Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Camillo Supino’s La borsa e il capitale improduttivo (1899)

Schullern’s brief German review presents Supino’s 1898 book as a clarifying intervention in the politically charged debate over the stock exchange. Its exposition moves from the growing mobility of wealth to the role of credit instruments, then to the distinction between productive and unproductive capital. Schullern’s endorsement rests on the possibility of discriminating criticism: neither indiscriminate praise nor wholesale condemnation adequately explains the exchange’s economic functions and harms.

As Schullern recounts Supino’s argument, increasing wealth and the growing proportion of movable assets loosen owners’ attachments to particular places. Money extends this mobility even to landed property, while income received without work weakens the sense of obligations attached to ownership. The conceptual result is a separation of capital from its personal and social bearings:

Damit wird immer mehr das Kapital als solches zu einem abstrakten, unpersönlichen Wesen.

English translation: Thereby capital as such becomes more and more an abstract, impersonal entity.

This transformation is presented as historically necessary, but not as the completion of a new social order. Mobile capital revitalizes economic activity and generates credit instruments that influence production. Their circulation nevertheless requires a crucial distinction between claims upon wealth and wealth itself:

Diese Kredittitel sind aber nur Surrogate wirklicher, und zwar entweder gegenwärtiger oder zukünftiger Güter, aber nicht Güter selbst, da sie ja nur die Bestimmung haben, die von ihnen vertretenen Güter leichter übertragbar zu machen.

English translation: These credit instruments, however, are only surrogates for real goods, and indeed either for present or for future goods, but not goods themselves, since their only purpose is to make the goods they represent more easily transferable.

The stock exchange facilitates transfers of these claims and thereby extends the mobilization of property. Because the claims can represent real goods generally, the exchange affects both their circulation and the distribution of income. Its power is thus grounded in its mediation of economic relationships, not merely in speculative activity. Yet its exclusively economic judgments disregard higher moral considerations, helping explain the polarized responses it provokes.

The review locates Supino’s decisive distinction within the exchange itself: productive capital operates alongside an increasingly prominent unproductive capital, which performs no useful function and derives its gains from damage to collective prosperity. Schullern does not reproduce the book’s detailed demonstration; he praises its clarity and instructiveness, concluding with a statement of the critical judgment he hopes it will encourage:

Supino führt seine Aufgabe in sehr klarer und lehrreicher Weise durch; möge er damit dem Ziele nahekommen, daß das viel umstrittene und in den politischen Kampf hineingezerrte Problem der Börse immer allgemeiner eine unbefangene Beurteilung finde, die die Spreu vom Weizen zu sondern versteht und auch wirklich zu tadeln wagt, was verwerflich ist.

English translation: Supino carries out his task in a very clear and instructive manner; may he thereby come near to the goal that the much-disputed problem of the stock exchange, dragged into the political struggle, should ever more generally meet with an impartial judgement, one that knows how to separate the chaff from the wheat and that also really dares to censure what is reprehensible.

The review’s significance lies in this conjunction of impartiality and moral criticism. Understanding the exchange’s indispensable mechanisms should make criticism more precise, not suspend judgment on gains obtained at the expense of public wealth.