1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.”
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.”
A national economy, on this account, is no mere sum of households but an organism of interdependent economic units bound by territory, law, and language. Conceived as a study aid for German-speaking universities, this compendium moves from the anatomy of needs and goods through a long historical survey, Greek and Roman antiquity, mercantilism, physiocracy, Adam Smith and the classical school, socialism from Owen to Marx, and the cooperative movement, before building its theoretical core on subjective value and marginal utility (Grenznutzen). Schullern-Schrattenhofen follows Menger in deriving money from the needs of exchange rather than from legislation, defends metallic currency against token theories, treats price as the meeting of subjective valuations, and closes on credit. Objective in method, yet frank about its own commitments.
Aus dem Gesagten dürfte sich wohl ergeben haben, daß jede von den aufgezählten Besitzkategorien ihre bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen, daß aber die wichtigsten die den mittleren Gruppen angehörenden sind.
English translation: “From what has been said, it should be evident that each of the enumerated categories of property has its particular task to fulfill, but that the most important are those belonging to the middle groups.”
Food can always be imported, the doctrine that would subordinate agriculture to industry and trade, had, Schullern-Schrattenhofen argues, been refuted by the World War. Written for Diehl and Mombert's Grundrisse series, this treatment of agrarian policy rather than agrarian law surveys the Agrarverfassung: land distribution, tenancy and Erbpacht, mortgage credit and Rodbertus's rent principle, inheritance and Anerbenrecht, internal colonization, and the postwar expropriation laws from the Reichssiedlungsgesetz to the abolition of the Fideikommisse. Against socialist Bodenreform and the Roman-law conception of absolute ownership, he presses a Germanic idea of property as duty, holding the self-cultivating owner to be the ideal citizen. His standpoint is anti-materialist, moderately agrarian, and insistent that agrarian questions admit only relative, situation-bound solutions.
Die Volkswirtschaft ist demnach nicht Selbstzweck, sie ist vielmehr in erster Reihe ein Hilfsmittel des kulturellen Fortschrittes und hat von diesem Standpunkte aus behandelt und geleitet zu werden.
English translation: “The national economy is accordingly not an end in itself; rather, it is in the first place an instrument of cultural progress, and must be treated and directed from this standpoint.”