Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Tangorra (1894)

Schullern’s review of Vincenzo Tangorra’s La teoria economica del costo di produzione (1893) combines praise for its analytical care with disagreement over its foundations. He associates the study with Cossa’s school, treating Tangorra’s discipleship as an inference from the work itself. Although finding little novelty in much of the book, he values its stimulating treatment of a fundamental, still unsettled economic problem.

His assessment moves from doctrinal history through cost theory to the book’s strongest concluding investigations. The historical treatment receives a pointed criticism:

Leider ist der Socialismus im dogmengeschichtlichen Theile etwas zu kurz gekommen, obwohl gerade seine Lehre das Ferment bildet, welches das Thema wieder in Bewegung gebracht hat.

English translation: Unfortunately socialism has come off somewhat too briefly in the part devoted to the history of doctrine, although it is precisely its teaching that forms the ferment which has set the subject in motion again.

Socialism matters here as the force that renewed debate over production costs, not merely as another doctrine to catalogue. In the constructive analysis, Tangorra reaches a position close to Cairnes’s, which Schullern finds unsatisfactory. Yet the reviewer distinguishes disagreement with the general result from appreciation of particular revisions. He commends Tangorra’s position toward Stuart Mill on the costs of labour and his use of marginal utility to measure the cost attributed to abstinence.

The same distinction governs his treatment of risk:

Wenn Tangorra, womit wir uns absolut nicht einverstanden erklären können, das Risico als einen Kostensatz auffassen zu müssen glaubt, so thut er sehr gut daran, diesen nach der Unlustempfindung über den in Aussicht stehenden Schaden zu bemessen.

English translation: If Tangorra believes that he must conceive risk as an item of cost — with which we can by no means declare ourselves in agreement — he does very well to measure this item according to the sensation of displeasure at the damage in prospect.

Schullern rejects risk as a cost component while approving, conditionally, its measurement through the displeasure associated with anticipated loss. This separates the legitimacy of a cost category from the coherence of its subjective valuation.

His highest praise goes to the investigations linking production costs with economic development and income distribution. He declines to extract isolated propositions without their proofs and urges that these short chapters be read whole. He locates the book’s genuine independence there, particularly in its distinction between natural and capitalist production costs. The review thus identifies Tangorra’s chief contribution in historically and socially differentiated cost analysis, while withholding assent from the broader theoretical framework.