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Max Weber's writings are not only very extensive, they range across law, finance, agrarian sociology, history and economics from the time of his doctoral dissertation in 1889 to posthumous publications in the early 1920s. During this span of more than 30 years he held a permanent professorial post for only ten; even if we add in his time teaching commercial law in Berlin up to 1894, in his lifetime he taught fewer than twenty full semesters. Nonetheless, he was at the time widely recognized in Germany as a leading academic and a public intellectual, his writing being characterized by a remarkable analytical coherence sustained throughout his life. While it is common to presume that the work produced in the last sixteen years of his life, from 1904 to 1920, represents a “mature phase” in his intellectual development, by tracing the course of his intellectual career from the early 1890s to the early 1920s this chapter demonstrates the lifelong consistency of his interests and argument in a body of work that shaped our understanding of modernity.
The reputation that Max Weber gained in the developing social sciences of the later twentieth century, and which echoes on today in textbooks and casual commentary, has been progressively revised since the 1980s. Central to this revision has been the publication of the Max Weber- Gesamtausgabe (Max Weber Complete Edition), which not only reprinted published writings, conference contributions and public lectures, but also a great deal of previously unknown material in ten volumes of correspondence and five volumes of lecture notes from the 1890s. Specialized editorial work has substantially altered our understanding of Weber's scholarly and academic significance on a number of fronts; importantly, the existence of the MWG itself sets new standards for discussion of Max Weber. By outlining his academic life, we can perhaps open out some of the implications of a complex, ongoing reassessment of a figure whose work remains of central importance for the humanities and social sciences.
For many, Max Weber's most familiar text is Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; MWG I/18; 2002), originally two linked journal articles from 1904/05 published as a book in an English translation by Talcott Parsons in 1930.
This volume of essays builds upon renewed interest in the long-run global development of wealth and inequality stimulated by the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It brings together an international team of leading economic historians and economists to provide an overview of global developments in the theory and reality of inequality and its salience in the modern world order.
The contributors take stock of the key concepts involved in contemporary debates - capital, wealth and income distribution, economic development, private and collective assets, financialization, global liberalisation - and evaluate the evidence for both common and contrasting historical trends in national statistical data sources. To the developed economies upon which Piketty drew are added contributions covering Latin America, Africa, India and Japan, providing a global perspective upon a global phenomenon.
The book seeks to provide readers with a deeper awareness and understanding of the significance of inequality in economic development, the varying pace and nature of economic change around the world, and the manner in which this process of change affects the distribution of incomes and wealth in diverse economies. The collection marks an important step in the process of developing Piketty's analytical framework and empirical material, overcoming some of their limitations and helping to cement a lasting place for inequality in the future agenda of economics and economic history.
As a broad introduction to the history of economic thought - based on courses the authors have taught for many years - this book provides a magisterial overview for students and teachers who have not had the opportunity to cover the development of the field of economics in its historical context.
The text is presented as a series of twenty-four lectures, which can be used as the basis for self-study or for the delivery of a course. Each lecture presents an outline of aims, a select bibliography, a chronology, an overview of between 3,000 and 4,000 words, and questions for further study or reflection.
Contemporary understanding of economic principles sheds little light on the manner in which past thinkers thought, so the reader is provided with the much-needed context behind the development of ideas, as well as being guided through the original writings of economists such as Smith, Jevons, Marshall, Robbins, Keynes and others. The emphasis is on the broad developing stream of economic argument from the seventeenth century to the present, seeking to emphasize a diversity that is sometimes suppressed in more conventional textbooks, which tend to organize their histories into sequences of schools of thought.
Backhouse and Tribe bring their considerable insight and knowledge to bear on the text, having honed their presentation to the needs of those with no previous background in the subject, without sacrificing analysis or rigour. The book will be warmly welcomed by students and teachers alike.
