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Published by EH.NET (December 2003)  
 
Warren J. Samuels, general editor, _European Economists of the Early 
Twentieth Century, Volume 2. Studies on Neglected Continental Thinkers of 
Germany and Italy_. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2003. xiii + 307 pp. $120 
(cloth), ISBN: 1-85898-810-1.  
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Nicola Giocoli, Department of Economics, University 
of Pisa  
 
  
 
This volume is the second and last of a series dedicated to neglected 
European economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
The first volume, which appeared in 1998, was dedicated to scholars from 
Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia; the present one deals 
with economists from Germany and Italy. As is easy to understand, such an 
ambitious project required a specialist's knowledge of the economic 
literature of the various countries involved -- something that no single 
historian can possess. For this reason, the general editor of the series, 
Warren J. Samuels of Michigan State University, has availed himself of the 
collaboration of six co-editors: Y.S. Brenner and Jan Simonis (both at the 
University of Utrecht), Riccardo Faucci (University of Pisa), Harald 
Hagemann (University of Hohenheim), Claude Menard (University of Paris I) 
and Bo Sandelin (University of Göteborg). The overall outcome is a 
collection of thirty essays (seventeen in Volume 1 and thirteen in Volume 
2) which offer an invaluable amount of information on the life and works of 
continental economists who are usually considered of second -- if not third 
 -- rank and, therefore, undeserving of receiving anything more than a 
brief mention in standard histories of economic thought, but whose work, as 
Samuels writes in the Introduction to Volume 2, "... was part of the work 
of the discipline ... contributed to -- constituted -- the spread of ideas 
... included new ideas whose originality was appreciated, if at all, only 
later ...." so that it cannot be disregarded, lest our historical accounts 
be "...myopic, insular and provincial" (xii).  
 
Of the thirteen essays contained in the present volume, six are dedicated 
to German economists (though we should rather say German-speaking, as two 
of them were born in Austria) and seven to Italian ones. The Germans are 
Carl Dietzel (the essay is by Rolf Glaeser), Rudolf Hilferding (M.C. Howard 
and J.E. King), Alfred Kähler (Christian Gehrke), Georg Friedrich Knapp 
(Hans-Michael Trautwein), Emil Lederer (Hans Ulrich Esslinger) and Günter 
Schmölders (Björn Frank). The Italians are Costantino Bresciani Turroni and 
Umberto Ricci (both essays are by Piero Bini), Gustavo Del Vecchio 
(Riccardo Realfonzo), Giovanni Demaria (Aldo Montesano), Antonio Graziadei 
(Pietro Maurandi), Achille Loria (Riccardo Faucci and Stefano Perri), and 
Angelo Messedaglia (Anna Pellanda).  
 
The selection deserves a few comments. First of all, while the goal of the 
collection was to cover scholars who were scientifically active in the 
period going from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, only 
eleven out of the thirteen economists meet this requirement (actually, they 
also satisfy the tighter constraint featured in the book's title, as their 
works mainly belong to the early twentieth century). Indeed, neither Carl 
Dietzel nor Angelo Messedaglia can by any means be considered as belonging 
to that period, if not on account of their year of death: Dietzel's 
pioneering work on public debt and fiscal policy dates back to 1855, while 
Messedaglia's contributions to economics are concentrated in the 1850s and 
1860s. This is not merely a matter of chronological boundaries. What really 
makes the essays by Glaeser and Pellanda at odds with the rest of the 
collection -- notwithstanding their intrinsic interest, especially as far 
as Glaeser's essay is concerned -- is the kind of economic theory that 
prevailed when their heroes were writing: contrary to the other eleven 
economists, who had all to come to terms (either favorably or unfavorably) 
with marginalist/neoclassical economics, the "received view" at the time of 
Dietzel and Messedaglia was still the classical one, while the main 
alternative was that offered by the (Old) Historical School. However, and 
this is my second comment, when exception is made of Dietzel and 
Messadaglia, the other selected economists do form a coherent whole, 
perhaps even beyond the editors' original intentions. When reading through 
the essays, one cannot fail to realize the common roots of most of their 
theoretical contributions, namely, the joint necessity to redefine the 
fundamental categories of the economic discourse in the light of the new 
marginalist/neoclassical approach, on the one side, and to support, 
preserve or enrich the wealth of alternative approaches, on the other. 
Thus, either when challenging bourgeois economics from a Marxian 
perspective (li! 
 ke in th 
e case of Loria, Hilferding, Graziadei and Lederer), or when trying to 
integrate classical and neoclassical themes and methods (Del Vecchio, 
Kähler), or when offering deeper institutional perspectives on monetary 
issues (Bresciani Turroni, Knapp), or when refusing to get rid of 
cardinalism in value theory (Ricci), or when defending free trade and 
laissez-faire policies (again Bresciani Turroni and Ricci), or even when 
proposing a (truly idiosyncratic) rethinking of the whole of economics 
(Demaria), the economists in the sample remind us of an important, though 
often forgotten, truth, i.e., that marginalist/neoclassical economics did 
not immediately rise to the status of undisputed orthodoxy. Actually, for 
several decades the new approach had to compete with serious alternatives, 
while the most brilliant economic minds of that time never ever thought of 
either embracing or rejecting it sic et simpliciter, as they rather 
praised, defended and looked for methodological and theoretical pluralism.  
 
