defense of exact theory, and traces how Boehm-Bawerk and Wieser extended the work into the Austrian school that carried Menger's ideas into international science.
Menger gehörte zu den Denkern, denen eine solche Leistung von entscheidender, für die Wissenschaft historischer Bedeutung gelungen ist.
English translation: “Menger belonged to those thinkers who succeeded in an achievement of decisive, historically significant importance for science.”
John Bates Clark had claimed that wages, interest, and rent alike could be settled by a single marginal-productivity principle, the product neatly exhausted by its factors. Strigl’s compact intervention in Austrian distribution theory dismantles that equation as an unproven technical hypothesis rather than a law of value, then rebuilds interest on other ground. Reserving marginal-productivity pricing for the “primary” factors of labor and land, and following Böhm-Bawerk in treating capital as the wage-and-rent fund that finances time-consuming roundabout production, he shows that once workers and landowners are paid what added units would yield elsewhere, a surplus must remain. Competition cannot erase it where it appears in every capitalist enterprise; it becomes a residual rent attributable to the fund that makes waiting possible — and this residual, Strigl argues, is capital interest itself.
Trotzdem bleibt die statische Kapitalzinstheorie von grundlegender Bedeutung, da ihr Gesetz den Ruhepunkt definiert, dem auch die dynamische Wirtschaft jederzeit zustrebt, wobei nur immer neue Störungen die völlige Ausgleichung hindern.
English translation: “Nevertheless the static theory of capital interest remains of fundamental significance, since its law defines the resting point toward which the dynamic economy at all times strives, while only ever-new disturbances prevent complete equalization.”