Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Nitti’s La popolazione e il sistema sociale (1894)

Schullern’s review examines Francesco S. Nitti’s attempt to displace Malthusian population theory with a law grounded in social development. Its governing concern is whether a historically conditioned account can nevertheless claim general validity. Schullern welcomes the intellectual ambition of Nitti’s argument while questioning its demonstration and its dependence on a projected social order.

Das Buch charakterisiert sich als ein Versuch, die Irrigkeit der Malthus'schen Bevölkerungstheorie mit Zuhilfenahme der Ergebnisse der bisherigen Forschung nachzuweisen und ein neues Bevölkerungsgesetz zu entwickeln.

English translation: The book characterizes itself as an attempt to demonstrate the erroneousness of the Malthusian theory of population with the aid of the results of research hitherto, and to develop a new law of population.

Nitti’s historical survey connects population theories with their authors’ economic circumstances and social convictions. For Schullern, the consequential step is not simply recognizing this historical variability, but attempting to make it the basis of a generally valid theory. The review therefore turns from demographic doctrine to the foundations of economic explanation:

Diese Frage schliesst sich an jene allgemeinere an, deren Bedeutung für die ganze Nationalökonomik grundlegend ist, die Frage nämlich, ob es überhaupt von Zeit und Ort ganz und gar unabhängige Wirtschaftsgesetze gebe.

English translation: This question attaches itself to that more general one whose significance for the whole of political economy is fundamental, namely the question whether there exist at all economic laws entirely and completely independent of time and place.

Schullern permits universal laws only where the underlying phenomena occur independently of cultural and historical differences. Such laws must remain few and abstract; more determinate propositions require hypothetical or historically specified conditions. Even the Austrian school’s general laws contain assumptions concerning economic motivation and the economic character of goods. This qualification supplies the standard for assessing Nitti’s stronger claim to universality.

Elemente für die Lehre Nittis sind die Theorien Spencers und Lorias; beide werden aber nur theilweise und in ihren Hauptzügen acceptiert und verarbeitet.

English translation: Elements for Nitti's doctrine are the theories of Spencer and of Loria; but both are accepted and worked up only partially and in their main features.

As Schullern reconstructs this synthesis, Spencer supplies the inverse relationship between population growth and the development of individuality, understood through the multiplication and intensification of individual functions. Loria supplies the connection between demographic change, social organization, and landownership. Nitti consequently combines an account of individual development with an institutional explanation of reproductive behavior.

Im Wege statistischer Forschung gelangt Nitti zuerst zum Satze, dass die Bevölkerung stets die organische Tendenz in sich habe, sich der Nahrungsmittelmenge anzupassen, wobei der Terminus Unterhaltsbedarf eine überaus wandelbare Bedeutung hat.

English translation: By way of statistical research Nitti arrives first at the proposition that the population always has within itself the organic tendency to adapt itself to the quantity of foodstuffs, whereby the term requirement of subsistence has an exceedingly variable meaning.

The variability of subsistence requirements prevents this tendency from becoming a simple numerical relationship. More equitable distribution could sustain a larger population without necessarily inducing demographic growth. Reproduction also depends on religious, moral, political, and distributive conditions. Opportunities for advancement encourage restraint, whereas poverty and concentrated ownership encourage excessive growth. In this account, misery displaces workers’ imprudence as the explanatory center: people without prospects of escaping deprivation have little scope for Malthusian moral restraint.

Nitti joins this social explanation to a biological and psychological argument. Greater individuality reduces fertility, while improved adaptation and protection against destructive dangers can sustain larger civilized populations despite declining birth rates. Responsibility and other moral motives reinforce restraint. Crucially, cultivated individuality differs from competitive individualism: its fullest development requires the disappearance of social inequalities rather than an intensification of competition.

The culminating law thus envisages widely distributed wealth and cooperative socialization that preserves individual activity. Under these conditions, conscious regulation would replace unconscious and irregular reproduction, bringing births into alignment with subsistence. Population equilibrium becomes the outcome of social transformation rather than an invariant pressure operating identically in every society.

Schullern’s final reservation concerns both analytical method and evidentiary force. Nitti seeks a theory from the complexity of actual phenomena without sufficiently isolating its elements, while his culminating law describes a society remote from existing conditions. Its supporting arguments approach conviction without establishing the result decisively. Schullern also considers Nitti’s opposition to Malthus overstated because it rests on an excessively rigid interpretation of Malthus’s doctrine. Nevertheless, his recommendation of a German translation affirms the book’s value for further debate. The review combines openness to socially conditioned demographic explanation with a firm distinction between a persuasive historical prospect and a demonstrated general law.