Rezension zu Emilio Cossa: Le forme naturali dell’Economia Sociale

Siegmund Feilbogen: Review of Emilio Cossa’s Le forme naturali dell’Economia Sociale (1891)

Feilbogen’s journal book review examines Cossa’s compact account of marginal utility as an explanation of economic development. He praises its command of Austrian economic literature and useful references to Italian sources. His central judgment combines approval of Cossa’s synthesis of classical premises with a qualification: marginal utility illuminates economic change, but cannot always serve as its first cause.

The review first reconstructs Cossa’s foundations. Economic efficiency—the pursuit of maximum value creation with minimum expenditure—and population pressure are not independent assumptions. Their interaction supplies a developmental principle:

Aber diese beiden Principien werden nicht mechanisch neben einander gestellt, sondern synthetisch zu einer höheren Einheit verbunden, nämlich zum socialpsychologischen Princip der steigenden Wirthschaftlichkeit bei steigendem Populationsdrucke.

English translation: But these two principles are not mechanically placed side by side; rather, they are synthetically combined into a higher unity, namely the social-psychological principle of increasing economic efficiency under increasing population pressure.

Feilbogen values this move because it corrects the classical economists’ frequent assumption that economic efficiency is everywhere equal. Cossa instead treats economizing conduct as something that intensifies under pressure. The review then follows this argument through two levels. The forme abstratte encompass value phenomena: increasing marginal utility of goods and labour promotes division of labour, exchange, money, distinct market laws for reproducible and non-reproducible goods, rents for specially qualified productive factors, and income differences between social classes.

The forme concrete are legal arrangements. As land’s marginal utility rises, economic considerations increasingly govern its distribution; production likewise selects its objects and techniques more carefully. Cossa’s account extends this tendency toward efficient arrangements to labour law:

Auch unter den Rechtsordnungen der Arbeit siegt immer allgemeiner die wirthschaftlichste, nämlich die Freiheit des Arbeiters.

English translation: Among the legal arrangements governing labour, too, the most economically efficient—namely, the worker’s freedom—prevails ever more widely.

This formulation makes the reach of the explanatory scheme especially clear: marginal utility is invoked not merely to explain prices, but to connect scarcity, productive organization, and institutional development. Feilbogen recommends the book for precisely this breadth, clarity, and consistency.

His concluding reservation concerns the limits of that causal reach:

Wo nämlich religiöse oder politische Elemente in die wirthschaftliche Entwicklung eingreifen, da verliert der Grenznutzen die Bedeutung einer ersten Ursache.

English translation: For where religious or political elements intervene in economic development, marginal utility loses its significance as a first cause.

Feilbogen illustrates the qualification through what he calls Islamic fatalism and through William the Conqueror’s redistribution of land in England. He credits Cossa with recognizing the issue in passing, but asks for fuller clarification. The review’s methodological interest lies in this distinction between explaining development through economic incentives and explaining the religious or political conditions that shape those incentives.