A third and final comment on the selection concerns the (admittedly easy) 
game of "who is missing?" In his Introduction Samuels mentions a few names 
of German economists that he would have liked to include, but no Italian 
names. Yet, this reviewer cannot fail to underline the absence of an essay 
on Marco Fanno. This is both inexplicable, as excellent work has recently 
been done on him, and very unfortunate, as the addition of a paper on Fanno 
to those on Bresciani Turroni, Del Vecchio, Ricci and Demaria would have 
provided the reader of an almost exhaustive assessment of the very best of 
Italian economics in the interwar years (exception being made of course of 
Luigi Einaudi and Piero Sraffa, who, however, can hardly be counted among 
the neglected scholars!).  
 
The latter comment leads me to a general point about the book. What strikes 
the reader is the difference between the essays dedicated to Italian 
economists and those on German ones. While each of the former (with the 
partial exception of the paper by Faucci and Perri -- an exception which is 
justified by the pervasiveness of the theme of capitalist development in 
Loria's thought) presents a comprehensive appraisal of the neglected 
economist's contributions to economic theory, the latter tend to focus on 
the single most important book of the author under scrutiny, relegating to 
a summary paragraph a sketchy presentation of his other works. This feature 
is, of course, unrelated to the essays' quality: indeed, the best two 
papers in the volume are the broad reconstruction of the life and works of 
Umberto Ricci by Piero Bini and the very detailed analysis of Rudolf 
Hilferding's 1910 masterpiece, _Financial Capital_, by M.C. Howard and J.E. 
King. Yet, the general impression is that the forgotten Germans somehow 
exhausted their best theoretical talents in just one big spurt of 
intellectual creativity which, in turn, also constitutes their main (if not 
their only) claim to historical appraisal. On the contrary, the neglected 
Italians are portrayed as fully-fledged professional economists, with all 
the usual implications of that condition: from the experiencing of academic 
ups and downs to the production of a regular flow of scientific 
publications, from the involvement in crucial consulting tasks to the rise 
to important political responsibilities. Again, this is not to deny that 
the German scholars also shared similar experiences; yet, the fact remains 
that these aspects of their life and career only partially emerge from the 
essays. Thus, to make just a few examples, the reader is left wondering 
whether the intriguing story of the German group of exiles at the New 
School's Graduate Faculty for Social and Political Science in New York 
would not deserve ampler space in the otherwise excellent papers on Kähler 
a! 
 nd Leder 
er; or whether Schmölders's sixty-year long career as a professional 
economist may be effectively summarized by focusing just on his juvenile 
book on the economics of prohibition; or whether, notwithstanding Glaeser's 
emphasis on it, the brief parliamentary experience of Carl Dietzel really 
had an impact on his intellectual career, especially when compared to the 
remarkable political duties (as Ministers, government advisors or Chairmen 
of Constitutional Commissions) of the likes of Bresciani Turroni, Del 
Vecchio, Ricci and Demaria. To cut a long story short, while the German 
papers are thorough examinations of the analytical details of single pieces 
of economic theory -- viz., very good examples of history of economic 
analysis -- the Italian ones are more in the tradition of the history of 
economic thought. Both methods are of course welcome, though the reader may 
still ask whether the difference is due to some specific institutional 
feature of the German academic system in the early twentieth century (say, 
the central role of the habilitation thesis in a scholar's career) or 
simply to the personal attitudes of the historians involved in Samuels's 
project.  
 
