The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments (...) for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action. ☆ This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Dogmenhistorischer Auschuss of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Lüdinghausen, June 2007. I would like to thank all those attending for their very helpful comments. In places I here draw upon material included in my essays on the Smith reception in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (edited by Keith Tribe, with Hiroshi Mizuta), Pickering and Chatto, London 2002, but do so in order to make a new argument concerning the contribution of German scholarship to modern Adam Smith scholarship. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of two hundred years of German economic thought, from the Staatswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to National Socialism and the Social Market. Whereas classical economics, from Smith through Ricardo to Marx and Mill, emphasised value, distribution and production, German economic thought had a long-running tradition of human need and the varying conditions for order. These ideas are brought together by a conception of rational action and, therefore, a rationalistic appraisal of welfare and order. By taking (...) this perspective, the usual contrast of market and planning approaches to economic organisation is subsumed by an approach which focuses on the construction of order in economic processes. This book highlights the continuity of this practical approach of German economists through the two centuries under consideration - from the Cameralists to the Ordoliberals. (shrink)

This book looks at the distinctive features of the development of German economics & draws attention to its divergences from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The book covers the period when economics became established as a systematically taught discipline in German universities. It concentrates on the textbooks in use at the time, both because they were a major means by which economic ideas were disseminated, & for their use in the teaching of state officials.

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor -- and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the (...) two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists. (shrink)

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary (...) array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events. (shrink)

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of History (...) at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

The first four chapters of Max Weber's Economy and Society presented by Talcott Parsons in 1947 as Theory of Social and Economic Organization present a coherent and complete analysis of social, economic and political structures based upon a consistent theory of social action and its understanding. Parsons did not see them this way. His lengthy introduction sought to insert them into his own “action frame of reference”, and his rearrangement of the text made it difficult for a reader to understand (...) why it was constructed the way that it is. This essay describes how Parsons came to be principal translator and editor of the text, examines the changes that he made to it, and links his editorial practice to the analytical procedures that he followed in his Structure of Social Action. ☆ This essay is developed from a paper originally presented in June 2005 at a conference on Max Weber's Basic Sociological Concepts at ZiF, Bielefeld University; an earlier version of the present paper was published as “Talcott Parsons als Übersetzer der ‘Soziologischen Grundbegriffe’ Max Webers”. Max Webers ‘Grundbegriffe’. Kategorien der kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ed. Klaus Lichtblau. (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006) 337–366. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has long been recognised that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) advances a ‘system of natural liberty’ in seeking to account for the ‘nature and causes of the wealth of nations.’ This is not however a theme that is explored or explained in the early sections of the book; in fact, not until Book IV, Ch. ix does Smith give his most expansive account of what he might mean by this term. This paper examines this chapter in detail (...) to determine the limits of his critique in that chapter of the ‘agricultural system’ (of Physiocracy), and why it might be that Smith is so parsimonious in offering a clear account of his central idea. (shrink)

SummaryDuring the 1950s at the latest, Max Weber became a ‘founding father’ of sociology, chiefly on the basis of a restricted set of canonical writings and without any consideration of his wider relationships to law, economics and politics. During the last ten years of his life he was responsible for a major collaborative work, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik—Outline of Social Economics. The title was of his own choosing; and so it might well shed new light on his work if we (...) consider how this work was organised, and how Economy and Society, written as a contribution to this handbook, was intended to form part of it. (shrink)