Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Loria and Pantaleoni (1905)

Schullern’s comparative review examines two collections published in 1904: Achille Loria’s Verso la giustizia sociale and Maffeo Pantaleoni’s Scritti vari di economia. It welcomes the republication of previously dispersed essays while contrasting the intellectual commitments that give each collection coherence. Its central judgment is that Loria’s idealism and Pantaleoni’s logical precision, despite their different foundations, both yield substantial contributions to economic inquiry.

Loria’s previously unpublished opening essay on the existence of social justice supplies the collection’s organizing principle. Defining justice and the social order that would realize it establishes a guiding ideal for the social sciences. Schullern then traces the volume’s movement through literary-historical criticism, including discussions of Roscher and Menger’s school; economic essays on industrial and trade policy and progressive taxation; and sociological studies, notably those on Spencer and Tolstoy. He praises Loria’s knowledge, observation, and dialectical ingenuity, but insists that readers must understand the standpoint underlying his arguments. Disagreement with that standpoint makes the essays occasions for both controversy and intellectual stimulation.

Schullern concedes that Loria’s idealism can carry him beyond historical realism, yet refuses to treat this as a straightforward defect. Neither complete factual reality nor the ideal social condition is securely available to inquiry:

Bei der sogenannten „vollen Reellität der Tatsachen“ unterläuft meist ebenso eine petitio principiis wie bei dem „absoluten Idealzustande“.

English translation: In the case of the so-called "full reality of the facts" a petitio principiis usually creeps in just as much as in the case of the "absolute ideal state".

This is the review’s sharpest methodological intervention: appeals to supposedly unmediated facts can presuppose what they claim to establish just as readily as appeals to an absolute ideal.

Pantaleoni’s collection begins with a different intellectual declaration, his 1897 Geneva inaugural address on disagreements among economists. Schullern highlights its commitment to scientific tolerance and its rejection of economic schools, including any school Pantaleoni might himself found. The review proceeds through studies of public finance, especially tax incidence, a critique of the theoretical principles of cooperation, and further theoretical essays. It also singles out economic semiology—the search for rules permitting economic diagnosis from statistical symptoms—and a discussion of Luigi Cossa’s history of economic theories. Across this varied material, Schullern identifies a consistent analytical strength:

Auch dieser Band bietet uns also eine Fülle interessantesten und lehrreichsten Materiales, das alles die außerordentliche Schärfe der logischen Spekulation zeigt, die P. auszeichnet und für alle seine Schriften charakteristisch ist.

English translation: This volume too therefore offers us an abundance of the most interesting and most instructive material, all of which shows the extraordinary acuteness of logical speculation that distinguishes P. and is characteristic of all his writings.

The concluding comparison does not reconcile the authors’ theories. Instead, it joins the volumes as records of decades of devoted intellectual work and evidence of continuing creative power. Schullern’s review is valuable for its methodological generosity: it recognizes contrasting modes of economic thought without making adherence to a single school the condition of scholarly merit.