Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Ghino Valenti’s Le idee economiche di Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1892)

Schullern’s review warmly endorses Valenti’s 1891 critical study as a conscientious recovery of Romagnosi’s economic thought from writings on economics, philosophy, law, and history. He praises its objectivity and arrangement while explaining why Romagnosi still merits attention after profound changes in economic science. The review’s central interest is the connection between economic reasoning and jurisprudence: Romagnosi joined economics to morality and law, anticipating efforts to move legal scholarship beyond formalism.

Da heute der Gedanke, volkswirtschaftliche Gesichtspunkte in der Rechtswissenschaft zur Geltung zu bringen, wenn auch langsam ihrer bisherigen, mehr formalistischen Gestaltung gegenüber Boden gewinnt, ist es von besonderem Interesse, einen verhältnismässig so frühen Träger dieser Idee vor Augen zu haben.

English translation: Since today the idea of giving effect to economic points of view within jurisprudence is gaining ground, albeit slowly, as against its hitherto more formalistic shape, it is of particular interest to have before our eyes so comparatively early a bearer of this idea.

Schullern singles out the Introduzione al diritto pubblico for treating economic order as the substrate of legal order and their governing principles as intimately connected. Historical recovery thus serves a contemporary intellectual purpose: Romagnosi provides an early example of the integration of disciplines that Schullern sees gaining ground in his own time.

The review then follows Valenti’s three-part organization selectively. From the first part, Schullern emphasizes free competition as a fundamental economic principle subject to limits, alongside the relationship between economics and legal science. From the second, devoted to economic concepts and theories, he highlights subjective value, understood as a thing’s usefulness as recognized by people. He acknowledges echoes of Menger’s theory but judges them of little significance, resisting an exaggerated claim of theoretical anticipation. He also notes the discussion of development and economic progress without elaborating its arguments.

The third part addresses the state’s task and activity, economic freedom, and especially the economic basis of property. Schullern condenses the latter into a principle that makes ownership dependent on labor and need:

Hiefür ist der Satz charakteristisch, dass das Eigenthum sich nicht weiter ausdehnen dürfe, als die Arbeit und das Bedürfnis des Eigenthümers reicht; dass das ökonomische Bedürfnis die Grundlage des Private eigenthums sei.

English translation: Characteristic of this is the proposition that property may not extend further than the labour and the need of the owner reach; that economic need is the foundation of private property.

This passage sharpens the review’s account of Romagnosi’s liberalism: economic freedom and private property are presented together with substantive limits, not as unconditional principles. Schullern closes by referring readers to Valenti’s concluding synthesis and wishing for equally careful studies of other earlier Italian economists, especially Giammaria Ortes. His brief appraisal values Valenti’s scholarship both as historical commemoration and as a means of recovering economic ideas relevant to contemporary debates about law, competition, and ownership.