Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/281

 REVIEWS 267

of prices. The section on prices is masterful, and terminates the work. While Professor Lehr fully acknowledges the importance of the investigations of such writers .as Menger, Walras, and Bohm-Bawerk, which he frequently cites, he nevertheless maintains that the theory of final utility represents the exclusive study of but one determinative series of phenomena in the regulation of prices of which the cost of production offers the supplementary explanation. He attempts to show that there is no such opposition between the classical theory of value and price and the more recent doctrine of final utility, as is frequently supposed.

An excellent feature of the book is the section on the legal organ- ization of society. Every economic society develops within the bound- aries, so to speak, of a fixed legal system, and receives from this legal system its peculiar stamp. The relation of law to economic activity may be described as that of the form to the contents, and the intimacy of the relation be demonstrated by the fact that all economic laws and concepts which are not merely borrowed from natural science contain the supposition of a somehow regulated society presuppose, in short, a legal system. It was a mistake of the elder economists, in their dis- cussions of economic concepts and laws, to omit indicating that it was a distinct form of society which alone their system attempted to explain. It was thus the idea could arise that there existed universal economic laws, bound neither by time nor space, and independent of the legal structure of society. If the chief service of the historical school has been to point out the importance of the temporal and local in economic theory, the work of Rodbertus and Wagner in emphasizing the inter- dependence of economic and legal concepts was of almost equal importance.

Some objections, of course, might be made to parts of Professor Lehr's work. Thus ft might be urged that in the treatment of free goods, as distinguished from economic goods, he fails sufficiently to appreciate the relativity of the term free. Many of the "gifts" of nature are neither common to all humanity nor gratuitous. Excellent qualities of soil and of climate, for instance, and partly the products which ensue therefrom, are the gifts of nature only to certain favored countries.

Another case. On page 222 a diagram of the demands of three purchasers of a certain ware is constructed, and their demands are added to constitute the total demand. In his explanation of this