Bücher, Karl
Bücher, Karl
Karl Bücher (1847–1930), economist, statistician, historian, and sociologist, was born to lower-middle-class parents in Kirdorf, a village in the Prussian Rhineland. He studied political science, history, and classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Göttingen. In his early thirties, he spent several years in Frankfurt am Main on the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Later he taught at the universities of Dorpat, Basel, and eventually, Leipzig, from which he retired in 1917.
While he was in Frankfurt, Bücher began research into archival materials relating to the demography of the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (1886). This and other research led to the publication of a series of monographs on a variety of subjects: medieval labor conditions ([1876–1894] 1922, pp. 245–258); the position of women in the Middle Ages ([1876–1894] 1922, pp. 259–299); medieval tax ordinances ([1876–1894] 1922, pp. 300–328); bookbinders’ ordinances from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries ([1876–1894] 1922, pp. 400–457); and others. His work on population and his authoritative study of forms of organization of the handicrafts in the German town of the high Middle Ages ([1876–1894] 1922, pp. 373–399) established his eminence as an economic historian.
His famous theory of stages (1893) claimed to establish the “law” that governed the economic development of western and central Europe from antiquity to modern times: the town economy of the high Middle Ages, which was the principal object of his own studies, had been preceded in antiquity by a closed household economy, the oikos, and was followed in modern times by a national economy, the Volkswirtschaft. In the context of Bücher’s writings, the term Volkswirtschaft may be considered synonymous with Verkehrswirtschaft, i.e., extensive exchange economy.
The role of exchange, then, serves as the criterion for determining what type of economy is under scrutiny. Primitive man, Bücher held, had an aversion to exchange rather than a propensity for it. In the oikos-dominated economy of antiquity, goods moved from producer to consumer without any intervening exchange. In the medieval town, there was some exchange, and craftsmen worked for the consumer either directly or indirectly by way of the local market. In the modern national market economy, everyone is engaged in multiple exchange.
Bücher found the factual basis for his oikos in Johann Karl Rodbertus’ interpretation of the gigantic slaveholdings of later Roman antiquity. In the familia rustica and the familia urbana all phases of production, from raw materials to finished goods, were united, under the control of the master, in the familia, i.e., the oikos. Although technical specialization in crafts did exist, there was no exchange of goods in various stages of completion. After chattel slavery was modified, first to villenage and eventually to colonate, only the protective Burg was required to create the closed medieval town economy with its craftsmen-Bürger, who exchanged goods locally on a modest scale. The third stage, Volkswirtschaft, resulted when the modern centralized state rescinded the privileges of medieval towns, as well as those of local territorial rulers generally, and thus cleared the way for an unlimited exchange economy on a national scale.
Of Bücher’s three stages, the last has proved to be conceptually of the greatest significance. Theories of the exchange economy were not new, but they lacked perspective and merely reflected the facts of contemporary life. Exchange was taken for granted as part of every economy. Biicher was the first to note the distortion that this assumption produced with regard to premodern economic history. In this sense, he rejected classical economics as a sound basis for the study of economic history.
His own more general and substantive concept of the economy evolved partly in reaction to classical economics and partly in response to some elements in Rodbertus’ oikos economics, complemented by assiduous reading of travelers’ accounts of early societies. (His Arbeit und Rhythmus, 1896, was a sociological by-product of his familiarity with this literature.) Classical economics, Biicher wrote, was concerned primarily with the circulation and distribution of goods, to the neglect of production and consumption. Money was conceived chiefly as a means of exchange, and its other uses were largely overlooked. In Rodbertus’ oikos, the process of production was central, forming one uninterrupted exchangeless unit: not even labor had a market; money was mainly used for purposes other than exchange. Briefly, Bücher’s approach makes exchange only a phenomenon of a particular stage of economic development, while the essence of the economy has to do with actual production, or, as one might say today, with the substantive element.
