Within the cooperative movement of all countries, it is possible to distinguish two main groups: the farmers’ cooperatives and the consumers’ cooperatives of the non-farming population.

The objectives of the farmers’ cooperatives are the marketing of farm products on the one hand and the distribution of farm supplies and the consumers’ goods which the farmers require on the other hand. Both objectives are in themselves perfectly legitimate and could, apart from the problem of tax and credit privileges, be approved by everybody.

Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.

But the cooperatives cannot do without passionate propaganda. They call their promotional campaigning “cooperative education.”

The avowed objective of consumers’ cooperatives and of the farmers’ purchasing cooperatives is to provide their members with commodities and services at lower prices than those which they would have to expend in the absence of these associations. This is a perfectly legitimate task. We shall have to examine whether and how cooperatives really attain this end.

The romantic revolt against logic and science does not limit itself to the sphere of social phenomena and the sciences of human action. It is a revolt against our entire culture and civilization. Both Spann and Sombart demand the renunciation of scientific knowledge and the return to the faith and the bucolic conditions of the Middle Ages, and all Germans who are not in the Marxist camp joyfully agree with them.

Subjectivist economics would be guilty of an omission if it did not also concern itself with the objections that have been raised against it from political and factional standpoints.

Every new theory encounters opposition and rejection at first. The adherents of the old, accepted doctrine object to the new theory, refuse it recognition, and declare it to be mistaken. Years, even decades, must pass before it succeeds in supplanting the old one. A new generation must grow up before its victory is decisive.

Let us consider first the doctrine which teaches that thought is dependent upon the class of the thinker.

In his De officiisCicero prescribed a code of social respectability and propriety that faithfully reflects the conceptions of gentility and merit that have prevailed in western civilization through the centuries. Cicero presented nothing new in this work, nor did he intend to. He availed himself of older, Greek standards. And the views that he expounded corresponded completely to those that had been generally accepted for centuries both in the Greek and Hellenistic world and in republican Rome.

The ultimate statement that the theory of knowledge can make without leaving the solid ground of science and engaging in vague speculations on fruitless metaphysical concepts is: Changes in what is given, as far as our experience is concerned, take place in a way that allows us to perceive in the course of things the rule of universal laws that permit of no exception.