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THE POLITICS OF HISTORICAL ECONOMICS: WILHELM ROSCHER ON DEMOCRACY, SOCIALISM AND CAESARISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2016

IAIN MCDANIEL
IAIN MCDANIEL*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Sussex E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 93 - 122
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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20 Ibid.

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23 Roscher, review of List, 1196–7. For Roscher's consideration of the moral and political dangers associated with an elaborate division of labour, which drew upon the work of Adam Ferguson as well as Smith, see Roscher, Wilhelm, System der Volkswirthschaft: Ein Hand- und Lesebuch für Geschäftsmänner und Studierend, 5 vols. (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1854–94), 1: 84–8Google Scholar.

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25 Roscher, Thukydides, viii.

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32 Ibid., vii.

33 Roscher, Grundriß, 4.

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40 Roscher laid emphasis on the parallel between ancient and modern economic history in Roscher, Grundriß, iv. In the much later Politik he entitled one chapter “Analogien aus dem Alterthume”; see Roscher, Politik, 304–7.

41 Roscher, Thukydides, 271.

42 Roscher, Umrisse, 458–9.

43 Roscher first rehearsed this parallel in detail in Roscher, Wilhelm, “Betrachtungen über Socialismus und Communismus,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 3 (1845), 418–61, 540–64Google Scholar; 4 (1845), 10–28, erster Abschnitt, at 436–47.

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61 Ibid., 79–80.

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64 Roscher, Umrisse, 87–8.

65 Ibid., 327–8, 331.

66 Ibid., 452. For an example of Herder's use of the machine state metaphor see Herder, Johann Gottfried, “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity,” in Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Forster, Michael N. (Cambridge, 2002), 272–358, at 316 Google Scholar.

67 Roscher, Umrisse, 452.

68 Ibid., 88, 458.

69 Ibid., 458.

70 Ibid., 459–70.

71 Ibid., 455.

72 Roscher, “Betrachtungen über Socialismus und Communismus.”

73 On the intellectual, legal and social dimensions of the “social question” see Kelley, Donald R. and Smith, Bonnie G., “What Was Property? Legal Dimensions of the Social Question in France (1789–1848),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128/3 (1984), 200–30Google Scholar; Beck, Hermann, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815–70 (Ann Arbor, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moggach, Douglas and Browne, Paul Leduc, eds., The Social Question and the Democratic Revolution: Marx and the Legacy of 1848 (Ottawa, 2000)Google Scholar; Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany, 89–126.

74 Roscher, “Betrachtungen,” 418.

75 Ibid., 419.

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77 Roscher, “Betrachtungen,” 422–32.

78 Ibid., 433.

79 Ibid., 436–47.

80 Ibid., 445.

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83 Roscher, “Betrachtungen,” 544.

84 Ibid., 547, 549.

85 Ibid., 549. This famous Hobbesian trope, it is worth noting, reappeared in Roscher's later depiction of Caesarism.

86 Ibid., 12–13.

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93 Ibid., 116–7 n.

94 Roscher, Politik, iii.

95 Ibid., iv.

96 For discussion, see the works listed in note 5 above.

97 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, “Cäsar und Cäsarismus,” in Bluntschli, , Staatswörterbuch in drei Bänden, 3 vols. (Zürich, 1872), 1: 387–92Google Scholar.

98 Treitschke argued that the permanent military domination of Cäsarismus was incompatible with the character of the German people in Heinrich von Treitschke, “Bundesstaat und Einheitsstaat” (1863), in Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, 6th edn, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1903), 2: 77–241, at 83; see also Heinrich von Treitschke, “Frankreichs Staatsleben und der Bonapartismus” (1865–71), in ibid., 3: 43–425.

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101 Roscher, Politik, 6.

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103 Roscher, Politik, 311, 347–53.

104 Ibid., 311.

105 Ibid., 454.

106 Ibid., 454–5.

107 Ibid., 320.

108 Ibid., 418, 448.

109 Ibid., 333. For a near-contemporary worry about the transformation of the European Rechtsstaat into a Kopfzahlstaat see Burckhardt, Jacob, Historische Fragmente, aus dem Nachlass gesammelt von Emil Dürr (Stuttgart, 1942), 46 Google Scholar; for an English translation see Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (Indianapolis, 1999), 52.

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112 Roscher, Politik, 332–3, 337 n.

113 Ibid., 440.

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115 Roscher, Politik, 440.

116 Ibid., 451.

117 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Macaulay’s Opinion of the United States Government,” Southern Literary Messenger, 30/15 (1860), 225–8, at 227. Roscher cited similar prophesies about the dangers of mass democracy in the US made by Henry George, president George Buchanan, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Roscher, Politik, 452.

118 Roscher, Politik, 453–4.

119 Ibid., 441, 453.

120 Ibid., 442–3. On this point, Roscher's view displays some similarities with Edouard Laboulaye's arguments, in the 1860s and 1870s, about the strength of the American system. See Sawyer, Stephen W., “An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Edouard Laboulaye's Constitutional Thought,” Journal of Modern History, 85/4 (2013), 739–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Roscher, Politik, 13 n.

122 Ibid., 591 n.

123 Ibid., 591–2.

124 Ibid., 592; see Treitschke, “Die Freiheit,” in Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, 3: 3–42.

125 Roscher, Politik, 592.

126 Ibid., 595.

127 Roscher, “Umrisse zur Naturlehre des Cäsarismus,” Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 10 (1888), 641–753, at 642.

128 Quidde, Ludwig, “Errinerungen: Im Kampf gegen Cäsarismus und Byzantinismus im Kaiserlichen Deutschland” (1926), in Quidde, Caligula: Schriften über Militarismus und Pazifismus, ed. and intro. Wehler, Hans Ulrich (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 19–60 Google Scholar; Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” in Weber, Political Writings, 1–28, esp. 22, 24.

129 Roscher, Politik, 694. Roscher referred to Frederick Harrison, Order and Progress (London, 1875). For discussion of Harrison's interest in Cromwell see Lang, Timothy, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past (Cambridge, 1995), 208–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Harrison see also Claeys, Gregory, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2012), 83–96 Google Scholar.

130 Roscher, Politik, 714.

131 Weber's methodological critique of Roscher can be found in Weber, Max, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (New York and London, 1975)Google Scholar.

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