It seems to me that the jurist Professor Stammler in his book _Wirthschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung_,[84] has also made the mistake of interpreting Marx's concept as an _ideal_ law. He is absolutely correct when, in rejecting Kautsky's comparison between the concept of labour-value and the law of gravity--which takes effect fully on a vacuum--whilst the resistance made by air leads to special results, he maintains that this has nothing analogous to a physical law. For him, on the other hand, Marx's law is justified (at least formally) as an attempt at investigation into what in the judgment of economists, granted the capitalist organisation of society, may be _objectively accurate_. Subjective judgments may differ, but that does not affect what ought to be an objective criterion, to divide the true from the false. But can an _objective criterion_ ever be found within the sphere of economics? Anyone who has rightly understood the principle of hedonistic economics must answer no. And if Stammler brings forward such an idea, it is because in his work he expressly intends to deny the originality of economic material and the independence of economics as a science.[85] Sorel believes that Marx's method has rendered all the assistance of which it is capable, and cannot aid the study, which it is needful to make, of modern economic conditions. If I am not mistaken he means that the hopes of the Marxians in regard to the fruitfulness of Marx's method are futile, and that the pages which he has written in the history of economics are practically all that can be produced by it. A good part of the third volume, in which Marx shows himself a simple classical economist, and the miserable and scanty output of Marxian economic writings subsequent to Marx, would suggest that Stammler's opinion is justified by the facts. But, whilst Sorel's book seems to me welcome in the endeavour to understand and define the score of Marx's economic inquiries, I cannot form the same judgment of another attempt made to reform the basis of Marx's system by rejecting his method, and a part of his results. I refer to a recent book by Dr Antonio Graziadei,[86] which has been much discussed during these last months. Graziadei's object is to examine profits independently of the theory of value: a course already indicated by Professor Loria, and the fallacy of which ought to be clearly evident at a glance, without its being necessary to wait for proof from the results of the attempt. A system of economics from which _value_ is omitted, is like logic without the _concept_, ethics without _duty_, æsthetics without _expression_. It is economics ... cut off from its proper sphere. But let us see for a moment how Graziadei manages the working out of his idea.