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I recently returned from the 12th World Congress of the International  
Economic Association in Buenos Aires.  In a session there Erich  
Streissler who holds the Menger Chair at the University of Vienna  
presented a paper entitled "Rau, Hermann and Roscher: Contributions  
of German Economics around the middle of the 19th Century."  In it he  
argues that most of the Marshallian apparatus of partial equilibrium  
neoclassical economics, including supply and demand diagrams with  
price on the vertical axis, and an analysis of decreasing cost industries,  
was completed by 1850 or so at the hands of German economists  
located in non-Berlin universities, notably Karl Rau in Heidelberg in the  
1820s, Friedrich Hermann in the 1830s in Munich who first drew a  
"modern" supply-demand diagram in 1841, and Wilhelm Roscher in  
Leipzig in subsequent decades.   
 
Supposedly Marshall read these folks in German and was heavily  
influenced by them but only gave them a small amount of credit.  The  
Austrians following Menger also were heavily influenced by them but  
forgot them after Menger, most notoriously Wieser who falsely claimed  
to have discovered the concept of opportunity cost.  Marx also was  
influenced especially by Roscher, although he criticized him  
unsurprisingly. In Germany this tradition was suppressed late in the  
century after German unification because of the link between the Berlin- 
based German Historical School led by Schmoller and the political  
ideology of the Prussian-German state.   
 
In the English language tradition, a combination of linguistic ignorance  
and anti-German prejudice led to a suppression and forgetting of this  
role of German economists after World War I.  Supposedly  
Schumpeter played a role in this who did not like these German  
economists (I do not know why).   
 
Any comments?  (BTW, so much for the claim that Fleeming Jenkin  
drew the first "standard" supply-demand diagram!)  
 
Barkley Rosser 
   
 
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