Rainer Schickele

Farm Tenure under the Strain of War

HE war puts our institutions to an acid test. Where they block the way to full mobilization of our economy for the war effort, they must be changed; where they facilitate the mobilizing of our resources, they must be strengthened. Habits of life and thought are being reoriented toward the moral principle of humanitarian democracy of, for, and by the common people, and toward the economic principle of maximizing the use of our productive resources. The institution of land tenure does not escape this test in the present struggle. I. Orientation of the Problem

The Rational Means-End Schema as a Tool for Empirical Analysis of Social Action

The paper starts with an argument for the necessity of a clear definition of rationality. Concepts are defined by content (their meaning) and by area (the corresponding objects). As concepts are understood as tools, they need to be defined according to their purpose. In economics and sociology, rationality serves for the analysis of action choices guided by reasoning. This implies conscious reflections. For an adequate judgment, the observer and the actor need to have the same knowledge. A further criterion is the possibility of verification, which means that the ends of rational action must be real, not transcendent.