chapter 6 Review of Othmar Spann, The Principal Theories of Economics* Translated from German by Ben Fowkes

Spann, Othmar 1923, Die Haupttheorien derVolkswirtschaftslehre, 12th–15th edi- tions, Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer (viii + 207pp).1

Othmar Spann’s book under review here is widely known. The only reason for this is that it provides painless examination preparation for thousands of students, because it is short and does not go deeply into the subject. What mainly interests us here is the chapter ‘A short description of the development of socialism’. Spann’s basic error is that he uncritically throws together such entirely diverse phenomena as utopian and scientific socialism and therefore necessarily arrives at an incorrect determination of concepts. In the current edition he has admittedly abandoned the incorrect formulation of previous editions to the effect that socialism ‘concentrated above all on the problems and tasks of distribution’. But one cannot say that his new formulation is any better. For Spann, socialism is not actually a theory of the economic process, but the ethical demand for a certain way of organising the economy and the state, ‘the idea of giving happiness to the whole of humanity’.2 It is evident that this is a misconception of what is most essential about Marx’s socialism. One can therefore agree with Spann without reservation when he says that there is a great lack of clarity about the concept of socialism. Of course, he also failed to generate clarity. In any case, this book is marked by a complete absence of clar- ity. In the third edition (1918) Spann writes: ‘Socialism is a universalist notion of the economy’;3 in the present edition, in contrast, he writes: ‘Can one define socialism as a purely universalist system? This cannot succeed!’4 The reason for this, Spann adds, is that the goal of socialism, namely the ‘right to receive the full proceeds of labour’, is individualistic! Spann does not know – it can be

* [Originally published as Grossmann 1928b.] 1 [There is an English translation of the later, 19th, 1929 edition, Spann 1930.] 2 Spann 1918, p. 126. 3 Spann 1918, p. 115. 4 Spann 1923, p. 127.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384750_008 178 chapter 6 remarked in passing – that the right to receive the full proceeds of labour has nothing to do with Marx’s socialism, and he has evidently never even heard rumours of Marx’s letter about the Gotha Program,5 with its biting critique of the right to receive the full proceeds of labour, made from the standpoint of Marx’s theory of value. Spann’s complete lack of a sense of history is shown in his dilettantish remarks about socialism in the ancient world. A decade ago, in the third edition of his book – evidently relying on Grünberg’s well-known article in the Dic- tionary of Economics,6 a reference he has since then carefully eradicated – he declared that socialism in the modern sense, hence ‘socialism based on the sci- ence of economics has only existed since the French Revolution’.7 Now, under the influence of [Robert] Pöhlmann,8 he restricts his assertion by speaking of ‘more recent’ scientific socialism, as if an ‘older’ version ever existed, and he assures us that ‘a true capitalism, and a social question of the same type as ours’9 already existed in ancient times! Our author is evidently unaware of the fundamental difference between the world of antiquity and the modern world resulting from the lack in the former of typical free wage labour, and the con- sequences of this absence for the whole of economic life. Spann’s detailed discussions of modern socialism also abound in inaccur- acies. Only a few examples as an illustration. It is incorrect to maintain, as Spann does, that Saint-Simon was ‘the first to emphasise the innate antagonism between capital and labour’.10 As anyone who has even half an interest in the material is aware, it is precisely this class antagonism which Saint-Simon failed to see, stressing instead the antagonism between ‘industry’ – the old Third Estate, i.e. the totality of all usefully active individuals – and restored feudalism. Charles Fourier (1808) and Sismondi (1819) were the first to work out the ant- agonism between capital and labour.11 It is therefore completely erroneous to assert, as Spann does, that Fourier proceeds from the assumption that ‘absolute harmony prevails’ not only in nature but also ‘in society and the economy’.12 It was an achievement of genius for Fourier to have already seen, in 1808, the disharmonies, the basically anarchic fundamental character of industry, the

5 [Marx 1989a.] 6 [Grünberg 1911a.] 7 Spann 1918, p. 115. 8 [Pöhlmann 1912.] 9 Spann 1918, p. 127. 10 Spann 1918, p. 128. 11 [Fourier 1996; Sismondi 1991d. See Grossman 1924a, see above pp. 55–119.] 12 Spann 1918, p. 128.