[Rezension zu Carlo Torlonia: Le dottrine finanziarie du F. V. Duverger de Forbonnais]

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s 1909 review of Carlo Torlonia’s study of Forbonnais presents eighteenth-century public finance as a theoretical achievement that nineteenth-century scholarship refined, supplemented, and systematized. Its central historical claim is continuity rather than a later invention of financial theory.

Schullern endorses Torlonia’s use of Forbonnais to substantiate this argument and identifies the study’s organizing distinction:

Torlonia bringt diese Auffassung mit Geschicklichkeit an dem Beispiele Forbonnais' zur Geltung (siehe z. B. S. 8 f.), dessen finanzwissenschaftliches Hauptwerk sorgfältig analysiert wird, und zwar zunächst in jenem Teile, den man heute den allgemeinen nennen würde, und dann insoweit die Quellen der öffentlichen Einnahmen erörtert werden.

English translation: Torlonia brings this conception to bear with skill upon the example of Forbonnais (see e.g. p. 8 f.), whose principal work in public finance is carefully analysed, first in that part which today one would call the general one, and then in so far as the sources of public revenue are discussed.

The review then points to taxation’s economic effects, public debt, credit institutions, and the distribution of tax burdens. These references indicate the range of Torlonia’s analysis without reconstructing Forbonnais’s positions. Schullern’s concluding praise is qualified by a criterion of continuing relevance:

Es ist in der vorliegenden Schrift wohl der ganze meritorische Inhalt der Forbonnaisschen Finanzlehre ausgeschöpft, insoweit sie heute noch irgendein Interesse beanspruchen kann.

English translation: In the present writing the entire substantive content of Forbonnais's doctrine of public finance has surely been exhausted, in so far as it can still claim any interest today.

The brief notice thus recommends Torlonia’s historical recovery as both careful and substantially comprehensive within that limit.