Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Heinrich Dietzel’s Weltwirtschaft und Volkswirtschaft (1901)

Schullern’s review combines respect for Dietzel’s intellectual force with a rejection of free trade as a universally valid doctrine. He presents the book as an arsenal whose arguments opponents must master before they can effectively contest it. His own objection concerns the subordination of national economic independence to a cosmopolitan division of labour, especially under contemporary Central European conditions.

The review moves from Dietzel’s promises of increased wealth and economic stability to the purposes and unequal consequences of international integration. Dietzel argues that cosmopolitan specialization makes each nation’s labour more national by concentrating it in branches suited to its land and people. Schullern counters that economic activity serves cultural purposes, initially those of distinct peoples entitled to independent existence. He also challenges a static understanding of productive suitability: science and technology can transform a country’s economic capacities.

The decisive disagreement is therefore about the status of the national economy:

Uns ist die Nation, uns ist der Staat ein selbständiges Wirtschaftssubject mit jeweils nur ihm eigenen Bedingungen für sein wirtschaftliches Gedeihen und für die Erreichung der ihm eigenen Culturaufgaben.

English translation: To us the nation, to us the state is an independent economic subject, with conditions peculiar to it alone for its economic prosperity and for the attainment of the cultural tasks proper to it.

This conception makes national agency, rather than aggregate enrichment alone, the criterion for judging integration. Schullern grants that attachment to the world economy may stabilize economic life, but insists that stability could be purchased through prolonged sacrifices imposed on part of humanity. His analogy with grain futures trading exposes the distributive stakes: international price equalization can benefit rich countries while crushing poorer producers operating under unfavourable conditions.

He likewise disputes the inference from improved living conditions to the necessity of free trade. Foreign exchange may have contributed to prosperity without unrestricted competition being indispensable; his reference to List’s Germany supports that distinction. The review’s concluding qualification is essential: its objections apply to integration understood as abandoning tariff protection and disregarding existing national labour conditions. Schullern does not oppose useful international commerce. He relocates the policy question from whether nations should trade to how protection should preserve their capacity for independent development:

Alles übrige ist eine Frage nach dem Maasse, welches der Protectionismus einhalten muss, wenn er nicht auch jenen Verkehr mit auswärtigen Volkswirtschaften unterbinden soll, der auch von unserem Standpunkte aus nothwendig und nützlich ist, und der sich als ein einigendes Band um die Völker schlingen soll, ohne zu einem Strick zu werden, welcher sie in ihrer nationalen Subjectivität und Selbständigkeit erdrosseln würde.

English translation: All the rest is a question of the measure which protectionism must observe if it is not also to cut off that intercourse with foreign national economies which is necessary and useful even from our own standpoint, and which is to wind itself as a uniting band around the peoples without becoming a rope that would strangle them in their national subjectivity and independence.

The closing contrast between a unifying bond and a strangling cord condenses the review’s contribution: international interdependence is desirable only insofar as it sustains, rather than dissolves, nations as economic and cultural subjects.