Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen on Cossa’s Reading of Adam Smith (1909)

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s review of Emilio Cossa’s Il pensiero di Adamo Smith nella teoria quantitativa del lavoro (1907) combines appreciation of meticulous historical scholarship with reservations about Cossa’s defense of Smith’s value theory. Its governing distinction is between accepting Cossa’s claim that Smith’s theory possesses the necessity of a natural law and welcoming his effort to restore Smith’s intellectual standing. Schullern supports the latter without fully endorsing the former.

The review opens by placing Cossa within the Italian tradition of historical economic scholarship fostered by his father, Luigi Cossa. It then presents the study’s ambitious conclusion and traces its conceptual foundations. Cossa’s interpretation gives Smith’s concept of labor an unusually broad scope:

Mit minutiöser Sorgfalt analysiert Cossa die Smithsche Wertlehre in ihrer reinen Gestalt; er erörtert dabei den Begriff der Arbeit, der bei Smith auch die Tätigkeit der Tiere und der Natur umschließt; nicht nur die Handarbeiter sind übrigens für Smith Arbeiter, sondern auch alle jene, welche Kapital produktiv verwenden.

English translation: With minute care Cossa analyses Smith's theory of value in its pure form; in doing so he discusses the concept of labour, which in Smith also encompasses the activity of animals and of nature; moreover, for Smith not only manual workers are labourers, but also all those who employ capital productively.

This breadth matters for the ensuing definition of labor’s product, through which Cossa disputes the interpretation of scientific socialists. Schullern’s principal reservation concerns the distinction between the supposedly invariant quantity of labor required by a kind of commodity and the quantity actually embodied in an individual unit. He identifies Cossa’s discussion of this distinction and its consequences in §§ 5–7 as likely to provoke disagreement. The review also records Cossa’s attempt to reconcile an invariant labor measure with the labor that commodities can purchase or command in a capitalist economy.

The subsequent outline follows Cossa’s extension of the argument to use value, his claim for the complete consistency of Smith’s explanation of profit, and his criticism of Ricardo’s alleged misunderstanding of Smith. Schullern reports these claims briefly rather than independently demonstrating their validity. His concluding assessment shifts from theoretical reconstruction to the standards by which canonical economists should be read:

Würde übrigens Smith mehr und sorgfältiger gelesen und würde nicht allzuoft einer oder der andere seiner Nachfolger an seiner Statt beurteilt werden, so würde manche voreilige Kritik zum Schweigen kommen und er auch heute noch tausendfältig befruchtend sein — trotz seiner Irrtümer — wie er es in früherer Zeit gewesen.

English translation: If, moreover, Smith were read more and more carefully, and if all too often one or another of his successors were not judged in his stead, many a hasty criticism would fall silent and he would even today be a thousandfold fructifying influence — despite his errors — as he was in earlier times.

The qualification “trotz seiner Irrtümer” preserves the distance between Schullern’s admiration and Cossa’s unconditional defense. The review’s significance lies in this qualified rehabilitation: Smith should be judged through close reading of his own arguments, rather than through doctrines attributed to his successors. Cossa’s scholarship is therefore valuable both as an act of historical justice and as a means of renewing economic inquiry, even where its strongest theoretical claims remain contestable.