Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Amadori-Virgilj (1903)

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s review of Giovanni Amadori-Virgilj’s L’istituto famigliare nelle società primordiali presents the book’s account of early family institutions through its methodological commitments and political implications. Schullern emphasizes its attempt to establish the moral, legal, and political foundations of the primordial family by critically examining existing theories, especially those concerning kinship, marriage, and mother-right.

The review locates the book’s central thesis in the reciprocal dependence of property and family. Both are treated as original institutions rather than products of a prior communal order:

Beide Einrichtungen sind in den allerältesten Anfängen des Menschengeschlechtes entstanden; die Promiskuität der Geschlechter und der sogenannte ursprüngliche allgemeine Kommunismus haben nach der Ansicht des Verfassers niemals existiert.

English translation: Both institutions arose in the very earliest beginnings of the human race; in the author's view, promiscuity of the sexes and the so-called original general communism never existed.

This denial supplies the basis for a larger account of social development. Property and family underpin the transformations achieved across generations; their persistence is compatible with changes in their particular forms. Schullern approvingly describes the resulting outlook as hopeful: progress preserves these fundamental institutions while increasingly reconciling individual and social interests. He also notes that this argument occasions criticism of historical materialism and the political principles of socialism. His presentation thus makes the reconstruction of early society consequential for contemporary disputes over property and social reform.

Schullern distinguishes an introductory chapter, a critical-methodological section, and a second part addressing specific institutions. Evolution serves as the governing research principle, while a dedicated chapter examines how factual evidence should be assessed for its probative force. The substantive part ranges across patriarchy and matriarchy, alleged promiscuity, clan organization and exogamy, kinship classes, women’s and children’s positions, sexual morality, marriage by capture and purchase, and maternal naming and paternal right. The review identifies these subjects without adjudicating their individual treatment.

Its concluding praise rests less on demonstrating every thesis than on the book’s challenge to assertions advanced with partisan certainty:

Mag man zu den einzelnen Thesen welche Stellung immer nehmen, man wird mit Freude zugestehen müssen, daß manche derselben ein erlösendes Wort bedeutet gegenüber gar vielen, mit der Präsumption parteidespotischer Unfehlbarkeit in die Welt gesetzten und ihr oktroyierten Behauptungen, daß das Buch in mancher Richtung als eine zur rechten Zeit vollzogene, mutige Tat anzuerkennen ist.

English translation: Whatever position one may take on the individual theses, one will gladly have to concede that several of them represent a liberating word as against a great many assertions launched into the world, and imposed upon it, with the presumption of party-despotic infallibility, and that the book is in several respects to be acknowledged as a courageous deed accomplished at the right moment.

The qualification preserves room for disagreement while endorsing the book’s intellectual intervention. The review’s distinctive significance lies in this conjunction: methodological scrutiny of evidence and evolutionary inquiry are welcomed alongside an affirmative defense of family and private property as enduring foundations of social progress.