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Was There Really a German Historical School of Economics?

Was There Really a German Historical School of Economics? History o Political Economy 31 :3 0 1999 by Duke University Press. f that we have learned to call the German Historical School was in reality neither German, nor historical, nor a school. Let us consider each of these three negations in some detail. Not Historical The idea of a specifically “historical” economics is no ex post facto invention; the aforementioned economists seem themselves to have welcomed the appellation. We see this already on the title page of the inaugural publication of Roscher, the “school’s” first dean: Outline of Lectures on Political Economy, according to the Historical Method (1843). A clue to the true import of this adjective can be gleaned from the most oft-quoted line in the book, where Roscher (1843,2) stated his desire to do for economics “something akin to what the method of [Friedrich Carl von] Savigny and [Karl Friedrich] Eichhorn has achieved for jurisprudence.” In other words, Roscher was explicitly hitching his own research program to the coattails of the German Historical School of Jurisprudence. No one aware of the tremendous prestige of historical jurisprudence in modern German culture can doubt that Roscher’s claim was a masterstroke of marketing, itself no dishonorable thing. But http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png History of Political Economy Duke University Press

Was There Really a German Historical School of Economics?

History of Political Economy , Volume 31 (3) – Sep 1, 1999

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1999 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0018-2702
eISSN
1527-1919
DOI
10.1215/00182702-31-3-547
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

History o Political Economy 31 :3 0 1999 by Duke University Press. f that we have learned to call the German Historical School was in reality neither German, nor historical, nor a school. Let us consider each of these three negations in some detail. Not Historical The idea of a specifically “historical” economics is no ex post facto invention; the aforementioned economists seem themselves to have welcomed the appellation. We see this already on the title page of the inaugural publication of Roscher, the “school’s” first dean: Outline of Lectures on Political Economy, according to the Historical Method (1843). A clue to the true import of this adjective can be gleaned from the most oft-quoted line in the book, where Roscher (1843,2) stated his desire to do for economics “something akin to what the method of [Friedrich Carl von] Savigny and [Karl Friedrich] Eichhorn has achieved for jurisprudence.” In other words, Roscher was explicitly hitching his own research program to the coattails of the German Historical School of Jurisprudence. No one aware of the tremendous prestige of historical jurisprudence in modern German culture can doubt that Roscher’s claim was a masterstroke of marketing, itself no dishonorable thing. But

Journal

History of Political EconomyDuke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 1999

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