Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Ferraris’s Gli infortuni sul lavoro e la legge (1899)

Schullern’s short scholarly review examines Carlo Francesco Ferraris’s 1897 report on workplace accidents and legislation. It expressly limits itself to the theoretical foundations of workers’ insurance rather than assessing the proposed law in detail. Its central judgment is that Ferraris offers a persuasive justification for compulsory public insurance and thereby establishes a sound reformist position between economic liberalism and socialist doctrinarism.

The review opens by praising Ferraris’s knowledge of foreign economic literature and legislation, especially German developments, and connects the report to his earlier critique of historical materialism. Schullern presents insurance policy as a practical application of Ferraris’s broader conception of the state’s social responsibilities. The argument begins with the gap between what wages ought to provide and what they ordinarily supply. For the adult married male worker, wages should cover family maintenance, children’s education, and provision against illness, accidents, disability, old age, unemployment, and death. In practice they generally do not. Schullern approvingly notes that Ferraris does not attribute this shortfall exclusively to employers, but also assigns responsibility to workers.

The inadequacy of wages is compounded by the limitations of voluntary self-help:

Ueberdies seien die Versuche der Arbeiter, sich selbst zu helfen, aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht immer erfolgreich gewesen, und sei anzunehmen, daß sie auch in Zukunft sich nicht als wirksamer erweisen werden; es bleibe also nichts übrig, als daß der Staat durch die obligatorische Versicherung helfend eingreife (S. 15) und damit eine seiner vornehmsten sozialen Pflichten erfülle.

English translation: Moreover, the attempts of the workers to help themselves have, for various reasons, not always been successful, and it is to be assumed that in the future too they will not prove more effective; nothing therefore remains but that the state should intervene with assistance through compulsory insurance (p. 15) and thereby fulfil one of its foremost social duties.

Compulsory insurance thus appears as a social duty of the state, grounded in the insufficient protection afforded by wages and private provision. Schullern emphasizes that this position had gained acceptance only slowly in the scholarship of the Romance-language countries. Its conceptual importance lies in affirming the possibility of effective state action without requiring a radical reconstruction of the economic order.

Schullern makes his own alignment explicit when placing Ferraris against Italy’s competing economic doctrines:

Gegenüber den in Italien noch vorherrschenden wirtschaftspolitischen Richtungen, von denen die eine blind dem ökonomischen Liberalismus folgt, die andere, geistreichere und beachtenswertere, sich mehr oder weniger dem sozialistischen Doktrinarismus überantwortet, hat der Autor unseres Erachtens damit den richtigen Weg beschritten.

English translation: As against the tendencies in economic policy still predominant in Italy, of which the one blindly follows economic liberalism, while the other, the more ingenious and more noteworthy, surrenders itself more or less to socialist doctrinairism, the author has in our view thereby entered upon the right path.

The review concludes by commending Ferraris’s selective use of foreign legislation: he extracts what is theoretically strongest and practically applicable to Italian conditions. Its relevance lies both in this endorsement of comparative policy analysis and in its articulation of compulsory insurance as a reformist alternative to laissez-faire and systemic transformation. Schullern recommends the report to specialists while praising the clarity that makes its argument accessible to a wider readership.