“It might be good to know on whose shoulders we stand – and why”: a conversation with Heinz Rieter

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Notes

1 Publications from annual meetings of the Verein and from the work of various committees have been published by Duncker & Humblot as Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik (SVS) ever since 1873. The Ausschuss for the history of economics runs its series (SVS 115) under the title Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie (Studies in the development of economic theory).

2 In the German language area, ‘Habilitation’ used to be the standard qualification required for conducting independent and self-contained teaching and for obtaining professorial positions at universities. It was – and in various places and disciplines still is – based on the defence of a habilitation thesis, a ‘second book’, for which the doctoral thesis is a prerequisite.

3 Fritz Neumark (1900-91) was a young professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt, when the Nazi regime forced him into emigration. He worked at Istanbul University from 1933 until 1951. After his return to Frankfurt, he served as professor and rector. As a modernizer of public finance and adviser to German ministries and the European commission, Neumark cut a high profile in post-war academia and politics.

4 The person-in-question was Dieter Schneider (1935-2014), professor at the RUB in Bochum for many years; he was certainly more interested in history and more erudite than most of his colleagues in business administration and management.

5 “Man möchte die Riesen kennenlernen, auf deren Schultern man steht“, Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik 21:1 (2020), 43-53.

6 Otmar Issing (born 1936) has served as chief economist and board member of the Deutsche Bundesbank in the 1990s. He became a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank in 1998, responsible for the Directorates General Economics and Research, thus serving as the ECB’s first chief economist.

7 Martin Hellwig (born 1949) is emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, with a background at US Ivy League universities such as the MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard. He is widely known for his work on the economics of information, financial markets and financial institutions.

8 Rieter, Heinz (2014), “Ökonomen im Dienste der nationalsozialistischen Raumplanung und ‘Raumforschung‘“, in: Trautwein, Hans-Michael (ed.), Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie, vol. XXIX: Die Entwicklung der Raumwirtschaftslehre von ihren Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 115/XXIX). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 239-332.

9 Southern Economic Journal 26:3 (1960), 199-206.

10 Rieter, Heinz (1983), “Zur Rezeption der physiokratischen Kreislauf-Analogie in der Wirtschaftswissenschaft”, in: Scherf, Harald (ed.), Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie vol. III (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 115 / III). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 55-99; see also Rieter, Heinz (1990), “Quesnays Tableau Economique als Uhren-Analogie”, in: Scherf, Harald (ed.), Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie vol. IX (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 115 / IX), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 57-94.

11 Rieter, Heinz (1989), “Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)”, in: Starbatty, Joachim, Klassiker des ökonomischen Denkens, vol. 2: Von Karl Marx bis John Maynard Keynes. Munich: C.H. Beck, 135-157, 316-317, 335-340; see also Rieter, Heinz (1992), “Alfred Marshall und die viktorianische Kunst”, in: Schefold, Bertram (ed.), Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie vol. XI (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 115/XI). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 191-238.

12 Rieter, Heinz (2009), “Autobiographien und Memoiren von Ökonomen“, in: Scheer, Christian (ed.), Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie vol. XXII: Ideen, Methoden und Entwicklungen der Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik 115/XXII). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 117-361.

13 English translation: Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

14 Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) was professor of philosophy at the University of Jena; he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908.

15 The Südheide is the Southern part of the Lüneburg heath, a large area of heathlands and woods in the hinterland of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen. Originally perceived as poor and hostile environments, the heathlands acquired a romantic image in the late 19th century, when the surrounding cities were strongly transformed by industrialization.

16 The Positivismusstreit, or dispute about positivism, was a controversy between the ’critical rationalists‘ Karl Popper and Hans Albert on the one side, and the ‘Frankfurt School’, led by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, on the other. It started in the early 1960s and was broadened into a general debate about methodology in the social sciences.

17 Starting with Kleiner Kulturfahrplan (Berlin: Herbig 1946), roughly translatable as ‘a short time table of culture’, Werner Stein (1913-93), who was professor of physics and later senator for higher education and research in West Berlin, published a large number of increasingly enlarged editions until his death in 1993.