THE INFUSION OF SOCIO-POLITICAL IDEAS INTO EUGEN VON PHILIPPOVICH Vienna I "First of all, however, pauperism directed the attention and sympathies of all cultivated people to the condition of the laboring classes, and, since the disturbances among the spinners in Silesia and Bohemia, not merely produced in the different parts of Germany unions for removing the difficulties, but also dwelt with increasing insistence upon an answer to the great general question: 'What social reforms does the growing chasm between the poor and the rich demand, and what duties does the right of possession impose?' Most notable is the fact that the men who, in other respects, are regarded as the leaders in the science of national economy: Hermann, Rau, Nebenius were silent over most of these open questions, and the practical men of the people who were 1 Das Eindringen der sozialpolitischen Ideen in die Litteratur: a monograph included in the second of the two volumes published in 1908 in recognition of Professor Schmoller's seventieth birthday. The general title of the volumes is: Die Entwicklung der deutschen Volkswirtschaftslehre im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. The survey afforded by the paper has important indirect bearings upon the subject to be discussed at the December, 1912, meeting of the American Sociological Society. Professor von Philippovich has kindly authorized publication of this translation. A few passages have been condensed and some of the notes have been omitted or abbreviated.-ED. immersed in business life, or the newer generation of political literati, almost exclusively occupied the arena.' I Thus wrote Bruno Hildebrand in the year 1848 in characterizing the attitude of German national economic science toward the great questions of the time. And yet at that time Germany also already had a labor movement and a socialistic trend which could no longer be disregarded, especially since the new theory of society had in France already led to bloody conflicts and threatened to arouse new ones. "To be sure, there have always been a few political romances and utopias," wrote Robert von Mohl a few years later, but "it is something new that sympathy with such a theory is no longer accounted as a sign of mental disease, but people openly acknowledge themselves to be socialists, as though it were a rightful and honorable standpoint, just as in other connections one was a realist or nominalist, a Kantian, or a Hegelian, a moral philosopher or a member of the historical school. It is finally new that many journals and fugitive publications exist which add to the currency of that way of thinking, and bring it to consciousness not only by direct teaching but especially by interpreting all occurrences in the manner of the socialistic party." It was evidence of no great degree of perspicacity that the new way of thinking did not earlier receive attention. There were symptoms of it which should have been observed before the French civic upheavals of 1848 caused vague ideas quickly to ripen into deeds. The gradual dawning of the new conception of human relations then began tardily to be noticed. From that point on, to maintain an indifferent or repellant attitude could be permitted to neither the practical statesman nor to the theorist. "It would have been crime or complete callousness." In fact, at the middle of the nineteenth century all those thought tendencies were already present which constitute the conception of the world and the economic system of socialism. The writings of the French socialists, which combine lively fancy and strong feeling with a wonderful wealth of ideas, had been Einleitung. 1 Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft, 1. Bd., 2 "Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Staatswissenschaften," Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, 1851, pp. 7-10. 2 translated into German. L. Stein, K. Grün, Biedermann3 had bound these in their representations into systems and had made them intelligible; Rodbertus,4 Marx, Engels" had already spoken out their basic ideas. Gall, Weitling, Hess, Grün had taught with energy and with agitating zeal a partly home-grown and partly French socialism. Marlo's system had appeared. There is no socialistic doctrine of essential significance, no socialistic theory of general industry, of historical development, of the state, of law, which had not already been spoken out at the middle of the nineteenth century, and had not been applied in criticism of the existing societary and industrial order; yet German national economic science did not regard it as necessary to reach an understanding with these doctrines. In Rau's Archiv der politischen Ökonomie, which appeared from 1835 to 1853, we find not a single monograph which concerns itself with socialism, with socialistic literature, or with the problems proposed by the same. Among the works reviewed in all these years were only a few on the condition of factory laborers: (Engels, Villermé, Taylor). The Tübinger Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, founded 1 Der Socialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte, 1842 (ein Band); zweite Auflage, 1848 (drei Bände): 1. Der Begriff der Gesellschaft und die Bewegungen in der Gesellschaft Frankreichs seit der Revolution; 2. Der französische Sozialismus und Communismus; 3. Anhang: Die sozialistischen und communistischen Bewegungen seit der dritten französischen Revolution. 2 Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, 1845. 3 Vorlesungen über Sozialismus und Soziale Fragen, 1847. 