Abstract
With regard to the arising labor question in the nineteenth century, Goldschmidt and Störring examine the work of Gustav Schmoller, who at this time was not only one of the most prestigious German economist but with his research agenda has laid the foundations of essential social reforms and legislations. Drawing the German ‘Sonderweg’ of the Historical School of Economics in general and of Gustav Schmoller, in particular, the authors illustrate the applied scientific outline and the considerable influence of the so-called socialists of the chair. This chapter explores Schmoller’s reformist ambition to elevate the working man, to integrate him ethically, and to enable him to participate in the economy. Goldschmidt and Störring describe Schmoller’s progressive ideas concerning workers’ participation, trade unions, and profit-sharing mechanisms. They conclude that many of the social developments that have taken place since would have been impossible without the pioneering work of the socialists of the chair.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations from German sources are translated into English by the authors of this chapter.
- 2.
The following biographical remarks are based on Goldschmidt (2008).
- 3.
Gustav Schmoller’s maternal grandfather, Karl Friedrich von Gärtner (1772–1850), was a doctor and botanist who had occasionally corresponded with Charles Darwin.
- 4.
Gustav Rümelin was a member of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–1849 and, from 1861 to 1873, the director of the Royal Württemberg Statistical-Topological Bureau. In 1867 he was made Professor of Statistics and Civics at the University of Tübingen, where he was chancellor from 1870 to 1889.
- 5.
Thirty years later, Schmoller described his three-part essay Die Arbeiterfrage as a typical early work (Müssiggang 1968, p. 130).
- 6.
The academics’ critical attitude prompted the liberal publicist Heinrich Oppenheim (1819–1880) to counter with a critique of his own. To discredit the emerging research approach, he referred to it in his diatribe as ‘lectern socialism’ [Kathedersozialismus] (Oppenheim 1872, pp. 33–41)—often rendered less cynically as ‘socialism of the chair’—setting off a very public dispute.
- 7.
- 8.
Schmoller gives the following description of an institution: ‘a partial organisation of communal life, serving certain functions, able to develop independently, representing a fixed structure for action […] Every institution is a collection of habits and rules of morality, of customs, of the law, […] which are connected to one another, form a system, have been subject to common practical and theoretical instruction, firmly rooted in communal life’ (Schmoller 1978, p. 61–2). Schmoller’s work, in its conception of institutions, displays great parallels to the later work of the economist and Nobel Prize winner Douglass C. North (1920–2015) (e.g. North 1990). Schmoller implicitly, like North after him explicitly, distinguishes between formal institutions (laws) and informal institutions (customs), referring to a culturally intertwined dependence (Richter 1996, pp. 576–9).
- 9.
The Kongress deutscher Volkswirte was an itinerant conference which met for the first time in 1845, in Gotha, and which argued for free trade and liberal economic ideas. Its members were particularly committed to freedom of trade, the free movement of persons, and cooperative societies.
- 10.
Three years earlier, also in Eisenach, the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP) was founded, a forerunner of the present-day SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
- 11.
There are good reasons to conclude that Bismarck’s social policies were far more the result of politically opportunistic motives than purely social ones (compare, for example van Meerhaeghe 2006, p. 295). Of at least equal importance to him was his strategy of weakening the forces of social democracy in their fight for social equality (seen in the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878: Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie), while simultaneously pacifying the working classes with social legislation.
- 12.
Max Sering (1857–1839) presented a comprehensive study of workers’ committees in German industry to the Verein für Socialpolitik (Sering 1890). Among the socialists of the chair, he and Schmoller were the greatest proponents of the committees.
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Goldschmidt, N., Störring, M. (2019). Gustav Schmoller: A Socialist of the Chair. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_5
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