It could be said that, during the nineteenth century, capitalism took over the world. Developments in trade, finance, manufacturing, farming, energy sources and population growth in Western Europe converged to create a new kind of economy whose rhythms were no longer primarily dictated by pestilence, the seasons, climatic cycles or wars of religion and of succession.
Austria Supreme, if It So Wishes (1684) provides a scholarly introduction to the Austrian-German mercantilist classic Oesterreich über Alles Wann es Nur Will (1684) by Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk.
Hornigk's book was a product of the mainstream – Cameralist-Mercantilist economics as it emerged to perfection between 1650 and 1750. But in many ways, with his Nine Principles or ‘Rules’ of Economic Development (see later in this chapter), Hornigk was the one who would set the tone for years to come. Even Ekelund and Tollison, who portrayed Mercantilist theory and practice in a rather bizarre way, took Hornigk's Nine Rules of economic development as representing Mercantilist thought in a nutshell (interestingly, they did not bother too much about Cameralism; while getting Hornigk's first rule wrong). On the one hand, Hornigk put into words what many others thought in his day. Economics was symbiotically linked with the big political issues of his day. We must not forget that anti-French publications and discourses reached a climax towards the beginning of the 1680s in the German territories. This had to do with the expansionist, and at times openly aggressive, policies of Louis XIV, the great French Sun King, who strove to turn France into the most powerful state in Europe. For this goal, he was admired and feared at the same time by his contemporaries. Alliances and allegiances were fluid and kept changing; in German politics pro-and anti-French stances were to be found coexisting and alternating sometimes within the same territory. Politics were not quite as ideological yet as they would be in later centuries, especially the twentieth century. Political stances and diplomatic connections could vary in the blink of an eye, with the death of a prince or a new bribe. They were in more or less constant flux throughout the 1660s and 1670s in the territories of the empire – especially as so many of these mini-states existed in the heart of Europe, which increased the demand for, as well as the supply of, itinerant messengers, ambassadors, negotiators and other diplomats, a new class of individuals that made politics and lobbyism increasingly their main business.
A Long-Forgotten Algorithm for Europe's Rise to Greatness: The Hörnigk Strategy
How does a country grow rich? Why do some countries grow rich much faster than others? Why do some nations experience growth and prosperity, while others don't? Why did Europe eventually overtake the rest of the world, becoming the first region to industrialize and experience a progressive economic advantage over the rest of the world? These are the big questions asked in the modern social sciences, not only in more recent times (as witnessed by the post-2000 Great Divergence debate fuelled by two books by scholars working at the University of California), but also since the days of Karl Marx or Max Weber. Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk's ‘Austria Supreme’ provides a concise and powerful answer to them. People had even raised them way before. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses, these questions were at the core of the ‘rich’ country versus ‘poor’ country debates. All major epigones of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume and Adam Smith, would comment on this problem. But this discourse was even older than that. It had been raised in early modern European political economy discourse at least since the sixteenth century and the days of Giovanni Botero, the Italian author who wrote a major treatise on cities and economic development. It is not usually acknowledged that the big rift that developed in economic fortune between Asia and the West around AD 1800 had a prehistory that predates the industrial revolution – one major element and cause of the Great Divergence – by centuries. Nor is it well understood what role ideas played in this process – that is, the intellectual history of industrialization and Europe's eventual economic supremacy. With the present text, written by a seventeenth-century diplomat living in Habsburg, Austria, who no schoolchild and social science student of today would be expected to have heard of, we have an answer at last, however partial or incomplete. It was the ‘Hornigk Strategy’ that made European nations rich. Perhaps, there is something to be learned from this. At least, this man should receive the fame he deserves.
