Political struggle: travel and public education
Descriptive of his life’s work, as well as of the reasons for the persecution of which he was a victim, is List’s claim that the content of his main book, The National System (List, 1841), could be summed up in two words: freedom and national unity.
One is tempted to add industrialization, although he saw this as an instrument for the above. His main enemies throughout his life continued to be local public bureaucracy, the landed interest and parties of the international power game. These joined ranks to fight him, and did so successfully during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his ideas later bore fruit through his young disciples, who eventually entered into positions of power in Germany and elsewhere, such as in Sweden, Russia, Japan, the United States and China.In 1819, the citizens of his home town, Reutlingen, elected him as their deputy to the state representative assembly of Wurtemberg. He then took part in the fight for a constitution for Wurtemberg. These reform activities brought him before the court, and he was tried and convicted for sedition in 1822. He escaped into exile in the same year. He came back to Stuttgart in 1824, when he was imprisoned. In 1825, he was exiled and he emigrated with his family to the United States following the advice of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman turned US military general. In the United States he travelled extensively, meeting several leading political figures.
List wrote a series of letters that were published as Outlines of American Political Economy2 (List, 1827), exposing its features and contrasting it with the extreme free trade Elements of Political Economy by the southern secessionist, Thomas Cooper. His work was hailed nationally as a textbook of the American system (of economics), as opposed to the British system (nonregulated free trade).
His efforts were in part responsible for the introduction of the protectionist US tariff laws of 1828. The conflict between these two strategies was later to be the central reason behind the US civil war where the industrial North was protectionist and allied with Russia and Japan, and the agricultural South was free trade and allied with Britain.List may therefore be described as an American economist as much as he may be described as a German economist. In 1830, List visited Paris. He returned to Germany in 1832. Back in Europe, he met people in politics, science and the arts. In Paris, in 1837, he wrote two treatises for the French Academy of Sciences, The Natural System of Political Economy3 (List, 1837a) and The World Moves (List, 1837b).4 The National System of Political Economy was published in 1841. Until his death in 1846, he wrote extensively for several journals. He travelled extensively on behalf of the Trade Association and met many leading politicians and heads of state. Throughout his life he propagated the same ideas which had followed him from his youth, outlined already in 1816, those of political freedom, political unification and economic development, with railroad construction and protection of manufacture as some instruments among many, all in the tradition of the potential ‘harmony of interests’.