The Quintessence of Socialism.

New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1890. First American edition. 55, [3, ads] pp. Publisher's printed buff wrappers. Lower front corner chipped. Overall, a very good copy."In 1871 Schäffle resigned his professorship to join the cabinet of Count Karl Sigmund von Hohenwart as minister of commerce for Austria. The government fell in that same year, however, and Schäffle took up residence in Stuttgart, where he devoted himself entirely to literary work. Schäffle's magnum opus, a treatise called Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers (Construction and Life of the Social Body) was published in four volumes from 1875 to 1878. The work was a grandiose attempt to create a unified system combining the natural and social sciences. Schäffle attempted to show a unity between human social behavior and the biological processes observed by natural science, while retaining a spiritual aspect in the tradition of German idealist philosophy. In his Quintessence of Socialism (1875) and The Impossibility of Social Democracy (1885) Schäffle developed a critique of socialism which focused on the problem of incentives in large-scale collectives. His conclusion was that classical socialism and democracy were incompatible. Schäffle thus foreshadowed some of the criticisms of socialism by Ludwig von Mises and Freidrich Hayek".(Wiki)