Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen on Lorenzoni’s Agricultural Cooperation (1902)

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s review of Giovanni Lorenzoni’s La cooperazione agraria nella Germania moderna assesses both the practical promise and the conceptual foundations of agricultural cooperation. The two-volume study of German institutions matters especially as a resource for Italian Tyrol, where fragmented landholding and intensive cultivation make cooperative organization a plausible remedy for economic difficulties. Schullern endorses this practical purpose, while regretting that a press preoccupied with political quarrels may do little to disseminate the findings among the population.

The review follows the study’s movement from institutional description to theoretical criticism. After a history of agricultural professional organizations, Lorenzoni’s first volume surveys forms of cooperation, defining agricultural cooperatives as voluntary, lasting associations that advance the economic purposes of agricultural enterprises. Their classification turns on immediate objectives: reducing production costs, improving production and marketing, controlling price formation, and limiting entrepreneurial risk. Schullern places the work near Rabbeno’s scholarship, treating it as a potentially expanded and deepened continuation of that research.

Credit cooperatives receive particular attention. Schullern admires the statistical detail and acknowledges Germany’s remarkable institutional development, but reserves judgment on Lorenzoni’s sweeping praise of its credit system and the near-disappearance of rural usury. Cooperatives have a major role in supplying agricultural credit; whether they can fulfil that task alone depends on circumstances and stages of economic development. Austrian conditions offer instructive comparisons rather than grounds for a universal answer. The review also singles out agricultural labour placement as an increasingly important issue connecting wage movements with economic results.

The second volume brings legal construction into the analysis of economic organization:

Ich möchte hier nicht unterlassen, die ungeheuere Bedeutung der juristisch richtigen Construction wirtschaftlicher Organisationen, den einschneidenden gegenseitigen Einfluss der wirtschaftlichen, socialen und rechtlichen Ideen und Entwicklungsstadien besonders zu betonen.

English translation: I should not like to omit here to emphasize particularly the immense importance of the juridically correct construction of economic organizations, and the incisive reciprocal influence of economic, social and legal ideas and stages of development.

This insistence on interaction supplies the basis for Schullern’s principal disagreement. Following Pantaleoni, Lorenzoni treats the cooperative as an economic association distinguished from others only by its participants and purposes. For Schullern, those differences are constitutive, not incidental. Historically, the term has belonged to particular associations whose members’ social position—including their capacity to contribute labour without capital—and distinctive objectives establish a separate category, potentially opposed to other forms of association such as joint-stock companies.

Dass fortschreitende Entwicklung eine Ausgleichung hervorrufen und die Genossenschaften ihres besonderen Wesens entkleiden kann, daran ist nicht zu zweifeln; wir müssen aber mit den gegebenen Thatsachen rechnen, umsemehr als die Cooperation nie ein rein juristisches oder rein ökonomisches, sondern stets ein juristisch-ökonomisches Gebilde ist.

English translation: That advancing development may bring about an equalization and divest the cooperatives of their particular essence is not to be doubted; but we must reckon with the facts as given, all the more so since cooperation is never a purely juridical or a purely economic formation, but always a juridical-economic one.

Schullern’s position is therefore historical and relational: cooperation possesses a specific character under existing conditions, without necessarily retaining it forever. He suggests that Lorenzoni’s substantive analysis actually approaches this relative position more closely than Pantaleoni’s categorical account, although Lorenzoni’s broad initial definition predisposes him toward the latter.

The closing discussion praises attention to the psychological and moral elements of cooperation, whose purposes resist precise specification. It also identifies a restraint that unites reviewer and author:

Dass der Verfasser sein Thema vorurtheilslos angefasst hat, beweist die Thatsache, dass er die Genossenschaft nicht für unbedingt und ihrem Wesen nach nützlich erklärt, sondern auch ihr nur eine relative Bedeutung als unter Umständen wirksames Mittel zum allgemeinen Culturzwecke zuerkennt.

English translation: That the author has taken up his theme without prejudice is proved by the fact that he does not declare the cooperative to be unconditionally and by its very nature useful, but likewise accords it only a relative significance as a means, effective under certain circumstances, to the general end of civilization.

The review’s governing judgment is thus favourable without treating cooperation as an automatic cure. Its relevance lies in connecting institutional transfer and agricultural reform with a historically grounded account of organizational difference. Schullern values Lorenzoni’s breadth precisely because cooperative institutions must be evaluated through their legal form, social membership, economic purposes, and relation to wider questions of economic and social policy.