The Germans have long since shown that in all spheres of science they are equal,and in most of them superior,to other civilised nations.Only one branch of science,political economy,had no German name among its foremost scholars.The reason is obvious.Political economy is the theoretical analysis of modern bourgeois society and therefore presupposes developed bourgeois conditions,conditions which for centuries,following the wars in the wake of the Reformation and the peasant wars and especially the Thirty Years'War,could not establish themselves in Germany.The separation of the Netherlands from the Empire removed Germany from the international trade routes and restricted her industrial development from the very beginning to the pettiest scale.
While the Germans painfully and slowly recovered from the devastations of the civil wars,while they used up their store of civic energy,which had never been very large,in futile struggle against the customs barriers and absurd commercial regulations which every petty princeling and imperial baron inflicted upon the industry of his subjects,while the imperial cities with their craft-guild practices and patrician spirit went to ruin --Holland,England and France meanwhile conquered the leading positions in international trade,established one colony after another and brought manufactory production to the height of its development,until finally England,with the aid of steam power,which made her coal and iron deposits valuable,headed modern bourgeois development.
But political economy could not arise in Germany so long as a struggle had still to be waged against so preposterously antiquated remnants of the Middle Ages as those which hampered the bourgeois development of her material forces until 1830.Only the establishment of the Customs Union enabled the Germans to comprehend political economy at all.It was indeed at this time that English and French economic works began to be imported for the benefit of the German middle class.Men of learning and bureaucrats soon got hold of the imported material and treated it in a way which does little credit to the "German intellect".
The literary efforts of a hotchpotch of chevaliers d'industrie ,traders,schoolmasters and bureaucrats produced a bunch of German economic publications which as regards triteness,banality,frivolity,verbosity and plagiarism are equalled only by the German novel.Among people pursuing practical objectives there arose first the protectionist school of the industrialists,whose chief spokesman,List,is still the best that German bourgeois political economy has produced although his celebrated work is entirely copied from the Frenchman Ferrier,the theoretical creator of the Continental System.In opposition to this trend the free-trade school was formed in the forties by merchants from the Baltic provinces,who fumblingly repeated the arguments of the English Free Traders with childlike,but not disinterested,faith.
Finally,among the schoolmasters and bureaucrats who had to handle the theoretical aspects there were uncritical and desiccated collectors of herbaria,like Herr Rau,pseudo-clever speculators who translated foreign propositions into undigested Hegelian language like Herr Stein,or gleaners with literary pretensions in the field of so-called history of civilisation,like Herr Riehl.The upshot of all this was cameralistics,an eclectic economic sauce covering a hotchpotch of sundry trivialities,of the sort a junior civil servant might find useful to remember during his final examination.
