Tag Archives: German Historical School

More than a century ago, the effective operation of the public economy was a significant, active concern of economists. With the insurgence of market-centrism and rational choice economics, however, government was devalued, its role circumscribed and seen from a perspective of “market failure.” As Backhouse (2005) has shown, the transformation in economic thinking in the latter half of the 20th century led to a “radical shift” in worldview regarding the role of the state. The very idea of a...

Karl Bücher (1847–1930) was a member of the Younger German Historical School, an important 19th century and early 20th century alternative to the Classical and Neoclassical schools of economics.The German Historical School had an interesting theory on the origin of money, rather similar to that of Karl Marx.This is from Karl Bücher’s book Industrial Evolution (1901) (N.B. his language and some of his attitudes, as you’d expect, are of the 19th century, so please get over that): “… it must be...