Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Lujo Brentano’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, Volume I (1899)

Schullern’s review of Erbrechtspolitik, alte und neue Feudalität warmly endorses Brentano’s historical scholarship while questioning how far its conclusions about divisible landed property can be generalized. It first surveys essays on French primogeniture, English inheritance and the peasantry, Bavarian landholding, Prussian agrarian reform, agrarian claims, and the feudal foundations of Silesian linen production. Its substantive discussion concentrates on France, before briefly returning to England and Justus Möser.

Es seien einige Bemerkungen insbesondere über die erstbezeichnete Arbeit gestattet.

English translation: Let a few remarks be permitted, in particular on the first-named work.

This deliberate narrowing makes the review chiefly an assessment of Brentano’s correction of a familiar historical claim: that the French Revolution introduced equal inheritance of land. Schullern accepts Brentano’s evidence that, before the Revolution, equal intestate inheritance already applied to non-noble estates. Revolutionary legislation abolished primogeniture in the privileged forms of property where it still existed, rather than establishing an entirely new general principle.

A second correction concerns Napoleon’s letter of 5 June 1806 on introducing the Code civil in Naples. Frequently invoked to associate equal intestate inheritance with despotism, the passage actually concerns the newly created nobility, not peasant inheritance. For Schullern, Brentano’s achievement lies in restoring the legal and social referents that make such evidence intelligible.

The reviewer’s reservation shifts the discussion from historical origins to the possible economic consequences of subdivision. He grants that freedom to divide property contributed substantially to French agricultural progress, but asks whether the same gains would have followed had division produced extensive holdings too small to be viable.

Sollte nicht auch hier eine Frage quantitativer Natur vorliegen, bei deren Lösung es darauf ankäme, der Zertheilung eine untere Grenze zu setzen?

English translation: Might there not here too be present a question of a quantitative nature, in the solution of which the point would be to set a lower limit to the subdivision?

This question qualifies rather than overturns Brentano’s case. Refuting the claim that free subdivision necessarily or frequently pulverizes holdings does not prove that excessive fragmentation cannot occur elsewhere—or in France under altered conditions. Schullern points to Austria’s southern crownlands as a possible test of that distinction. His core conceptual move is to separate the historical vindication of divisible property from an unconditional endorsement of every degree of division.

The brief discussion of England reinforces the importance of institutional explanation. Schullern highlights Brentano’s conclusion that the disappearance of the English peasantry resulted from concrete legislation, including inheritance law, rather than an unavoidable economic necessity. He closes by commending the essay on Möser and Prussian agrarian reform for its literary-historical significance. The review’s value thus lies in its combination of praise for historically specific causal analysis with caution about extending one country’s experience into a universal agrarian rule.