As to method, Bücher followed an entirely independent line. Although he was an institutionalist, he sided in the Methodenstreit with Carl Menger and the neoclassical theorists against Gustav Schmoller and the German historical school, with its preference for institutional description. He welcomed the return of the Vienna school to “isolating abstraction” and “logical deduction,” for he was convinced that it was in these methods that the strength of classical economics lay. He objected to both classical and neoclassical economics on the grounds that these theories had a narrow, timebound concept of economy, a concept which they assumed was applicable to all historical periods, including antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bücher’s brand of institutionalism was fundamentally analytical; he called for further research into the working of the modern Volkswirtschaft, pressing all the while for theoretical treatment of the results of this research. He himself treated the forms of medieval craft organization as well as the oikos economy in this manner.
Bücher’s genetic theory of the medieval urban economy was variously criticized by Schmoller, Georg von Below, Alfons Dopsch, and Werner Sombart. Eventually the impact of their criticism abated, and scholars of the rank of Henri Pirenne and Max Weber accepted Bücher’s urban theory. As they interpreted it, the rationale of the town economy was the institutional securing of an appropriate standard of life for the citizen.
A second controversy, which is still not settled, has to do with whether the material civilization of ancient Greece was primitive or modern in character. This is the oikos controversy, in which Bücher and Max Weber clashed with the classical historians Eduard Meyer and Karl J. Beloch. Meyer adduced evidence that the economic life of classical Greece, even its commerce and banking, was “thoroughly modern.” Max Weber held, on the contrary, that nothing would be more disastrous than to conceive of the conditions of antiquity in modern terms; such concepts as commercialism, factory, or industrial proletariat, he held, could not properly be used in a discussion that hardly transcended the level of cultural interpretation. Later, Johannes Hasebroek upheld and developed the primitivist case. He argued, for example, that the Solonic crisis was not caused by a revolt akin to the French Revolution, but rather by a disaffected peasantry revolting against the warrior rule of the landed aristocracy. On this decisive point, Michael Rostovtzeff, originally an antagonist of primitivism, came to agree with Hasebroek. But Rostovtzeff did not give way to Weber on another aspect of the controversy: he disagreed with Weber’s view that capitalism, insofar as it existed at all in antiquity, was no more than a cultural phenomenon, and then only in the political, rather than the strictly economic, field. Quite recently, such scholars as A. L. Oppenheim (1957), W. F. Leemans (1960), Gelb, and Grandin have studied and modified the old oikos theory. Clearly, the problem originally formulated by Bücher still has intellectual vitality.
[For the historical context of Bücher’s work, seeEconomic thought; and the biographies ofMenger; Rodbertus; Schmoller. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeGilds; Manorial economy; Specialization and exchange; and the biographies ofPirenne; Weber, Max.]
WORKS BY BUCHER
(1876–1894) 1922 Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Tübingen: Laupp. → Contains “Zur Arbeiterfrage im Mittelalter,” 1876; “Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter,” 1882; “Zwei mittelalterliche Steuerordnungen,” 1894; “Frankfurter Buchbinderordnungen vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert,” 1888; and “Mittelalterliche Handwerksverbände,” 1922.
1886 Frankfurt am Main im XIV. und XV. Jahrhundert: Socialstatistische Studien. Volume 1. Tübingen (Germany): Laupp. → Only Volume 1 was published.
(1893) 1901 Industrial Evolution. Univ. of Toronto Press. → First published as Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft.
(1896) 1924 Arbeit und Rhythmus. 6th ed., rev. & enl. Leipzig: Teubner.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brodnitz, Gerhard 1931 Karl Bücher (obituary). Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft. 90:1–7.
Hoselitz, Bert F. 1960 Theories of Stages of Economic Growth. Pages 193–238 in Bert F. Hoselitz et al. (editors), Theories of Economic Growt. New York: Free Press.
Leemans, W. F. 1960 Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period. Leiden (Netherlands): Brill.
Oppenheim, A. L. 1957 A Bird’s-eye View of Mesopotamian Economic History. Pages 27–37 in Karl Polanyi et al. (editors), Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Pearson, Harry W. 1957 The Secular Debate on Economic Primitivism. Pages 3–11 in Karl Polanyi et al. (editors), Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Sweet, Ronald F. G. 1958 On Prices, Moneys, and Money Uses in the Old Babylonian Period. Ph.D. dissertation, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.
Troeltsch, Walter 1917 Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Karl Bücher. Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt [1917], no. 15.
Will, Édouard 1954 Trois quarts de siécle de recherches sur I’éeconomie grecque antique. Annales 9:7–19.