2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
If nature cannot feel deprivation, does using it impose no economic cost? In this 1885 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen challenges labour-only theories of production by locating the loss elsewhere: exhausted soil, depleted mines, and diminished forests cost something to the people who depend on them, whether resources are privately or collectively owned. His distinctive move is to separate the inputs of a particular productive act from their ultimate constituents: capital derives from earlier production, but nature cannot be reduced to labour. Combining criticism of economic doctrine with an account of scarcity and subjective valuation, Schullern makes resource depletion central to his anti-socialist argument. The article offers a concrete distinction to examine: human agency directs production without making labour its only economically costly element.
Neither a Ricardian exception nor an artifact of private landownership, ground rent in this 1889 study becomes the value that a scarce natural factor draws from its marginal product. Schullern-Schrattenhofen builds the argument on the marginal-utility value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, treating land not as an eternal surface but as a temporally limited productive service, and carefully separating 'raw' from 'pure' land-use, a distinction that turns decisive in mines, where extraction consumes the resource itself. Fertility, location, population growth, and diminishing returns all move rent by changing either product value or the degree of dependence on the natural factor. Against Henry George, he insists that abolishing private property would redistribute rent, not dissolve it, and presents his whole account as a reform of Ricardo grounded in human need.
Keiner dieser Sätze enthält das Wort „Privateigentum“, oder deutet auch nur im entferntesten darauf hin.
English translation: “None of these propositions contains the word "private property," nor does any of them even remotely allude to it.”
Can a new definition of money explain the Austrian agio, or does it merely redescribe the difficulty? In this brief review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen examines Eduard Hammer’s separation of supposedly unchanging units of value from the coins and notes that represent them. The practical test is Hammer’s account of the agio as a gap between money’s represented value and its market price, rather than a difference between metals or currencies. Schullern finds the proposal thought-provoking but doubts its agreement with the facts. His measured response brings a precise monetary dispute into focus: what must a conceptual distinction explain before it earns acceptance as an economic explanation?
Trade figures can identify an opening without explaining whether it will last. In this 1891 review of Josef Grunzel’s study of China’s commercial development, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen tests statistical description against the needs of commercial judgment. Shanghai’s abrupt import fluctuations prompt his central question: do they reflect accidents or persistent causes? His European export perspective gives particular weight to German cloth and metal goods and Bohemian imitation gemstones and matches, yet he also recalls the violence of Europe’s introduction of opium. The review offers a compact, pointed account of what trade tables leave unresolved: Chinese demand, domestic production costs, and the conditions that make an apparent market opportunity viable.
Are commercial crises preventable failures of speculation and oversight, or recurrent phases of a credit economy? In this 1891 comparative review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen weighs Max Wirth’s fourth edition against Clément Juglar’s second, valuing Wirth’s wider historical reach while cautiously preferring Juglar’s theoretical depth. His comparison brings practical safeguards—bank reserves, shareholder rights, publicity—into view alongside Juglar’s account of prosperity turning into crisis and liquidation. Banks emerge in a revealing double role: their credit sustains expansion, while their balance sheets help observers diagnose its course. The review offers a compact encounter with two ways of making economic disturbance intelligible, and with a reviewer attentive to the difference between recognizing danger and having institutions capable of responding.
Revived by national unification, the social question, and a decisive turn from French toward German and Austrian scholarship, Italian political economy had by the 1890s produced a theoretical literature that Schullern-Schrattenhofen sets out to make legible to German readers. He traces the fault line running through it, between economists who defend generally valid, absolute economic laws and those who dissolve them into historical categories, while insisting that induction and deduction proceed hand in hand. Organized after Luigi Cossa's system, the survey moves through the factors of production, the theory of value and price, money and credit, and income distribution, weighing Pantaleoni's marginal utility, Nazzani's cost-of-production value, Ferrara's reproduction-cost doctrine, and Loria's Ricardian historical cost against one another. A map of a national science coming rapidly into its own.
Heute ist die Volkswirtschaftslehre Italiens neuerdings auf eine Stufe emporgestiegen, welche sie allgemeiner Beachtung würdig macht.
English translation: “Today Italian political economy has recently risen to a level that makes it worthy of general attention.”
Erudition does not guarantee objectivity: this distinction shapes Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s brief 1892 review of Adolf Jäger’s Die sociale Frage. Jäger reads biblical prophecy through imperial history and examines European social and monetary conditions from a strictly Protestant standpoint. Schullern credits his learning, ingenuity and perseverance while objecting to anti-Catholic polemic and the sacrifice of scholarly objectivity to theological premises. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination: Schullern neither dismisses the historical detail nor endorses the framework, and finds ideas worth circulating in a work whose design and spirit, he fears, will obstruct its reception.
A statistical yearbook can count a nation’s resources without adequately describing how its people live. In this 1892 review of the Annuario statistico italiano 1889–90, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen judges Italian statistics by their capacity to connect economic measurement with material welfare. He praises Luigi Bodio’s leadership and the yearbook’s explanations of how figures were collected, but reserves judgment on factory-level wage averages even when comparisons with wheat prices illuminate purchasing power. His attention to temporary migration, pellagra mortality, and silk production as a source of rural cash income gives this short review its concrete interest: readers encounter an economist asking which categories and comparisons make social conditions intelligible—and where abundant data still leave questions unanswered.
When a coin changes in value between the signing of a contract and payment, what counts as settling the debt? In this brief 1892 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen commends Conigliani’s historical treatment of that legal problem. He highlights the competing claims of coins’ legal, intrinsic and current values, and reports Conigliani’s conclusion that modern monetary conditions warrant recognition only of legal valuation at the moment of payment. Schullern’s emphasis falls on the historical circumstances behind these doctrines: the review offers a compact glimpse of how he valued the history of economic thought as a means of clarifying conflicting claims over monetary obligations.
Does credit reduce the need for money, or enable transactions whose expansion demands still more cash? This tension anchors Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s favourable 1892 review of Carlo Francesco Ferraris’s Principii di scienza bancaria. Schullern singles out Ferraris’s argument that credit supplements insufficient circulating money rather than simply replacing it. His praise rests on a specific critical standard: precise definitions should clarify economic effects, not merely tidy terminology. Readers can see how that standard shapes his assessment of monetary requirements, consumption credit and price formation. His closing attention to the comparatively neglected writings of Arthur Jehan de Johannis also gives the review a purpose beyond recommendation: bringing Italian research on banking and agricultural credit to a German-reading scholarly audience.
Cheap editions can widen access to economic knowledge—but at what cost to the printed text? In this brief 1892 review of Emanuel Herrmann’s Miniaturbilder aus dem Gebiete der Wirtschaft, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen welcomes the inexpensive 1891 edition while regretting its many printing errors. His praise centres on Herrmann’s sharp observation and skill in miniature description, with particular approval for discussions of Thünen’s law, the correspondence card, and luxury. The notice offers a compact example of Schullern’s criteria for popular economic writing: precise observation and engaging exposition that carry knowledge beyond specialist readers.
Could shorter working hours serve employers as well as workers without overturning private property? In this brief 1892 review, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen examines Emilio Cossa’s argument that they could: spreading employment would turn unemployed workers into purchasers, strengthening domestic demand. Schullern places this defence of reduced hours and state intervention against the resistance he identifies among Italian scholars. His interest is tempered by a precise reservation: Cossa may be too optimistic about the development he anticipates. The review offers a compact encounter with an economic case for shorter hours—and with a sympathetic reviewer who stops short of accepting its confidence in the outcome.