Viktor Mataja, Das Recht des Schadenersatzes vom Standpunkte der Nationalökonomie (1888)

Mataja’s monograph recasts damages law as an economic problem: not how law can undo harm, but how it allocates losses that have already entered social life. Against a purely doctrinal account of fault, he treats liability as a device for distributing costs among owners, enterprises, workers, consumers, and risk communities. The book’s two main divisions follow from this premise: first, the grounds on which one person should bear another’s loss; second, the valuation of that loss once liability is established.

The historical argument contrasts older forms of collective or status-based responsibility with the more individualist Roman-law model inherited by modern private law. Mataja does not romanticize archaic law, but he finds in it a principle obscured by later dogmatics: benefit, control, and responsibility belong together.

Das ältere Recht trägt nämlich überall dem Gedanken Rechnung, daß, wo eine Herrschaft und eine Nutznießung stattfindet, auch eine entsprechende Verantwortlichkeit einzutreten habe.

English translation: For the older law everywhere takes account of the idea that, wherever dominion and enjoyment of use occur, a corresponding responsibility must also arise.

From this perspective, the maxim that each person should answer only for his own culpable acts is too narrow for industrial society. Railways, factories, mines, ships, machines, and organized labor processes create risks that cannot be reduced to isolated acts of personal negligence. The economically relevant question is who controls the dangerous activity, who profits from it, who can prevent loss, and who can best distribute its costs.

Vor allem dürfen wir es hier nicht als einen unsere Frage entscheidenden Grundsatz ansehen, daß jedem nur die Folgen seiner eigenen Handlungen und Unterlassungen aufgebürdet werden sollen.

English translation: Above all, we must not here regard as a principle decisive of our question the notion that everyone should be burdened only with the consequences of his own acts and omissions.

Mataja’s central innovation is therefore a theory of “Schadenrepartition,” or loss distribution. A concentrated loss may ruin an individual, while the same loss spread over an enterprise, insurance fund, occupational group, or consuming public may be socially tolerable. This is not merely humanitarian sentiment; it follows from an economic analysis of value, marginal utility, and risk-bearing capacity. Law should encourage care, but it should also prevent enterprises from enjoying gains while externalizing accident costs onto helpless third parties.

Ökonomisch muß aber hier schon deshalb eine irgendwie geartete Verantwortlichkeit gefordert werden, weil andernfalls durch das Recht eine volkswirtschaftlich falsche Wertschätzung der Güter hervorgerufen wird.

English translation: Economically, however, some form of responsibility must be demanded here, if only because otherwise the law would produce an economically false valuation of goods.

The chapters on employer liability and workers’ accident insurance form the social-political core of the treatise. Mataja argues that ordinary fault liability often fails injured workers because proof is difficult, dependence is structural, and the true causes of accidents lie in organization, machinery, supervision, and production pressure. Compulsory insurance appears as a more rational form of legal ordering: it treats occupational accidents as costs of production rather than exceptional moral lapses.

The second part turns to the measure of compensation. Here Mataja rejects any simple equation of damage with abstract market value. A loss is the difference between the injured person’s actual economic position and the position that would have existed without the harmful event. Market price remains important, but its relevance depends on the injured party’s situation: consumer, trader, owner, reseller, user, or investor. The discussion therefore ranges over lost profit, replacement, indirect loss, conjectural gain, affection value, and judicial estimation.

The book’s lasting importance lies in its double shift. Liability becomes a theory of social risk allocation, and compensation becomes a theory of economically situated valuation. Mataja anticipates later doctrines of enterprise liability, cost internalization, strict liability, and social insurance while still preserving a role for fault where blame and prevention remain genuinely meaningful.