Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Molinari’s Précis d’économie politique et de morale (1894)

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s short review presents Molinari’s book as a condensation of his earlier liberal economic writings. Its structure is predominantly expository: Schullern reconstructs the sequence from natural necessity to production, exchange, distribution, and moral progress, before offering a brief, sharply qualified judgment.

Molinari’s starting point makes economic activity part of a general account of living beings. Each species performs a function within the whole; need and satisfaction stimulate the labor necessary to maintain existence, while labor’s burdensomeness encourages economy of effort. The struggle for existence selects stronger species, but human beings possess distinctive capacities:

Die Gattung „Mensch“ unterscheidet sich insofern von den anderen Gattungen der Lebewesen, dass sie nicht nur zerstören, sondern auch producieren, also die Menge ihrer Unterhaltsmittel vermehren kann, und dadurch, dass sie allein im Stande ist, ihre eigene Vermehrung der Menge der Lebensmittel anzupassen.

English translation: The species "man" is distinguished from the other species of living beings in so far as it can not only destroy but also produce, and thus increase the quantity of its means of subsistence, and by the fact that it alone is in a position to adapt its own increase to the quantity of the means of life.

Production and the regulation of population thus distinguish human economic life from mere competition over existing subsistence. Schullern follows Molinari from the division of labor to exchange and value. Utility and labor constitute value’s two elements, while exchange determines its magnitude through supply and demand. Molinari further posits a tendency for value to fall toward the minimum necessary labor expenditure, itself progressively declining. This purported regularity grounds his account of equilibrium between production and consumption. Enterprise distributes returns among the forms of capital contributing to production; the allocation of gains and consumption according to expenditure of effort is presented as the most useful arrangement.

Schullern marks his distance by calling this the “vermeintlich natürlichen Lauf” of things. In Molinari’s account, external conditions and human conduct obstruct that course: industrial improvement must overcome the former, moral improvement the latter. Economic progress has made moral progress necessary, but resolving the contemporary social crisis requires their complete agreement.

The reviewer accepts morality’s importance for economic policy without accepting the theoretical apparatus supporting Molinari’s conclusions. His closing assessment combines skepticism about the continued defense of such doctrines with limited recognition of an advance beyond Bastiat:

Immerhin ist ein kleiner Schritt zum Bessern dem Optimismus Bastiats gegenüber mit Genugthuung zu verzeichnen.

English translation: Still, a small step toward the better as compared with Bastiat's optimism is to be recorded with satisfaction.

Schullern locates that improvement in the book’s third part, “La Morale.” The review’s significance lies in this discriminating judgment: the acknowledgment of moral conditions qualifies liberal optimism, but does not vindicate Molinari’s asserted economic harmonies. Schullern signals the inadequacy of several theoretical propositions rather than developing a detailed refutation.