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.
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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. WagnerÃÂs academic career took him first to the MerchantsàSuperior School, Vienna (1858-1863), then àafter failing to secure a chair at the University of Vienna because of disagreements over fiscal policy with Lorenz von Stein àto the Hamburg Higher MerchantsàSchool (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 Tartu in what is today Estonia.
In Tartu, Wagner "became a follower of BismarckÃÂs policy for unifying Germany under Prussian guidance. (Rubner, 435) Thus, when German unification became realistic, Wagner wanted to go back to Germany proper ÃÂ 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.
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.
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 WagnerÃÂs 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.
Biography
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Key Publications
By Wagner
In English:
Letters etc.:
About Wagner in English
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