Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2016
Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Roscher (1817–94) is generally remembered as a significant nineteenth-century German political economist and a contributor to the “German historical school of economics.” His work is usually placed in the context of a larger narrative about the development of economic thought. Yet intellectual historians have rarely noticed that, for Roscher, Staatswirthschaft or Nationalökonomie were subordinate to a larger science of politics, and few have engaged with the substance of his political thought (as opposed to his economics). The aim of this article is to provide an interpretation of Roscher as a political thinker, focusing especially on his account of the modern European state between the 1840s and the 1890s. In particular, it explores Roscher's concern that nineteenth-century Europe's economically advanced societies, characterized by an unstable combination of democratic sovereignty, deep socio-economic inequality and a centralized state apparatus, would soon find themselves at the mercy of “military tyranny” or “Caesarism.” It underlines the ways in which Roscher's preoccupation with ancient history fed into his estimation of nineteenth-century politics, and also examines his comparative assessment of democracy's prospects in Britain, France and the United States.
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40 Roscher laid emphasis on the parallel between ancient and modern economic history in Roscher, Grundriß, iv. In the much later Politik he entitled one chapter “Analogien aus dem Alterthume”; see Roscher, Politik, 304–7.
41 Roscher, Thukydides, 271.
42 Roscher, Umrisse, 458–9.
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57 Ibid., 249.
58 Ibid.
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65 Ibid., 327–8, 331.
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68 Ibid., 88, 458.
69 Ibid., 458.
70 Ibid., 459–70.
71 Ibid., 455.
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75 Ibid., 419.
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79 Ibid., 436–47.
80 Ibid., 445.
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85 Ibid., 549. This famous Hobbesian trope, it is worth noting, reappeared in Roscher's later depiction of Caesarism.
86 Ibid., 12–13.
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106 Ibid., 454–5.
107 Ibid., 320.
108 Ibid., 418, 448.
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116 Ibid., 451.
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118 Roscher, Politik, 453–4.
119 Ibid., 441, 453.
120 Ibid., 442–3. On this point, Roscher's view displays some similarities with Edouard Laboulaye's arguments, in the 1860s and 1870s, about the strength of the American system. See Sawyer, Stephen W., “An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Edouard Laboulaye's Constitutional Thought,” Journal of Modern History, 85/4 (2013), 739–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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124 Ibid., 592; see Treitschke, “Die Freiheit,” in Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, 3: 3–42.
125 Roscher, Politik, 592.
126 Ibid., 595.
127 Roscher, “Umrisse zur Naturlehre des Cäsarismus,” Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 10 (1888), 641–753, at 642.
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