Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Bertrand Nogaro’s Éléments d’Économie politique (1914)

Schullern’s brief German review assesses Nogaro’s 1913 textbook as a successful teaching aid, primarily for law students but useful to other professional readers through its emphasis on money, banking, stock exchanges, and international trade. His principal judgment concerns pedagogical clarity:

Die Darstellung ist einfach, klar und gedrängt, so daß man in bezug auf sie nur günstiges sagen kann.

English translation: The presentation is simple, clear, and concise, so that with respect to it one can say only favourable things.

Schullern connects this achievement to the aims of his own textbook, placing Nogaro within a shared project of accessible economic instruction. He declines detailed criticism, instead noting the substantial use of literature, including a modest representation of German scholarship, and Nogaro’s preference for established or deserving classics.

The review then shifts from teaching value to conceptual foundations. As Schullern presents it, Nogaro’s introduction defines political economy through “economic life” and individual activities, moving from their private purposes to an external standpoint from which their combinations become manifestations of social life. The key distinction is between individual aims and social coordination, rather than an immediate prescription for state action:

Inwieweit die Regierungsgewalt hier einzugreifen habe, sei eine Frage, die außerhalb des Aufgabenkreises des Verfassers liege.

English translation: To what extent governmental authority ought to intervene here is, he says, a question that lies outside the range of the author's task.

This boundary separates the inquiry into economic organization from the question of governmental intervention. Schullern’s concluding example, drawn from the chapter on production, concerns how individual activities coordinate and organize to adapt nature to human needs. He treats these formulations as characteristic of the book without developing a separate theoretical critique. The review’s significance lies in its conjunction of practical instruction and conceptual definition: it recommends Nogaro’s exposition while identifying the passage from individual activity to organized social life as a central feature of his economics.