Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Adolphe Landry’s L’utilité sociale de la propriété individuelle (1902)

In this German book review, Schullern examines Landry’s argument that private ownership of productive goods inherently conflicts with collective welfare. His assessment combines respect for Landry’s analytical thoroughness with skepticism about his socialist conclusions. The central question is whether diagnosing conflicts between individual profitability and social productivity establishes either private property as their cause or socialism as their remedy.

Schullern outlines the book’s progression through production, distribution, and consumption, followed by a chapter on reform. He also identifies its methodological hierarchy:

Seine Beweisführung teilt er in drei Abschnitte, welche die Produktion, die Verteilung und den Konsum behandeln; dabei bedient er sich hauptsächlich der deduktiven Forschungsmethode und verwendet er die Induktion vorwiegend zu Zwecken der Ueberprüfung.

English translation: He divides his demonstration into three sections, which treat production, distribution and consumption; in this he makes use chiefly of the deductive method of research and employs induction predominantly for purposes of verification.

Landry’s inquiry thus seeks to establish necessary consequences of private property, using induction chiefly to check its deductions. Schullern acknowledges both the breadth of the investigation and Landry’s familiarity with relevant literature, including Rodbertus, Dühring, and Sismondi.

The review’s decisive comparison, however, concerns Wilhelm Neurath. Both thinkers identify a divergence between privately profitable production and production serving society’s interests; their analyses even converge strikingly on economic crises. Yet they draw opposite conclusions about property. Landry envisages socialism as maximizing collective welfare, whereas Neurath regards the abolition of private ownership of productive goods as unnecessary and harmful. For Schullern, this divergence makes causal attribution—not merely recognition of economic dysfunction—the crucial issue. He regrets Landry’s unfamiliarity with Neurath, whose arguments might have prompted a revision of the proof.

The closing assessment turns on Landry’s own qualifications. Schullern praises his caution in recognizing that reform cannot simply be implemented in full and that the defects attributed to private property do not establish socialism’s superiority: a socialist organization might introduce defects of its own.

Es ist für ihn mehr ein Gefühl, als eine durch seine Untersuchungen begründete Ueberzeugung, wenn er für seine Person ein sozialistisches Regime als die unentbehrliche Voraussetzung für die Heilung der Mißstände in unserer Gesellschaft erklärt.

English translation: It is for him more a feeling than a conviction grounded in his investigations when he declares, for his own part, a socialist regime to be the indispensable precondition for the cure of the ills in our society.

This distinction between personal conviction and demonstrated conclusion governs Schullern’s verdict. He expects many readers to share Landry’s reservations more strongly while rejecting his proposals. Nevertheless, the review affirms the book’s intellectual value. Its relevance lies in separating a searching critique of existing economic arrangements from a sufficient argument for institutional replacement.