4 Zur Erkenntnis unserer staatswirthschaftlichen Zustände. Erstes (einziges) Heft, 1842. Soziale Briefe an Kirchmann, 3 Hefte, 1850-51. 5 (Marx and Engels), Die heilige Familie. Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten, 1844; Misère de la Philosophie, 1847; (Marx and Engels), Das kommunistische Maniest, 1848; Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, 1852; Enthüllungen über den Kommunistenprozess zu Köln, 1852. • Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England, 1845. 7 Marlo (K. S. Winkelblech), Untersuchungen über die Organisation der Arbeit oder System der Weltökonomie, 1850 ff. The essay by R. Mohl on the disadvantages which both the laborers and the civic society itself suffer from the factory form of enterprise, and on the necessity of taking measures with reference to the same, which appeared in 1835 and had no influence, is not in connection with the socialistic literature. I in 1844, also pays little attention to the social questions. It is beyond doubt that German national economy in the first half of the nineteenth century was suffering from a poverty of ideas. Born from a union of the old Cameralistik with Eudämonismus, and the philosophy of the enlightenment, German national economy alternated between technico-administrative considerations and vague endeavors for welfare. It exerted no influence even upon the development of the doctrine of individual freedom, which strove for control in industrial politics, and which was accepted as a part of the economic theory of the period. The intellectual promoter of the movement against the Polizeistaat in Germany is rather Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen' exerted an influence beyond the boundaries of Germany; and the leader in the field of industrial politics is the publicist and GermanoEnglishman Prince-Smith.3 The merits of the German theorists in national economy of this date reside merely in the formalistic elaboration of the theory of general industry, in the sharper discrimination of the fundamental ideas, in a systematically clearer articulation and elaboration of the doctrines of the English and French classicists. In the practical questions of industrial politics, thanks to their cameralistic antecedents, they exhibited greater readiness to champion intervention on the part of the public administration for the removal of the evils of free trade as opposed to the extreme representatives of individualism. They consequently occupied a sympathetic position with reference to private endeavors to mitigate the evils, to lessen the great inequalities in providing the different classes of the people with material goods, The volume for 1846 contains an essay on socialism by Stein, that of 1847 another on labor unions by Fallati. The problems of a social policy much discussed among publicists are not noticed. Among national economists only Schüz treats, in the volume 1844-45, certain fundamental theoretical questions of politics and social ethics. In later volumes only philosophers treat the same (Warnkönig, Vorländer, etc.). a Published in book form in 1851, after it had already appeared in parts. 3 Ueber Handelsfeindseligkeit, 1843; Ueber die englische Tarifreform und ihre materiellen, sozialen, und politischen Folgen für Europa, 1846. Compare on PrinceSmith, Becker, Das deutsche Manchesterthum, 1907. and in improving the situation of the factory laborers. They assert, however, that through the apprehension of such failings "the fundamental truths of economic theory are not shaken," that its circle of generalizations from experience is merely subject to extension in particulars. With respect to these details industrial politics may not ignore the challenge "to seek new governmental measures for application to new evils or needs." Of a fundamental determination of industrial policies through the new facts of experience, viz., the turning of society into a mass of factory laborers, and the operations of "free competition," there is not a word. Such a view would go to pieces in collision with the mass of the old doctrine. Accordingly, German national economy passed by the signs of the times without attention. The noise of the street, the strokes of the scourge of the agitating publicists, the historical and philosophical observations of the critics of society affected it as little as they would the astronomers who trace out in the orbits of the stars the eternal laws of nature. German national economy was not dragged forth from that self-conscious repose until the powerful agitation which was contained in the socialistic literature and the socialistic reform movement penetrated its territory in a circuitous way. This invasion occurred from two sides, namely: from the side (1) of the philosophy of law and from the side (2) of ethics and the historical conception of society. Economic theory had not manifested an ability to triumph over the new and strange phenomena of a critique which attacked one of its fundamentals-individual property and free competition or to assimilate the elements of this criticism. It had to be admitted that the older theories had defects and called for extension. There was a demand for an enlargement and deepening of scientific investigations of the industrial relations of human beings, whose peculiarly independent life was now beginning to be recognized, and for an evaluation of the same on the basis of firm philosophical and ethical principles. Such a new treatment of private property and of the relationships in industry on the basis of a philosophy of law emerged in close Rau, Volkswirthschaftslehre, 4th ed., 1841, p. 41. To the same effect in the preface of his discussion of Sismondi. |