ABSTRACT
To understand the nature of the National Socialist economic system, a few considerations on the relation between property and contract will prove helpful. This chapter illustrates the nature of the economic system by an examination of the institution of property. The natural lawyers of the seventeenth century and the classical economists of the eighteenth century clearly realized that freedom of contract and freedom of trade are not simply legal categories but exercise specific social functions. Freedom of trade implies the right of any entrepreneur to leave a combination and to re-establish his economic freedom, thereby endangering monopolistic possessions. The German economy has two broad and striking characteristics. It is a monopolistic economy—and a command economy. If one believes that Germany's economy is no longer capitalistic under National Socialism, it is easy to believe further that her society has become classless. National Socialism must necessarily carry to an extreme the one process that characterizes the structure of modern society, bureaucratization.
