Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen · 1891
Schullern-Schrattenhofen’s study introduces recent Italian theoretical economics to German readers by arguing that Italy has again become scientifically consequential after an earlier history of brilliance, decline, and dependence on French and Smithian formulas.
Heute ist die Volkswirtschaftslehre Italiens neuerdings auf eine Stufe emporgestiegen, welche sie allgemeiner Beachtung würdig macht.
English translation: Today Italian political economy has recently risen to a level that makes it worthy of general attention.
The book is deliberately selective rather than encyclopedic. It excludes finance, policy, and many applied questions in order to examine “theoretical national economics” as renewed after unification, the social question, and the reception of German and Austrian scholarship. Its narrative presents Italian economics not as provincial imitation, but as a contested intellectual field in which inherited classical doctrines were reworked through method, history, marginal utility, and social analysis.
The first major issue is method. Schullern treats the Milan economists’ congress of 1875 as a symbolic break with the belief that classical political economy had already reached completion. Italian writers are arranged according to their use of deduction, induction, history, sociology, and mathematics. Cossa occupies a mediating position: general laws require deductive construction, yet must be tested and enriched by empirical inquiry. Loria supplies the strongest historicizing contrast, insisting that economic laws are tied to particular property relations and social epochs. Schullern favors exact theory, but he rejects methodological narrowness:
die induktive und die deduktive Forschungsweise zum Heile der Wissenschaft Hand in Hand einhergehen
English translation: the inductive and the deductive modes of inquiry proceed hand in hand for the benefit of the science
This reconciliation governs the treatment of production, circulation, distribution, and consumption. Political economy remains an autonomous theoretical science, not merely a branch of sociology; nevertheless, it needs history and statistics to prevent abstraction from becoming empty. In production theory, Italian writers broaden the concept of goods to include services and utility-bearing actions, not only material objects:
„Gut“ ist jedes Ding, Substanz, Handlung oder Dienst, welches ein Vergnügen bereiten oder ein Mißvergnügen beseitigen kann.
English translation: A "good" is any thing, substance, action, or service capable of affording a pleasure or removing a displeasure.
The most sustained theoretical discussion concerns value. Schullern distinguishes cost theories, reproduction-cost theories, marginal-utility theories, and social-value theories. Nazzani refines cost theory; Loria reconstructs value historically through land monopoly and capitalist property; Ferrara, despite criticism, is credited with shifting attention toward the buyer, utility, and substitution. Pantaleoni appears as the leading Italian marginalist, combining Austrian, Jevonian, Marshallian, and Ferrarian elements. Alessio’s theory of social value tries to move beyond individual valuation, though its results often approach marginal-utility reasoning.
Distribution forms the second center of the book. Toniolo seeks a unified account of wages, rent, interest, and profit; Loria derives capitalist income from the disappearance of free land and the separation of productive factors; Pantaleoni explains distribution through marginal productivity, scarcity, and entrepreneurial calculation. Schullern’s own synthesis subordinates distribution to value theory: factors are valued as complementary elements within the product.
Jeder wirtschaftliche Produktivfaktor wird aus dem Produktwerte als komplementäres Gut nach den hierfür geltenden Normen seinen Wert erhalten und beteilt werden.
English translation: Every economic productive factor will receive its value from the value of the product as a complementary good, and will be apportioned according to the norms applicable thereto.
Yet this theoretical allocation is always modified by law, property, and historical institutions. The book therefore neither dissolves economics into history nor allows theory to ignore social form. Consumption, by contrast, remains weakly developed in the Italian literature: Schullern finds scattered insights and crisis theories, but no fully independent doctrine.
The later sections define the auxiliary sciences. Economic history and statistics are indispensable for verification, induction, and concreteness, but they cannot replace theory. Cognetti de Martiis is treated as an evolutionary historian of economic activity, while Toniolo uses historical work, especially on Florence, for social-policy ends. Statistics, represented by Bodio, Pantaleoni, and Messedaglia, becomes a disciplined art of abstraction, using averages, classifications, and estimates that are imperfect but necessary. The history of doctrines likewise belongs near economic history, because theories arise from determinate social conditions rather than from a purely internal sequence of ideas.
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