State Intervention and Economic Growth in Pre-industrial Europe
Only for reasons of analytical completeness, a brief sketch of Austrian economic policy and development is given here, mainly because Hornigk reiterated, passim and almost ad nauseam, that with ‘Oesterreich über alles’ wann es nur will, he had formulated a blueprint economic development model for the Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire, extending mainly, but not exclusively, to the ‘Hereditary Lands’ (Österreichische Erblande), that is lands held in hereditary possession by the Holy Roman Emperors, which at that time comprised most parts of Austria proper, Bohemia and Hungary. We have seen, however, that – contrary to the book's title, which is in many ways misleading, especially to the modern reader –, the work represents by no means a peculiar ‘Austrian’ strategy of development. Other states would – and should, in Hornigk's opinion – apply the ‘Hornigk’ strategy as well. As we have seen in the list of editions (Table 1), the first edition ever to be published within Austrian borders was the last known for the pre-industrial age: the much-amended and commented upon 1784 Vienna edition by Benedikt Franz Hermann. That means literally all known editions prior to the twentieth century were printed within the ‘German’ parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The ‘Hornigk Strategy’ therefore, was more akin to a general ‘German’, if not continental European model. It picked up on theories and practices that had been long established by the ‘Mercantilist’ states of early modern Europe and which have been masterfully surveyed in the old, but in this regard by no means out-dated, comparative study by Heckscher.
The concept of ‘Enlightenment’ is, of course, a treacherous one. Adorno and Habermas were neither the first nor the last to discover this. Ratio and rationality were gradually inscribed into Europe's scientific and philosophical mind map since the mid-seventeenth century, including the field of economics and political economy (which have been given far less attention by intellectual historians than other fields, such as the natural sciences). Contrary to a widely-cherished textbook notion, the eighteenth-century Physiocrats weren't the first to entertain the notion that economics should be interpreted as a science in itself, with the subject of study – the economy – being understood as a separate realm of analysis that followed its own mechanisms and ‘laws’ of motion. The Cameralists were here long before the Physiocrats, but it was the latter who drove the notion to its extreme, describing the realm of economy using the morphology of physics (which during the later nineteenth century became an even more popular analogy in the modern economic sciences). The Cameralists on the other hand (and many Mercantilists) understood the economy to be an ‘organism’, a living being (which it was and is and always has been: economics is about interaction between humans) – something for which biological analogies may be invoked, but certainly not abstract physical laws or working mechanisms. In the modern economic sciences post-1880, when the ‘Marginalist’ or Walrasian Revolution had finally taken hold, this interpretation of the economy as a physical mechanism or system (rather than a biological organism) finally teamed up with a quasi-ethical standpoint of ‘valueless-ness’ (objectivity) coupled with what would become known and cherished as the homo oeconomicus principle (rational individual with perfect overview on chances, available menu of options and ability to precisely calculate/ quantify opportunity costs, maximizing benefits at a given cost structure or, alternatively, minimizing costs in a given framework of desires).
How successful the Cameralists and their theory were is indicated by the fact that ‘by the time they had disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, they had amassed a collective bibliography of more than 14,000 items, according to Magdalene Humpert (1937).’ And from work currently in process by former Harvard University librarian Ken Carpenter, we know that hundreds of ‘German’ cameralist texts and textbooks found their way into other languages and scientific cultures, such as Swedish and Italian. On what Cameralism was, what it represented and what – or rather how much – it contributed to the emergence and evolution of modern economics there has been perhaps more controversy than unity. Mercantilism (and Cameralism) have suffered from a series of accusations, mainly by twentieth-century scholars, that are, upon hindsight, more a reflection of academic fashion and convention than deep insight. The main charges can be summarized as follows, at the risk of oversimplification inherent to any such exercise.
• Mercantilist economics lacked theoretical foundation and epistemological stringency. Even eminent Marxist economic historians spoke about the theoretische Armseligkeit des Kameralismus (here they shared common ground with the liberal interpretation), or ‘Mercantilism in the service of the feudal state’ – ‘Merkantilismus des deutschen Zwergstaates.’ There was no Cameralist thinker, as the saying went in the Communist interpretation of the history of political economy, who would have matched the analytical level and rigour of the contemporary English Mercantilists. German theory remained as primitive and backword as the German economy throughout 1600–1900, it was said. Both interpretations can be challenged on the basis of more recent research.