In a sense the previous remarks are preemptively countered by the editor's 
insistence (x-xi) that the collection's goal is first and foremost that of 
rediscovering _individual_ economists, with no necessary connection with 
popular themes such as the role of national styles and traditions or the 
influence of schools of thought. (Indeed, it is in order to stress this 
feature that the papers are presented in strictly alphabetical order 
according to the economist's surname.). Yet, it is precisely because the 
Italian economists so clearly emerge as part of a real scientific community 
 -- that is, as a group of scholars who shared the same sociology and who 
were constantly dialoguing both among themselves and with their 
international peers -- that it is inevitable to use the essays to also draw 
some inferences on, say, the troubled existence of an Italian school of 
Marxian economics or the constant popularity of orthodox views on monetary 
issues. And even if the German papers offer less room for similar 
conjectures, the possibility of, say, common theoretical roots for Kähler's 
and Lederer's reflections on technical progress does emerge strongly. This 
circumstance leads me to what is perhaps the major drawback of the volume. 
I believe that the reader would have greatly benefited from the inclusion 
of two brief essays outlining the general framework of, respectively, 
German and Italian economics in the period under scrutiny and addressing 
key issues such as the early twentieth-century influence of the Historical 
School or the comparative importance of general and partial equilibrium 
analysis (viz., of Pareto and Pantaleoni) on interwar Italian economics. 
These essays, on account of their necessarily sketchy content, would of 
course have been useless for those historians who already know the state of 
the art in the two countries, but this is _not_ the kind of audience to 
which the book is primarily addressed. If Samuels's main aim were that of 
bringing to international attention (especially in English-speaking c! 
 ountries 
) the life and works of thirteen neglected economists, the reconstruction 
of the scientific environment in which the latter operated would have been 
helpful in guiding the reader through the single chapters, thereby making 
the volume a truly self-contained one. I am aware that both commissioning 
and writing these two essays would have been no easy tasks, yet they would 
have looked somehow less daunting had the book's coverage been formally 
restricted, as de facto it is, to the period 1900-1940.  
 
Another, though lesser, weakness of the book is its failure in providing an 
answer to the following question. When looking at the list of the thirteen 
economists, one immediately recognizes the significant variance of their 
lifetime fortune. Some of them, like the Italians Loria and Bresciani 
Turroni and the Germans Knapp and Hilferding, were far from being 
neglected, as their main works were among the most well-known and 
intensively debated of their times. Others, like Demaria or Dietzel, seem 
not to have had any remarkable impact even among their contemporaries. 
Hence an historical puzzle arises: how could it happen that some relatively 
famous economists ended up being considered by standard histories of 
economic thought much in the same way as those rather obscure ones, that 
is, hardly at all? In other words, how do historians select the leading 
characters of their histories? It is unfortunate that none of the essays 
offers even a tentative answer to this question.  
 
Having mentioned the main drawbacks, let me conclude by assessing the 
book's achievement and by highlighting its major attractions. Was Samuels's 
goal "...to rescue these more or less hitherto neglected economists from 
the dustbin of history and thereby to contribute to a fuller picture of 
what was going on in the discipline on the continent of Europe during the 
period..." eventually achieved? The answer is yes. To convince oneself, 
just look at Montesano's or Trautwein's papers on "impossible" authors such 
as Demaria and Knapp, appreciate the efforts to extract the gist of their 
remarkable contributions out of the linguistic intricacies of their 
economics and then ask how else would one ever happen to read, let alone 
understand, works featuring expressions such as "entelechian events" or 
"pantolopic disturbances" were it not for the praiseworthy endeavor of 
Samuels and his associates. As to the book's major attractions, one should 
underline the very high quality of the analytical assessments featuring in 
most of the papers (the dissection of Loria's and Kähler's model by, 
respectively, Faucci and Perri and Christian Gehrke, deserve a special 
mention in this respect) and, above all, the fact that these 300-odd pages 
stand out as a real goldmine of hard-to-recover information for historians 
of twentieth-century economics. In particular, all essays offer excellent 
bibliographies of the primary and secondary sources on the various 
economists; some of these lists (like those by Bini for Bresciani Turroni 
and Ricci and by Montesano for Demaria) even aim at achieving completeness, 
at least as far as major works are concerned. This by itself makes the book 
a remarkable contribution to our discipline.  
 
  
 
Nicola Giocoli is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the 
University of Pisa. Among his recent publications, _Modeling Rational 
Agents: From Interwar Economics to Early Modern Game Theory_, Edward Elgar, 
2003.  
 
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