European Society for the History of Economic Thought

Bertram Schefold

21.02.2001

PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENT FROM THE OPENING SPEECH OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE DARMSTADT CONFERENCE ON 23 FEBRUARY 2001

Bertram Schefold

21.02.2001

PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENT FROM THE OPENING SPEECH OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE DARMSTADT CONFERENCE ON 23 FEBRUARY 2001

Herr Präsident,
Herr Dekan,
Dear Colleagues and guests of our Society,
It gives some satisfaction, probably to all of us, that we may open the fifth annual Conference of ESHET. We already have had our Ph.D Seminar yesterday. We are especially proud to provide this floor for young academic researchers in our field where it is not always easy to gain the recognition of the general economist. We had David Laidler’s thought-provoking lecture and the reception by the Mayor. This agreeable experience provides me with the opportunity to thank our organisers, Ingo Barens and Volker Caspari and their supporters. We should like to thank for financial support, especially generous the one from the ECB. We have been sponsored by BHF-Bank Braas, Dachsysteme GmbH & Co, Carl Schenk AG, Europäische Zentralbank, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Landeszentralbank in Hessen, Siemens Management Consulting, Sparkasse Darmstadt, Oberbürgermeister der Stadt Darmstadt Peter Benz

Darmstadt, like so many European cities, was largely destroyed during the war, yet much remains which is of great historical interest; Darmstadt was a centre of the Art Nouveau movement around the last turn of the century, favoured by the interest of the Duke Ernst Ludwig and many of you will want to visit the Mathildenhšhe. There is the museum in the Castle with a famous Holbein, and other treasures. Ingo Barens and Volker Caspari propose to take us to a remarkable medieval monastery for the Conference Dinner. It is probably not unusual for historians of economic thought to be interested in the history of art – you can go to Frankfurt or Heidelberg after the Conference, and we hope, at any rate, that you will not regret having come to Germany – even if you live in a more favourable climate.

Apart from the Conference, there will be the Annual General Meeting, prepared by the Executive Committee and the Council which both met yesterday. An agenda will be distributed. According to our constitution, elections to the EC have to take place this fall. The EC will propose candidates, to be nominated by the AGM. You are free also to suggest names for nomination.

As many of you may have heard, Ernest Lluch, one of our most distinguished members, became the victim of a political assassination some weeks ago. We have decided to replace a planned ‘Social event’ on Friday evening by a Memorial Session in his honour, where we shall recall his academic achievements and discuss themes in our field which interested him, like links between the continental schools of mercantilism and cameralism.

Our theme, The influence of political developments on the evolution of economic thought, presents a challenge. The challenge is intellectual, primarily at the methodological level, for it is problematic to admit that economics as a scientific discipline should be affected by currents and events. The challenge also is ideological and political. I was invited to represent our Society in a semi-official way in Moscow last fall, to a Conference on: Is there a Russian school of economic thought?. You could argue that there had been adherents of liberalism and of socialism, of the historical school and of other currents which all were international, and that the Russians could choose this or that. But the organisers in Moscow – influential personalities, some having been active in Gorbatchov’s government – attempted to demonstrate that certain links regarding the spiritual background and the policy orientations of Russian economists in the past two centuries were sufficiently important to warrant the designation of a Russian school – and the suggested implication was that there would be some sort of social market economy of a Russian type.

When I had at last managed to convince my students in St. Petersburg to come and have tea somewhere, after a lecture, they first demanded an autograph, which flattered me, but then they asked What will become of us?, which I could not answer. And What will become of our culture? is what people ask around the world when they are confronted with globalisation.

The theme of the conference finally represents a historical challenge. My favourite example is Philipp Wilhelm von Hšrnigk. He wrote a book with the title …sterreich Ÿber alles, wenn es nur will – Austria above everything, if only she wants. The book was the most popular textbook in economics in the German speaking area in the 18th century, and the title, modified, became the first line of the German national anthem. The historical background to this disquieting connection is this: Hšrnigk was a low-level diplomat of the Habsburgs. He had been employed to create a defensive alliance against the threat of the alliance between Louis XIV and the Turks. The armies of Louis XIV had conquered Strasbourg and the Alsace between 1680 and 1684, the Turks were besieging Vienna and Austria had to be saved by the Poles. Hšrnigk understood that the Habsburg countries would have to go it alone. To this end, the provinces had to be integrated economically and Hšrnigk groped towards a theory of economic integration – a program of this type was realised three generations later by Maria Theresia, and the Habsburg monarchy became in some ways a model of Europe. We shall never be able to determine the extent to which Hšrnigk’s book causally influenced later real developments but he formulated as a program what later emerged as a successful policy.