• It was likewise often maintained that Mercantilism/Cameralism represented no ‘closed’ or ‘unified’ theory (usually taken to mean a theory that explains everything, that is, all types of possible economic fields and constellations, out of itself, such as Marxism or Keynesian economics).
• Perhaps the gravest of all charges may be the accusation that Cameralism (in the same way as Mercantilism) lacked the potential to raise general economic welfare in a Pareto-optimal way if applied as an economic policy – as though such characteristics would either be necessary or represent conditiones sine qua non, in a sense of being ultimately relevant, for determining how good or useful one particular theory really is in terms of improving the economic fate of mankind.
This book discusses the impact of cameralism on the practices of governance, early modern state-building and economy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It argues that the cameralist conception of state and economy - a form of 'science' of government dedicated to reforming society while promoting economic development, and often associated mainly with Prussia - had significant impact far beyond Germany and Austria. In fact, its influence spread into Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Northern Italy and other parts of Europe. In this volume, an international set of experts discusses administrative practices and policies in relation to population, forestry, proto-industry, trade, mining affairs, education, police regulation, and insurance. The book will appeal to early modernists, economic historians and historians of economic thought. MARTEN SEPPEL is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. KEITH TRIBE has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught at the University of Keele (UK) from 1976 to 2002, retiring as Reader in Economics. He is now working as a highly regarded professional translator and independent scholar. Forthcoming work includes a new translation of Max Weber, Economy and Society Part One (Harvard University Press, 2018). His publications include Strategies of Economic Order (CUP, 1995/2007); The Economy of the Word. Language, History, and Economics (OUP, 2015); and (edited with Pat Hudson) The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Agenda, 2016). Contributors: ROGER BARTLETT, ALEXANDRE MENDES CUNHA, HANS FRAMBACH, GUILLAUME GARNER, LARS MAGNUSSON, INGRID MARKUSSEN, FRANK OBERHOLZNER, GÖRAN RYDÉN, MARTEN SEPPEL, KEITH TRIBE, PAUL WARDE
There is today a resurgence of interest in the history of economics, but students often lack the opportunity of taking a systematic course that introduces them to the ideas, policies and writers who played a part in the development of economic thinking from the seventeenth century up to the present day. This book offers a partial solution to this problem by providing a template for students and teachers seeking orientation in the subject. It is based on the material that we have taught to third-year undergraduates at the University of Birmingham for several years, augmented with some material that one of us has covered with graduate students at the University of Oporto and at Erasmus University Rotterdam, expanding it a little beyond our 20 two-hour lectures. We have structured it in such a way that shorter courses could be based on a selection, and we make some suggestions regarding this below.
That this is not a conventional textbook will be apparent from the formal presentation of each lecture, beginning with aims, then providing an annotated bibliography and the relevant chronology before moving on to the subject matter of the lecture. Each lecture ends with a series of questions for discussion that could provide a framework for class discussion or individual reflection. In scope and presentation, then, there is a clear difference here from Roger Backhouse’s Penguin History of Economic Thought (published in North America by Princeton University Press as The Ordinary Business of Life), the textbook we recommend our students to read for initial orientation and which covers the history of economic thought from the ancient Greeks onwards. Likewise, chapter 2 of Keith Tribe’s Economy of the Word provides an extended overview of the transformation in the use of the word “economy” from the Greeks to the 1960s that provides a more discursive initial orientation.
From the 1920s onwards economic argument rapidly became more formalized and academic, so that what had hitherto largely been public economic debate increasingly becomes debate between academic economists. Before the 1920s economic thinking was both more diverse and less institutionally defined; indeed, part of the story we tell here is the conversion of a broad tradition of political economy into the new university discipline of economics.
