List’s background and career
Friedrich was the son of a respected tanner in the Southwest German town of Reutlingen. After a short and uninspiring period in his father’s business, he decided to enter the civil service as a clerk and, in 1811, he took up a position in the neighbouring ancient university town of Tubingen.
He studied law, part time, and gave up his position in 1813 in order to concentrate on his studies. He never sat for the final lawyer’s examination, but instead passed the actuary examination in 1814. He re-entered the civil service as an accountant and was promoted to chief examiner of accounts (ministerial under-secretary) in 1816, under his mentor, Minister von Wangenheim. One product of his studies in law was the treatise on Roman law (List, 1962). He condemned the influence of this law (List, 1841, p. 80).Apart from numerous reports, List later wrote at length on the importance of agricultural reform for democratization and industrialization. A pioneer paper on land reform is ‘Die Ackerverfassung, die Zwergwirtschaft und die Auswanderung’ (Agricultural constitution, small business and emigration) (List, 1927-36, vol. 5, pp. 418-547). This is a blueprint of legal reforms in agriculture necessary for higher efficiency in agriculture, higher revenue and therefore surplus for investments in industrialization. But the political aspect of the agricultural constitution was as important. The Japanese and Korean reforms are examples of industrialization starting with land reform. In both countries, the works of List were well known.
In this comparative country study, List elaborates on the ideas of the Cameralist, Justus Moser. List spells out the necessary reforms in order to create the political preconditions for a modern representative parliamentary system. The civil liberties of this system were supposed to be conducive to the creation of an urbanized and industrial society.
List advised a golden middle way, creating a class of independent middle-class farmers instead of the British capitalist large-scale type of agriculture. This long-ignored work is perhaps the first systematic work in the historical tradition (with its empirical methodology as opposed to the rationalist introspective methodology of the classical British school) and thereby set a standard for a later method within the historical tradition of economic thought. Marx copied large portions from both this work and from ‘The national system’ (Lenz, 1930, p. 15).List was an ardent supporter of the political liberal movement in the German idealistic tradition of Cusa, Leibniz and Wolff. Like them, he acted against the arbitrariness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy and also against the autocratic force of Austria in particular. He put forward numerous practical reports and suggestions for reform of the local inefficient administration and its legal system, some of them actually manifestos for reform. This came to the attention of his superiors and he became the protege of von Wangenheim, who had similar ideas and intentions, but also made him enemies, especially
within the bureaucracy, to whom he became especially vulnerable after the resignation of von Wangenheim. The time was not yet ripe for these liberal reforms - but when would it ever be without the martyrdom of strong-minded and visionary forerunners? This outcome of List’s reform efforts was to haunt him politically and financially for the rest of his life.
He supported the establishment of a chair in economics at the local university of Tubingen. Although he was not appointed to this chair, he was appointed to the full-time chair of political administration (Staatspraxis) in 1817, although he had no formal credentials for such a position. In fact, the chair was created for him personally. However, List was too energetic to keep away from life outside academia, and he became involved in the establishment of, and as consular secretary for, a new society for trade and manufacturing (the German Association of Trade and Commerce) in Stuttgart. This aimed at the abolition of internal impediments to trade in Germany, acting against internal customs barriers and for the erection of barriers to foreign manufactured goods, that is, for international customs barriers - a typical (state-) mercantilist programme. This provoked his opponents and gave them an excuse to demand his resignation, partly on the grounds that it was improper for a civil servant to hold a political position and partly because of his absenteeism. List withdrew from his chair in 1819, and thereafter his life was completely devoted to political and economic reform in the service of the common good. His financial position was to be, in consequence, correspondingly bad.