Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen · 1911
Schullern-Schrattenhofen’s Grundzüge der Volkswirtschaftslehre treats economics as a systematic science of the national economy, moving from goods, value, production, exchange, money, and distribution to the practical tasks of economic policy. Its argument is neither laissez-faire nor socialist: market coordination matters, but markets operate through law, property, money, bargaining power, institutions, and historically changing social needs. Economic theory therefore has to be joined to policy, because prices and contracts alone cannot secure a stable or just social order.
The theoretical chapters present value and price as outcomes of scarcity, utility, cost, competition, money value, and market organization rather than as mechanical magnitudes. Monopoly, cartels, patents, and state privileges are evaluated by their social effects: temporary incentives may be justified, but organized market power becomes dangerous when it turns into exploitation. Money is likewise treated institutionally and historically. Following Menger, the book explains money as arising from especially saleable goods, while the state later gives currency legal form. Paper money is not automatically “true” money; it depends on confidence, convertibility, and the economic order sustaining it.
The distribution analysis extends this realism. Wages are not explained by a single law, whether Lassalle’s “iron” wage law, wage-fund theory, or Marxian exploitation doctrine. They depend on labor supply, employer concentration, workers’ bargaining strength, money value, and the historically shifting minimum standard of life. Schullern-Schrattenhofen insists that formal freedom of contract is inadequate where laborers lack effective economic freedom. Rent, interest, and profit are similarly treated as socially conditioned prices: ground rent reflects fertility, scarcity, and location; interest is the price of capital use; entrepreneurial profit rewards organization, risk, and initiative rather than mere ownership.
The policy sections give the book its distinctive character. Volkswirtschaftspolitik is not deduced from doctrine but shaped by comparison, historical circumstance, and practical judgment. The state must secure property, contract, money, transport, credit, and legal order, yet it must also act where market forces generate dependency, social injury, or structural imbalance. This balance is especially visible in the agrarian chapters, where the author rejects both large-estate triumphalism and romantic peasant atomization. Different property forms have different economic functions, but middle holdings are socially central:
Aus dem Gesagten dürfte sich wohl ergeben haben, daß jede von den aufgezählten Besitzkategorien ihre bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen, daß aber die wichtigsten die den mittleren Gruppen angehörenden sind.
English translation: From what has been said, it should be evident that each of the enumerated categories of property has its particular task to fulfill, but that the most important are those belonging to the middle groups.
This passage expresses the book’s larger method: institutions are judged by their role within the whole economy, not by abstract ideology. The same moderation appears in the treatment of Marxian concentration theory. Schullern-Schrattenhofen does not deny capitalist pressure, but he argues that the expected automatic concentration of landownership is not borne out statistically:
Eine Konzentrationstendenz im Grundbesitze, wie sie den Anschauungen des Marxismus entspräche, wird durch die Statistik, insoweit sie zeitliche Vergleiche ermöglicht, nicht nachgewiesen
English translation: A tendency toward concentration in landownership, such as would correspond to the views of Marxism, is not demonstrated by statistics, insofar as they permit temporal comparisons.
Yet the anti-Marxian argument is not complacent. The book repeatedly stresses that capitalist development produces new dependencies requiring social policy. In agriculture this need is acute because protective reform had lagged behind industrial labor legislation:
Die landwirtschaftlichen Arbeiter sind also vorläufig sozial-politisch vernachlässigt
English translation: Agricultural laborers are thus for the time being neglected in social-political terms.
The account of worker protection makes the reformist conclusion explicit. Modern labor law becomes necessary when capitalist production is recognized as productive but socially harmful under unregulated conditions:
Ein Arbeiterschutz im modernen Sinne des Wortes kam erst mit dem Zeitpunkte in Frage, in dem man erkannte, daß die kapitalistische Produktionsweise neben ihren privat- und wohl auch volkswirtschaftlichen Vorteilen auch schwere Nachteile der letztern Art und im sozialen Sinne mit sich bringt.
English translation: Labor protection in the modern sense of the word first came into question at the point when it was recognized that the capitalist mode of production, alongside its private and also its national-economic advantages, likewise brings with it serious disadvantages of the latter kind and in the social sense.
The work’s enduring significance lies in this synthesis. It accepts marginalist analysis, the coordinating role of markets, and the productivity of capitalism, while refusing to detach them from legal form, social power, historical development, and public purpose. Schullern-Schrattenhofen’s economics is therefore a theory of an ordered but conflictual national economy: price mechanisms explain coordination, but policy must address the unequal conditions under which coordination takes place.
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