Ludwig von Mises · 1929
Ludwig von Mises’s 1929 book review assesses Grünfeld’s economic and sociological study, the first volume of a planned four-volume handbook on cooperatives. Its structure moves from the historical limits of cooperative reform to a focused criticism of Grünfeld’s sociology, before closing with strong praise. The central distinction is between cooperatives’ failure to supersede capitalism and their enduring importance as a form of enterprise.
Die Entwicklung des Genossenschaftswesens hat alle diese Erwartungen zu Schanden gemacht, doch sie hat der Genossenschaft als Unternehmensform ein Betätigungsfeld zugeteilt, das ihr nicht so bald genommen werden kann.
English translation: The development of the cooperative system has confounded all these expectations, yet it has allotted to the cooperative, as a form of enterprise, a field of activity which cannot soon be taken from it.
For Mises, the collapse of transformative expectations does not diminish the value of studying cooperatives’ actual functions. He welcomes the handbook’s division of legal, business, economic, and sociological questions, with particular attention to German conditions.
His substantive criticism concerns the short section on the sociology of cooperatives. He accepts that a handbook depends on prior specialized research and that Grünfeld can offer little more than indications where such research is lacking. Yet he identifies a decisive omission: cooperatives’ service to political, religious, cultural, and national ideas.
Daß die Genossenschaften Ideen gedient haben, die ihrem nächsten wirtschaftlichen Zweck fremd waren, das allein rechtfertigt m. E., das Genossenschaftswesen nicht nur rechtlich und betriebstechnisch, sondern auch wirtschaftspolitisch als eine einheitliche Erscheinung anzusehen.
English translation: That the cooperatives have served ideas alien to their immediate economic purpose: this alone justifies, in my opinion, regarding the cooperative system as a unified phenomenon not only in legal and operational respects but also in respect of economic policy.
This is the review’s strongest conceptual claim. Cooperatives become intelligible as a unified economic-policy phenomenon through their service to purposes beyond their immediate economic tasks. Mises therefore connects their sociology to the history of social, religious, and national struggles. Grünfeld’s charismatic leader, he argues, was generally pursuing definite aims conventionally called extra-economic. The omission is especially striking because Grünfeld repeatedly discusses these influences in his accounts of particular cooperative forms and countries, but fails to incorporate them into the sociological section.
Mises nevertheless concludes that the book is an excellent and indispensable resource. The review’s significance lies in this precise demand for integration: a sociology of cooperatives must explain how organizational activity serves wider commitments, rather than leave those commitments dispersed through historical description.
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