Introduction: ‘State Adventurers’ in English and German Economic History

The term merchant adventurer was applied to the earliest medieval English merchants who made their wealth and fame in new and hazardous markets (Carus-Wilson, 1967). A similar spirit of hazardous economic adventure cum economic career characterized the life of economist and social scientist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717– 1771) as well as several of his cameralist contemporaries in Germany and Austria. Justi epitomizes the heyday of the German brand of mercantilist writing, cameralism. These traditions represent the reasoning on economics and state sciences that laid the necessary groundwork for the creation of all European nation-states and for the Industrial Revolution, but was later excluded from the more narrow and barter-based economics of the English tradition. Justi was both a synthesizer and a modernizer of this tradition, absorbing the important novelties of the 1700's into the already existing consensus of the late 1600– s. Justi was, as far as we can judge, probably also the most prolific writer of all economists in any language, publishing a total of 67 books of which 8 works were translated into five languages (See Reinert & Reinert: ‘A Bibliography of J.H.G. von Justi’ in this volume).

As a profession, these early German-speaking economists stand out as being of a very different class and type than their English contemporaries. This is emphasized by Keith Tribe, the English-speaking author who in a very thorough work has devoted more time and space to Justi than anyone else in the English language (Tribe 1988). However, when comparing Justi's writings with the economics traditions in the rest of the European continent – from Spain to Sweden and Finland – rather than with England, it is in fact the English tradition that stands out as being ‘different’. Whereas most early English economists were themselves merchants, the professional career of the typical German economist at the time tended to be tied to the administration of the many small German states. The activities of these German-speaking economists tended to cover a very broad spectrum. Their careers include both theory and Praxis – teaching, administration and entrepreneurship – and also activities on very different levels of abstraction: from theoretical philosophy to government administration and practical matters of production and starting new enterprises.