The German Historical School and European Economic Thought

摘要

The present book meets the interest in the German Historical School (GHS), which is on the rise again, not by comparing it to other currents of economic thought, as one might interpret the title, but by showing how the ideas of the GHS were received in a dozen European countries. Although it is agreed that the school was not as homogeneous as the designation "school" suggests and not as exclusively German as the name implies, and although main representatives were competent in economic theory after all, the selection proves that in most of the countries considered, the GHS was perceived as a leading current in economics in the latter half of the nineteenth century and beyond. It had emerged out of the problems of development in the German states and became important by identifying the problem of development and proposing how to foster it. Historism was a European phenomenon, not confined to economics, and so were the ideas about ethics and progress associated with it. The editors, in their introduction, present the GHS as an alternative to classical thought on many fronts (method, reforms, growth and development, institutionalism), but they feel, as a result of the inquiry in the country studies, that the ideas of the GHS outside Germany mainly served ideological and instrumental purposes: "When using or quoting German authors in support of their arguments, European political economists were merely [sic] using rhetoric devices to make their proposals sound and acceptable" (p. xviii). The editors discuss the uses made of the GHS. In particular, it was referred to in order to question the scientific status and narrowness of political economy, and in order to complain about the excessive use of abstract deductive methods. They argue that the criticism of classical liberalism in economics did not result in a "substantial change of the construction of mainstream economics" (p. xix), but stimulated autonomous advances in economic history and sociology. It seems to me that this skeptical appraisal, although confirmed by several of the country studies, does not do justice to the telos of the GHS itself, which, in the beginning of the twentieth century, provided deep post-Marxian analyses of modern capitalism in the work of authors such as Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, and led later to the comparison of economic systems and to ordo-liberalism. For Rudolf Eucken, although against the inductivism of the GHS, in a sense solved the problem of the Historical School by means of his combinatorial use of ideal types. Analyses of economic styles arguably surpassed the present understanding of the varieties of capitalism insofar as links between the economic and cultural forms of social life were discussed extensively.