Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk on Adolph Samter’s Das Eigenthum in seiner socialen Bedeutung (1883)

Böhm-Bawerk’s review examines Samter’s 1879 study of property as an influential contribution to social-economic reform. Its organizing distinction is between Samter’s fruitful account of property as a historically variable institution and his inadequately justified proposals for redistributing its forms among individuals, associations, and the state. Böhm-Bawerk values the book chiefly for opening property relations to substantive criticism without abandoning the institution itself.

The review first reconstructs Samter’s central argument: unrestricted private property permits socially harmful, egoistic abuses, so the common good requires restrictions and a substantial expansion of collective ownership.

Das Privateigenthum ist daher zwar keineswegs aufzuheben, aber im Interesse des Gemeinwohles einzuschränken und in weitem Umfang durch gesellschaftliches Eigenthum zu ersetzen.

English translation: Private property is therefore by no means to be abolished, but it is to be restricted in the interest of the common good and to a wide extent to be replaced by social property.

Böhm-Bawerk follows the book’s four-part progression from concepts and classifications through historical examples and kinds of owners to the functions of property. Samter’s opening conceptual move is to detach ownership from its identification with unlimited private dominion. Property receives its content from a changing legal order, and different owners and objects may legitimately fall under different rules. His distinctions between property for direct use, production, and lending intersect with those between private and collective ownership. The historical section draws chiefly on earlier scholarship; the third section examines the needs and administrative capacities of individuals, families, voluntary associations, municipalities, and the state. These analyses prepare the final allocation of appropriate forms of ownership to particular holders.

Samter grounds property’s necessity in personality and the capacity of associations to pursue their purposes, rejecting utility-based justifications. But the necessity of property in general does not establish the legitimacy of every particular form. He endorses private ownership of consumption goods and movable industrial productive assets, while opposing private landed productive property and lending property. Cooperatives would assume a larger productive role. State ownership of almost all productive land would give government influence over production and wages without requiring it to compete directly with private enterprises. A proposed paper-money reform would largely displace lending property.

Böhm-Bawerk’s assessment turns on refusing to treat these prescriptions as necessary consequences of the conceptual framework.

In der Würdigung dieser Gedanken muss man, um dem Verfasser nicht Unrecht zu thun, wohl unterscheiden zwischen den allgemeinen theoretischen Grundgedanken, mit denen sein Ideengang anhebt, und zwischen den concreten Schlussfolgerungen und Vorschlägen, in welche er ausläuft.

English translation: In appraising these ideas one must, in order not to do the author an injustice, carefully distinguish between the general theoretical fundamental ideas with which his train of thought begins and the concrete conclusions and proposals in which it terminates.

He endorses much of that framework: private ownership is not the only genuine ownership; legal personality is a fiction; property’s content changes historically; some social restriction is unavoidable; and differentiated rules need not be inconsistent. The merit lies in the systematic presentation of these insights, even where Samter cannot claim originality.

Dagegen scheinen mir die positiven Vorschläge des Verfassers fast durchweg verunglückt oder wenigstens viel zu nachlässig begründet.

English translation: The author's positive proposals, on the other hand, seem to me almost throughout to have miscarried, or at least to be far too carelessly grounded.

The practical objections concern both evidence and institutional consequences. Samter concedes the state’s lower productive efficiency but merely asserts that its productivity would remain sufficient—precisely what requires proof. General state ownership of land would eliminate a peasantry whose ownership relations Böhm-Bawerk regards as substantially sound, replacing it with propertyless small tenants unable to fulfil the same political and social role. He also flags the dangers of a barely bounded issue of paper money against exchangeable commodities, though without developing that criticism at length.

The review nevertheless ends with a positive judgment. Property’s inviolability, sanctity, and freedom retain genuine value, but their elevation into slogans protects abuses as well as the institution’s indispensable core.

Man schützt mit ihnen nicht nur den unschätzbaren Kern der Eigenthumsinstitution, sondern auch ihre Auswüchse, und liebt es, deren Correctur, ja die blosse Discussion solcher Correctur, von Weitem im Namen des Princips zurückzuweisen.

English translation: With them one protects not only the inestimable core of the institution of property, but also its excrescences, and one is fond of rejecting from afar, in the name of the principle, any correction of these, indeed the mere discussion of such correction.

Samter’s relevance therefore lies less in his immediate recommendations than in his ability to force a reasoned discussion of reform. Böhm-Bawerk expects practical life to discredit the exaggerations while preserving the useful challenge to dogmatic defenses of existing arrangements. The review combines a defense of private property with an insistence that its particular legal forms and social effects remain open to scrutiny.