Adolph Wagner

Adolph Wagner (25 March 1835 - 1917) was a German economist and social reformer, a leading Kathedersozialist and 'public finance scholar; Wagner's Law of increasing state activity is named after him.

Life

Born in Erlangen as the son of a university professor, the physiologist Rudolf Wagner, Adolph studied economics at the University of Göttingen, receiving a doctorate in 1857. Wagner’s academic career took him first to the Merchants’ Superior School, Vienna (1858-1863), then – after failing to secure a chair at the University of Vienna because of disagreements over fiscal policy with Lorenz von Stein – to the Hamburg Higher Merchants’ School (1863-1865), both institutions comparable to business schools today. In 1865, he took the chair of Ethnography, Geography, and Statistics (in reality an economics professorship) at the University of Dorpat in the Russian province of Livonia.

In Dorpat, Wagner "became a follower of Bismarck’s policy for unifying Germany under Prussian guidance. (Rubner, 435) Thus, when German unification became realistic, Wagner wanted to go back to Germany proper – a general attitude of Imperial Germans in the Baltics. Beginning Fall Term 1868/69, Wagner therefore took over the Chair of the Cameralistic subjects (roughly, state management) at the Grand Duke of Badenian University of Freiburg im Breisgau, and very soon afterwards, in 1870, the Chair of Staatswissenschaften at the University of Berlin, by that time not only the premier university in Germany but probably in the world. It was in Berlin that Wagner unfolded his tenure as one of the intellectually and politically most influential economists of his time.

Wagner died in Berlin in 1917.

Work

Wagner is the main protagonist of a specific school of economics and social policy, called "State Socialism" ("Staatssozialismus"), which is a specific form of Kathedersozialismus. (Albert Schäffle (1831-1903) and Karl Rodbertus(-Jagetzow) (1805-1875) were important protagonists of that thought as well.) He was emphatically not a member of the Historical School, however, which so many of his colleagues - such as Schmoller and Lujo Brentano - were.

Character

Wagner was a very combative and harsh personality who did not take insults lightly and who never phrased things diplomatically. As was mentioned, he had difficulties with Gustav von Schmoller and was an enemy of Lujo Brentano. It is by all contemporary accounts probably fair to say that Wagner must have been vain, easily hurt, and extremely choleric. In the 1890s, Wagner would so enrage an industrial-conservative member of the Reichstag, likewise with a defense of the Kathedersozialist influence within the University, that that deputy challenged him to a duel. Wagner did not categorically refuse, but it was never fought.) An even more famous case was Wagner’s altercation with Eugen Dühring (against whom Friedrich Engels' Anti-Dühring is directed), and which in the very end resulted in Dühring's remotion and dismissal from the University of Berlin.

Key Publications

By Wagner

• Wagner, Adolph (1864). Die Gesetzmässigkeit in den scheinbar willkührlichen menschlichen Handlungen vom Standpunkte der Statistik. Hamburg: Boyes & Geisler.
• Wagner, Adolph (1866). Beiträge zur Finanzstatistik des Schulwesens in den Städten des Ostseegouvernements Livland, Kurland und Esthland. Dorpat: Als Manuscript gedruckt. / Druck von C. Matthiesen.
• Wagner, Adolph (1866). "Die auswärtige Politik Rußlands und ihre Bedeutung für Preußen." Preußische Jahrbücher, vol. 18, no. 6 (December), pp. 657-692.
• Wagner, Adolph (1867). "Statistik." In Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch, vol. 10. Leipzig: Expedition des Staats-Wörterbuchs, pp. 400-481.
• Wagner, Adolph (1868). Die russische Papierwährung. Riga: Kymmel.
• Wagner, Adolph (1870). Die Abschaffung des privaten Grundeigenthums. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
• Wagner, Adolph (1892). Grundlegung der politischen Ökonomie. Part 1, vol. 1. 3rd edn. Leipzig: Winter.
• Wagner, Adolph (1895). Die akademische Nationalökonomie und der Socialismus. Berlin: Julius Becker.
• Wagner, Adolph (1900). Allgemeine und theoretische Volkswirtschaftslehre oder Sozialökonomik. (Theoretische National-Oekonomie.). Berlin: Als Manuskript gedruckt.
• Wagner, Adolph (1902). Agrar- und Industriestaat. Die Kehrseite des Industriestaats und die Rechtfertigung agrarischen Zollschutzes mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Bevölkerungsfrage. 2nd edn. Jena: Fischer.
• Wagner, Adolph (1904). Die finanzielle Mitbeteiligung der Gemeinden an kulturellen Staatseinrichtungen und die Entwickelung der Gemeindeeinnahmen.Jena: Fischer.
• Wagner, Adolph (1916). Staatsbürgerliche Bildung. Berlin: Verlag "Bodenreform".
• Wagner, Adolph (1948). Finanzwissenschaft und Staatssozialismus. August Skalweit, ed. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann.

In English:

• Wagner, Adolph (1939). "Speech on the Social Question" (abridged), in Donald O. Wagner, ed. Social Reformers. Adam Smith to John Dewey. New York: Macmillan, pp. 489-506.

Letters etc.:

• Wagner, Adolph (1978). Briefe - Dokumente - Augenzeugenberichte, 1851-1917. Heinrich Rubner, ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

About Wagner in English

• Backhaus, Jürgen G. (1997), ed. Essays in Social Security and Taxation. Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner Reconsidered. Marburg: Metropolis. (Contains much of the best recent research on Wagner in English)
• Wright, H.R.C. (1993). "Adolph Wagner and the Plural Society." The South African Journal of Economics, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 59-66.