Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg · 1880
In this review of Lujo Brentano’s 1879 study of workers’ insurance, Inama-Sternegg presents insurance as the necessary foundation of collective self-help within the existing economic order. The review moves from Brentano’s earlier writings on guilds, trade unions, and employment relations to the institutional arrangements proposed in the new book, before closing with a reservation about the possible necessity of state assistance.
Inama-Sternegg locates Brentano’s work within a sustained attempt to reconcile workers’ collective organization with modern economic and political freedom. Trade unions, in this account, realize the principles of the modern order rather than contradict them. Yet Brentano’s earlier treatment of insurance had left a consequential gap: insecurity could defeat collective organization before it achieved improvements in wages or employment conditions.
Die drängende Noth des Augenblickes würde den Gedanken an einen corporativen Zusammenhalt gar nicht aufkommen oder ihn doch als werthlos erscheinen lassen, wenn er sich ausser Stand erwiese, solcher Noth gegenüber Hilfe zu gewähren.
English translation: The pressing distress of the moment would not let the thought of a corporative cohesion arise at all, or would at least make it appear worthless, if that cohesion proved unable to afford help in the face of such distress.
Insurance therefore does more than add another benefit to union membership. By answering immediate distress, it establishes the conditions under which durable association becomes possible. Inama-Sternegg judges the new study a substantial success because it supplies this missing support and thereby brings Brentano’s broader argument for workers’ corporate organization to systematic completion.
The conceptual hinge is the relationship between economic freedom and responsibility for subsistence. The review recounts a historical scheme linking privileged earning rights to compulsory provision, restricted earning capacity to obligations of support, and free earning capacity to personal responsibility. Under the existing legal and economic order, Brentano consequently rejects compulsory insurance funds, compulsory membership, and obligations on the state, municipalities, or employers to secure workers’ existence. But this defense of freedom carries a substantive condition:
Die moderne Wirtschaftsordnung selbst würde aber nur dann als verwerflich erscheinen, wenn sie es den Arbeitern nicht möglich machen würde, gleichzeitig mit der Erwerbsfreiheit auch die Selbsthilfe zu betätigen.
English translation: The modern economic order itself, however, would appear reprehensible only if it did not make it possible for the workers to exercise self-help along with freedom of acquisition.
Association is the mechanism intended to make self-help practicable. As collective organization strengthens workers’ position in concluding employment contracts, it should also enable them to insure against the hazards of their existence. The review distinguishes six needs: children’s upbringing after the early death of parents, old age, funeral expenses, disability, sickness, and unemployment caused by deficient demand for labor. It reports Brentano’s preference for large insurance institutions for the first four, especially where very small premiums are accepted and premium reserves remain withdrawable. Sickness requires nationally organized, specialized workers’ funds. Unemployment insurance belongs most appropriately to trade unions because it is inseparable from their wider efforts to improve workers’ conditions. Collective self-help thus entails a differentiated institutional arrangement, not the assignment of every risk to a single organization.
Inama-Sternegg endorses the essential argument but questions whether its practical prerequisites are universally available:
Ob aber die persönlichen und realen Bürgschaften, welche für eine gedeihliche Entwicklung der Gewerkvereine unbedingt nöthig sind, überall zur Verfügung stehen, bleibt die Frage.
English translation: But whether the personal and material guarantees which are absolutely necessary for a prosperous development of the trade unions are everywhere available remains the question.
This qualification limits the inference from formal freedom to effective self-organization. Where those prerequisites are missing, he leaves room for state assistance, invoking the state’s successful contribution to peasant emancipation. The review’s significance lies in this tension: insurance makes voluntary association viable, but public help may itself be needed to establish the conditions under which that association can flourish.
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