Knut Borchardt

Knut Borchardt (born June 2, 1929 in Berlin ) is a German economist and economic historian .

life and work

Knut Borchardt was born in 1929 as the son of the production engineer Hans Borchardt and his wife Hildegard, nee. Frommholz, born in Berlin. After attending primary school in Berlin-Siemensstadt , Sagan / Silesia and Weidenhof near Breslau , Borchardt worked on a farm in Dürmentingen in Upper Swabia until 1946 . After returning to Berlin, he passed the Abitur at the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule in Berlin-Spandau in 1948. He then studied German and history at the Humboldt University in Berlin and worked as an assistant at the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar in 1949/50 . From 1951 on, Borchardt studied business administration at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and at the Free University of Berlin, and passed the diploma examination for business people in Munich in 1954. He then worked as an assistant at the Economics Institute of the University of Munich, where he in 1956 at Friedrich Lütge with a thesis on the argument of the single market for Dr. oec. publ. received his doctorate . Until 1961 he was employed as a research assistant at the Economics Institute of the LMU Munich. After completing his habilitation in 1961, he took over the chair for economic and social history at the University of Tübingen . In 1962 he was appointed professor for economic history and economics at the business school and University of Mannheim , where he held the post of rector from 1967–1968. From 1969 until his retirement in 1991 he was professor for economic history and economics at the LMU Munich.

In 1987 he received the Leibniz Prize and in 1999 the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art . In 1989 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class . Borchardt received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Innsbruck (1990) and Mannheim (1994).

His research interests include the economic history of the period between the world wars, the person of Max Weber as a political economist and his early work and teaching as well as special aspects of long-term economic development in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1974 Borchardt was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . There he is a representative of the philosophical-historical class of the budget commission and is chairman of the commission for economic and social history and deputy chairman of the commission for cultural anthropological studies. He is a member of the Economic History Committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik and, since 1970, of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Ministry of Economics . 1981–2007 he was a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Together with other personalities such as Alfred E. Ott and Heinrich Strecker , he edited the yearbooks for economics and statistics from 1968 to 1982 . From 1980 to 2007 he was co-editor of the historical magazine . In the past few years, Borchardt has also dealt with economic and socio-political aspects of globalization . His students include Werner Abelshauser , Christoph Buchheim , Dietmar Petzina and Albrecht Ritschl .

The “Borchardt Hypothesis” and the controversy that followed

Borchardt's theses on economic policy in the final phase of the Weimar Republic became the subject of scientific controversy in the 1980s. In 1979, Borchardt attacked the prevailing view that the deflationary policy of the Heinrich Brüning cabinet from 1930–1932 was primarily responsible for the severity of the global economic crisis in Germany. Borchardt argued that Brüning had no other choice in view of the over-indebtedness of public budgets, which had been cut off from credit during the global economic crisis. This debt problem was at least partly the result of excessively generous wage and social policies in the Weimar Republic before 1929.

In the period that followed, an extensive and often passionate debate about this hypothesis sparked, in which leading economic historians in Germany and abroad took part. The Berlin economic historian Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich attacked Borchardt's thesis on high wages in the Weimar Republic in a particularly determined manner. Holtfrerich's counter-arguments were later called into question. More recently, the Borchardt student Albrecht Ritschl has expanded Borchardt's hypothesis. Ritschl argues that Germany got into a balance of payments crisis in 1930, caused by high foreign debts and the tightening of the reparations regime by the Young Plan , and in which a policy of economic stimulation was impossible.

The debate about Borchardt's theses, which has not yet come to a conclusion, in any case sowed doubts about the once common view that an expansive, “Keynesian” fiscal and monetary policy could have ended the economic crisis in Germany earlier and with less damage .

Works (selection)

• The industrial revolution in Germany. London 1969, ISBN 3-492-00340-0 .
• Growth, crises, scope for economic policy. Göttingen 1982, ISBN 3-5253-5708-7 (English 1991).
• Outline of German economic history. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1978, ISBN 3-5253-3421-4 (unchanged edition 1985)
• (Ed. With Hans Otto Schötz) Economic policy in the crisis. The (secret) conference of the Friedrich List Society in September 1931 on the possibilities and consequences of credit expansion. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1991, ISBN 3-7890-2116-4 .
• Max Weber's stock market papers. Mystery of an overlooked work. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7696-1610-3 .
• Globalization in a historical perspective. Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7696-1614-6 .

• Knut Borchardt and Carlo M. Cipolla (eds.):
• European Economic History I. The Middle Ages (UTB, 1998)
• European economic history II. Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . Stuttgart, Gustav Fischer Verlag 1979 (also UTB No. 1268)
• European economic history III. The industrial revolution (UTB, 1997, ISBN 3-8252-1315-3 )
• European economic history IV. The development of industrial societies (UTB 1985, ISBN 3-8252-1316-1 )

literature

• Christoph Buchheim , Michael Hutter , Harold James (eds.): Torn between the wars. Economic history contributions. Knut Borchardt on his 65th birthday . Nomos, Baden-Baden 1994, ISBN 3-7890-3367-7 .
• Albrecht Ritschl : Knut Borchardt's interpretation of the Weimar economy. On the history and impact of an economic history controversy. In: Jürgen Elvert / Susanne Krauß (eds.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries , Stuttgart 2001, pp. 234–244.

Web links

• Literature by and about Knut Borchardt in the catalog of the German National Library
• List of publications

Remarks

1. ↑ Knut Borchardt. In: Who's Who. Retrieved April 13, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Reinhard Spree (ed.): History of the German economy in the 20th century . CH Beck, Munich 2001, p. 230 .
3. ↑ see also H-Net Reviews: Knut Borchardt, Ed. Max Weber Complete Edition, Dept. 1. Stock Exchange. Writings and speeches 1893–1898, Vol. 5, 1. and 2. In collaboration with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll. .
4. ^ Commission for Social and Economic History ( Memento from February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
5. ^ Commission for cultural anthropological studies ( Memento of February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
6. ↑ cf. Bavarian Academy of Sciences: Knut Borchardt - Directory of Scientific Publications .
7. ↑ Knut Borchardt: Difficulty and room for maneuver in the great global economic crisis of the early thirties. For the revision of the traditional image of history . In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , 1979, pp. 85–132.
8. ↑ Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich: Too high wages in the Weimar Republic? Comments on the Borchardt thesis. In: History and Society. Journal for historical social science 10, 1984, pp. 122-141.
9. ↑ u. a. Mark Spoerer: German Net Investment and the Cumulative Real Wage Position, 1925-1929: on a Premature Burial of the Borchardt Debate. In: Historical Social Research 19, 1994, pp. 26-41.
10. ^ Albrecht Ritschl: Knut Borchardt's interpretation of the Weimar economy. On the history and effects of an economic-historical controversy , lecture given at the 2001 annual meeting of the Ranke Society.