Robert Meyer: Review of Petrazycki’s Die Lehre vom Einkommen, Volume II (1897)

Robert Meyer’s 1897 review assesses the economic significance of Leo von Petrazycki’s second volume, Einkommensersatz, published in 1895. The volume addresses obligations to replace another person’s income, especially interest, reserving income formation for a later volume. Meyer admires its analysis of the economic effects of civil law while questioning some distributional assumptions and claims to methodological novelty.

Setting aside detailed adjudication of legal sources, Meyer identifies his principal concern:

Vielmehr ist es die reiche Ausbeute, die vom Standpunkte der Volkswirtschaftslehre zu finden ist, für die ich die Aufmerksamkeit der Leser in Anspruch nehmen möchte.

English translation: Rather, it is the rich yield to be found from the standpoint of political economy for which I should like to claim the readers' attention.

This contribution lies especially in Petrazycki’s treatment of the psychological effects of legal rules. Expectations concerning compensation, liability, and enforceability influence property management and transactions. Civil law thus becomes an instrument for shaping economic conduct, not merely for settling existing claims.

Das Civilrecht soll seine Normen derart festsetzen, daß es die Bürger zu einem volkswirtschaftlich nützlichen, sittlich lobenswerten Thun anleitet, schädliches und verwerfliches Verhalten verhindert, oder seltener macht.

English translation: Civil law ought to lay down its norms in such a way that it guides the citizens toward conduct that is useful for the national economy and morally praiseworthy, prevents harmful and reprehensible behaviour, or makes it rarer.

Reimbursement consequently concerns incentives as well as entitlements. Productive management of another’s property should carry an expectation of compensation for expenditure and labor, whereas dishonest speculation at the owner’s expense should not promise a gain. Meyer particularly values Petrazycki’s sensitivity to differences between Roman and modern economic circumstances. His discussions of agency and interest obligations demonstrate why inherited rules require scrutiny in light of their purposes and consequences.

This evaluative approach also informs Petrazycki’s criticism of contemporary codification:

Von diesem Gesichtspunkte werden die einzelnen Rechtssätze beurteilt, wobei allerdings der Entwurf des deutschen Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuchs oft schlecht wegkommt.

English translation: From this point of view the individual legal propositions are judged, whereby, to be sure, the draft of the German Civil Code often fares badly.

Following Anton Menger, Petrazycki questions whether rights of withdrawal, retention, and creditor remedies reinforce advantages already conferred by wealth and intelligence. Apparently equitable provisions may presuppose solvent, conscientious contracting parties, neglecting vulnerable debtors and the opportunities available to exploitative creditors.

Meyer endorses the importance of this problem but rejects an automatic identification of the debtor with the weaker party. Wealthy, unscrupulous debtors can also harm producers of modest means. He particularly objects to the argument that the object owed has greater economic value in the defaulting debtor’s hands than in the creditor’s. Greater usefulness cannot itself justify withholding payment: this reasoning could defer repayment until the debtor’s circumstances approached those of the creditor. Social evaluation of legal rules therefore requires counterexamples rather than a fixed opposition between poor debtors and powerful creditors.

Meyer finds more persuasive Petrazycki’s distinction between replaceable market goods and objects possessing individual use value. A merchant dealing in marketable goods or securities faces a different situation from a painter whose commissioned portrait is refused. This difference limits the transfer of commercial-law rules into ordinary civil transactions. Attention to consumption likewise reveals consequences obscured by narrowly legal accounting: the economic importance of a judgment must be assessed through its effects on the household concerned.

The review then turns to the relationship between jurisprudence and economics. Petrazycki argues that economic theory cannot adequately proceed from general assumptions about private property and contractual freedom while disregarding specific legal arrangements. Price analysis, for example, must consider enforceability and rights of withdrawal. Meyer accepts the value of investigating these institutional details, but not the inference that an independent discipline of Civilpolitik is therefore necessary or that earlier economics has been unproductive.

His concluding criticisms insist on intellectual reciprocity. Petrazycki’s arguments themselves draw on economic understandings of use value, economic planning, returns, and credit. Meyer objects to treating weak or outdated accounts of entrepreneurial profit as representative of economics and notes insufficient acknowledgment of relevant work by Menger and Mataja. His judgment nevertheless remains appreciative: close analysis of legal institutions can enrich economics, provided that reform proposals withstand distributional counterexamples and methodological claims recognize existing economic achievements. The promised treatment of income formation remains an object of high expectation.