Robert Meyer: Review of Leo von Petrażycki’s Die Lehre vom Einkommen, Vol. I (1895)

Robert Meyer’s review evaluates Petrażycki’s first volume on income as a contribution to civil law, economic theory, and legislative policy. Its organizing claim is that the legal doctrine of fruits becomes intelligible through the economic distinction between income and capital. Meyer follows the book’s conceptual and historical investigations before turning to its broader proposal for a science of Civilpolitik. His enthusiastic appraisal is qualified by a claim to intellectual priority and reservations about establishing a separate discipline.

Petrażycki’s immediate target is the treatment of fruits in civil-law scholarship and the draft German civil code. As Meyer explains, disputes concerning usufruct, dowries, good-faith possession, and leases repeatedly require distinctions between capital and income and judgments about the amount of income available. Roman jurists’ practical decisions can therefore embody economic understanding even where their explicit theories fail:

Der Verf. sucht in äußerst anregender Weise durch die Untersuchung der einzelnen Quellenstellen zu zeigen, wie die römischen Juristen, ohne eine Theorie des Einkommens zu entwickeln, ja zuweilen im Gegensatz zu ihren eigenen verfehlten theoretischen Betrachtungen ihre kasuistischen Entscheidungen stets in dem Sinne getroffen haben, der vom ökonomischen Standpunkte aus geboten war.

English translation: By examining the individual source passages, the author seeks in an exceedingly stimulating manner to show how the Roman jurists, without developing a theory of income, indeed at times in contradiction to their own mistaken theoretical reflections, always reached their casuistic decisions in the sense that was required from the economic standpoint.

The book proceeds from gross receipts derived from individual capital assets and aggregate capital to income assessed in money, including expenditures and realized fruits, and finally to the history and classification of income concepts. Meyer especially values the economic discrimination shown in its treatment of forests, parks, and different kinds of livestock. These examples connect legal classifications with the concrete conditions under which yields can be obtained while preserving productive assets.

The central conceptual move is to understand income as a norm of economic conduct rather than simply an observable class of receipts:

Das Einkommen fasst Verf. in einer sehr fortgeschrittenen Weise auf, indem er den Begriff des Einkommens als den Ausdruck einer Verhaltensregel betrachtet.

English translation: The author conceives income in a very advanced manner, in that he regards the concept of income as the expression of a rule of conduct.

On this account, income defines a permissible consumption fund: recurrent satisfaction of needs is the objective, and preservation of capital secures the possibility of recurrence. Meyer endorses this shift from supposedly objective characteristics to practical requirements, but insists that he had developed substantially the same argument in his own 1887 work. He claims priority while acknowledging that a missing note in Petrażycki’s text might have contained relevant references. This intervention makes the review both an appreciation of applied economic reasoning and a dispute over the genealogy of its governing concept.

Meyer leaves the adequacy of Petrażycki’s interpretations of Roman legal sources to specialist jurists. For economists, the achievement is to demonstrate that defining income can have substantial—and possibly decisive—practical consequences in civil law. The book’s concluding methodological argument has still wider significance: knowledge of existing law must be supplemented by systematic inquiry into the social effects of possible legislation.

Die Methode des Denkens de lege ferenda müsse eine ganz andere sein, als die richterlich dogmatische — die leider bei der Abfassung des deutschen Entwurfs die ausschlaggebende Rolle gespielt habe.

English translation: The method of thinking de lege ferenda must, he holds, be an entirely different one from the judicial-dogmatic method — which unfortunately played the decisive role in the drafting of the German bill.

The distinction concerns the object of inquiry. Judicial and doctrinal reasoning takes facts as given and seeks an appropriate decision; legislative policy asks which actions a rule will encourage or prevent. Meyer highlights Petrażycki’s applications to wasteful usufruct, preservation of fruits, good-faith possession, and reimbursement of useful expenses. The common principle is to assess legal rules through the motives and conduct they generate.

Der Leser sieht aus denselben, daß der Verfasser in seiner Arbeit ein schönes Beispiel angewandter Volkswirtschaftslehre gegeben hat.

English translation: From these the reader sees that the author has given in his work a fine example of applied political economy.

This judgment captures Meyer’s praise without erasing his final reservation. He questions whether the proposed Civilpolitik requires disciplinary independence, suggesting that stronger economic education for jurists and legal education for economists might achieve the same purpose. He also suspects that Petrażycki undervalues existing contributions by practical lawyers. The review’s enduring relevance lies in this double insistence: legal concepts require economic interpretation, and legislative choices require attention to behavioral consequences, even if the institutional form of that inquiry remains unsettled.