Edgar Salin

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Edgar Bernhard Jacques Salin (born February 10, 1892 in Frankfurt am Main , † May 17, 1974 in Veytaux , Switzerland ) was a German economist .

Life

Edgar Salin was born as the son of the Jewish entrepreneur Alfred Salin and his wife Paula. From 1901 to 1910 he attended the Goethe-Gymnasium in his birthplace Frankfurt am Main. In 1910 his uncle, the New York banker Jakob Heinrich Schiff , invited him on a railroad and sea voyage across the United States to Alaska , on which they investigated opportunities to invest in railways and mining. He then studied economics and law at the universities of Heidelberg , Munich and Berlin , as well as philosophy, art and literary history. In Heidelberg he came into contact with the poet Stefan George through the local professor of German studies Friedrich Gundolf and his friends Norbert von Hellingrath and Wolfgang Heyer . During his time in Heidelberg, Salin also followed in the footsteps of Friedrich Hölderlin because Hellingrath, one of his closest friends, had discovered some important manuscripts and was now editing them. In 1913 Salin received his doctorate under Alfred Weber on the economic development of Alaska and Yukon Territory. A contribution to the history and theory of the concentration movement . Salin also had contact with his brother Max Weber and Eberhard Gothein in Heidelberg.

In 1914 Salin volunteered as a soldier in the First World War . In 1918 he was seriously wounded on the Eastern Front . He then went to the Foreign Service and became a consultant in the political department of the German legation in Bern . In 1919 he left diplomacy and returned to science. Salin advocated close interdisciplinary links between economics and cultural, social and philosophical topics and methods. In 1920 he completed his habilitation in Heidelberg on Plato and the Greek utopia ; later he dealt with Plato in detail. In 1924 Salin was appointed to an extraordinary professorship at the Institute for Social and Political Sciences at Heidelberg University. In Heidelberg he supervised, among other things, the doctoral project of the American Talcott Parsons , who dealt with the concept of capitalism under Max Weber and Werner Sombart in his dissertation . On his return to America, Parsons became one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. After a visiting professorship at the University of Kiel , where he met George supporters Friedrich Wolters and Julius Landmann , Salin was appointed full professor at the University of Basel in 1927 as Landmann's successor . There he was rector from 1961/1962. In 1962 he retired. His students include Ulrich Sonnemann , who did his doctorate with him in 1934, and Marion Countess Dönhoff , who did his doctorate with him in 1935 and with whom he remained connected after the war. In 1962 he was awarded the Goethe plaque from the city of Frankfurt am Main .

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His fields of work were mainly economic history and political economy. He strove for a comparative doctrine of economics even before institutional economics had given the motto of a comparative institutional doctrine. In addition, he advocated what he called a "descriptive theory" that should include the "rational theory" (most likely to be identified with neoclassical theory ), but should not be incorporated into it. He also strove for an economy in the service of society, which should nevertheless be kept in mind that the economy can only be a sub-area of ​​the whole of life and is therefore only a means of enhancing the existence of the state and people and should not be an end in itself. For the political economy of the kind Salin had in mind, mathematical theory should only be an aid and tool. But economic history and the history of theory are indispensable.

Salin saw it as the common goal of the economists to preserve human independence and dignity and to look for the ways (Lynkeus, preface) "the individual and the peoples, Europe and the world the still achievable degree of personal, economic and social freedom to preserve ". Nevertheless, he was not a liberal (or, as a catchphrase, neoliberal) economist in today's sense. Whether this political economy, which should take into account the political element and the social, sociological forces and not, as Eucken had postulated as the basis of political economy, stop at political data, should see it as a data corridor for its considerations and models, whether this political Economy is to be seen as a pioneer or forerunner of the New Political Economy , must remain open. Its classification in today's terms is extremely difficult. An essay about him is entitled The Last Humanist . He stood in the line of the early Lord Keynes, whose views into the future, "first raised 'The Consequences of the Peace' and then 'A Tract of Monetary Reform', from all contemporary economic literature" (Lynkeus, p. 265), and considered the “Tract” to be one of those books that a political economist could use to train himself (ibid.). However, he did not share the thesis of a Keynesian macroeconomic revolution, since he saw its forerunners primarily in German economists. In the history of economics, he saw above all a “change in people's attitudes towards business and science” taking place, and he therefore pursued a history of ideas rather than a succession of analytical tools or methods, as is often found where the present one is State of economic science is regarded as the highest form of which. He was critical of the idea of ​​progress in science, as if the knowledge of today's science had remained inaccessible to both ancient and medieval people (GdV, 4th edition, p. 11). His history of economics stands in the three steps of prehistory (Athens, Rome and Catholic Europe [Middle Ages]), history (mercantilism is characterized as a political science, physiocrats and classics as systematic science, and socialism and historicism as evolutionist science) and the Present as descendants and forerunners. The beginning of the GdV reads “Economics as a science is a phenomenon that belongs exclusively to European-American modernity. Its story begins with the awakening of the individualistic spirit, with the emergence of national territories and empires, and with the victory of rational capitalism over traditional economic activity in the Middle Ages ”(GdV, p. 12). Salin was the founder and secretary of the List Society , which was named after the German economist Friedrich List .

Together with six other scientists, Professor Edgar Salin founded Prognos AG on October 6, 1959 in Basel .

Honors

Works

  • On the special train to Alaska. Diary of an American trip . 1910
  • Plato and the Greek utopia . 1921
  • Civitas Dei . 1926
  • The German tributes . 1930
  • Economy and state . 1932
  • Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche (2nd edition 1948)
  • History of Economics (GdV, 4th edition 1952, 5th edition renamed Political Economy )
  • About Stefan George . Helmut Küpper formerly Georg Bondi, Düsseldorf / Munich 1948 ( online version ; 2nd, newly designed and expanded edition 1954)
  • Editor of the magazine Kyklos (since 1947)
  • numerous transfers of selected works by Plato, published by Klostermann
  • Lynkeus - Figures and problems from business and politics . JCB Mohr, Tübingen 1963 (collected speeches and papers as an introduction to political economy, with biographical sketches, papers on economic history, economic theory and economic policy)
  • The Isolated State, 1826–1926
  • Johann Heinrich von Thünen in his time
  • Relocation of the German economy in the first quarter of the 20th century
  • Concept of capital and the theory of capital from antiquity to the physiocrats ( online as pdf )
  • High capitalism. A study about Werner Sombart, German economics and the economic system of the present
  • Political Economy - Today
  • The shape change of the European entrepreneur
  • Manager

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ See, for example, his descriptions in Edgar Salin: Um Stefan George . 2nd Edition. Düsseldorf / Munich 1954, pp. 102-104, 118-120.
personal data
SURNAME Salin, Edgar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Salin, Edgar Bernhard Jacques
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH 17th May 1974
Place of death Veytaux , Switzerland