Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Leopold Caro’s Der Wucher (1894)

Schullern’s review of Leopold Caro’s 1893 study treats usury as a pressing problem requiring both economic investigation and legal intervention. Its qualified endorsement proceeds from praise of Caro’s empirical classification to criticism of his legal definition and theoretical method, before affirming the book’s contribution to social policy.

Unseres Erachtens ist das 6. Capitel für den Wert des Buches entscheidend; es enthält eine Morphologie des Wuchers in seinen verschiedensten Erscheinungsformen, wie sie kaum besser gedacht werden kann.

English translation: In our judgement the sixth chapter is decisive for the value of the book; it contains a morphology of usury in its most varied forms of appearance such as can hardly be conceived better.

This “morphology” supplies the review’s principal ground for approval: Caro makes usury’s varied manifestations and destructive economic consequences visible. Schullern also endorses the proposed inquiry, but distinguishes its substantive ambition from the usability of its questionnaire. Questions should be separated, better grouped, and simplified or explained so that respondents can understand them. Empirical investigation requires not merely comprehensive coverage but an accessible instrument.

The central legal objection concerns Caro’s definition of usury through obligations that exceed a debtor’s sustainable earning or productive capacity and cause or contribute to economic ruin. Schullern finds this broadly appropriate for civil-law treatment but too expansive for criminal punishment, which must additionally require at least the creditor’s knowledge of the danger. He thus separates the harmful economic character of a transaction from the conditions of criminal responsibility.

His methodological criticism follows a similar insistence on distinctions. Caro’s discussion of usury, interest, and ethical limits mixes theoretical explanation with economic-policy judgment, weakening its polemic against Böhm-Bawerk. Yet Schullern suggests that marginal utility theory could itself furnish a stronger argument against usury:

Wir möchten uns nur noch die Frage erlauben, ob nicht gerade aufgrund der Grenznutzentheorie die volkswirtschaftliche Schädlichkeit des Wuchers am besten nachgewiesen werden könnte, da sie die theoretischen Prämissen für den Schluss bietet, dass der Schaden, den der Wucherer beim Bewucherten verursacht, in aller Regel grösser sein wird, als der Gewinn, den er selbst dadurch erzielt; so dass für die Volkswirtschaft als solche eine Wertvernichtung als Schlussresultat erscheint.

English translation: We should like to permit ourselves only the further question whether the injuriousness of usury to the national economy might not be best demonstrated precisely on the basis of the marginal utility theory, since this offers the theoretical premises for the conclusion that the damage which the usurer causes to the one subjected to usury will as a rule be greater than the gain which he himself thereby obtains; so that for the national economy as such a destruction of value appears as the final result.

The conceptual move is to assess usury beyond the creditor’s gain: the debtor’s greater loss makes the transaction a destruction of value for the economy as a whole. Offered as a question rather than a developed proof, this suggestion connects theoretical economics to the case for intervention without accepting Caro’s conflation of analytical standpoints.

The concluding endorsement preserves these reservations while recognizing Caro’s advance in examining apparently juridical questions economically. For Schullern, the book’s significance lies both in its concrete account of usury and in its larger social-policy purpose: challenging inherited doctrines and securing recognition that the state has social and economic responsibilities whose scope varies historically—and is extensive in the present.