ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The German historical school in economic thought: an analysis from "Germany" in the nineteenth century
Author: Maximo Mario, Vieira Clarice
It has become an almost indispensable element to traditional narratives of the History of Economic Thought (HTE) devoted to the German Historical School to associate directly the political and economic context of "Germany" in the mid-nineteenth century to the emergence of the School. The economic and political "backwardness" of that "country", compared to the English and French standards, would have resulted in the appearance, in their territories, of movements of “reactionary” nature, whose major example would be the German Romanticism, of which the Historical School would be a direct intellectual descendant. While admitting that the emergence of ideas keep relations with the environment in which they arise, it is suggested that how this association has been usually done in the case of German Historical School, with a direct link between the ideas and the political and economic scope, deserves some important qualifications and revisions. This is precisely the article's main goal, namely, to demonstrate, from a description of Germany’s economic, political and intellectual environment during the nineteenth century, that at least two problems arise to this kind of direct association. On the one hand, it is difficult to establish a connection between the emergence of the Historical School and the particular situation in which was “Germany”, because the territory in question found itself politically and economically fragmented in states with very different characteristics and, at the same time, were involved in extremely serious disputes with each other. On the other hand, the authors of the German Historical School are usually academics, many of them linked to states in which there was great influence of English liberalism, especially through the works of A. Smith and J. S. Mill. The authors of the first generation of the German Historical School were not even associated with the Prussian state, the political center that leveraged the unification of Germany and the economic development of the region. The first problem is linked to the economic and political context of the German Confederation, and the second related to the intellectual environment where the School arises. From this analysis we suggest ways to engage with and qualify that difficult relationship between the emergence of the Historical School and its specific political, economic and intellectual context.
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