Rudolf Goldscheid (12 August 1870 – 6 October 1931) was an Austrian writer and sociologist, co-founder of the

German Sociological Association The German Sociological Association (''Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie'', DGS) is a professional organization of social scientists in Germany. Established in Berlin on January 3, 1909, its founding members included Rudolf Goldscheid, Ferdin ...

, known for his theory of human economy (german: Menschenökonomie, link=no) and for developing the topic of fiscal sociology. He has been described as "the founder of scientific sociology in Vienna", though he never had a job with a university.

Life

Rudolf Goldscheid was born in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

on 12 August 1870 as the fifth child of a Jewish family of merchants. After graduating from a Viennese secondary school, in 1891 he enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

to study philosophy and sociology, but quit without a degree in 1894. He remained in Germany for some years, writing novels and plays using the pseudonym Rudolf Golm, and married Marie Rudolph in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

in 1898, returning to Vienna soon afterwards. Politically, Goldscheid was a pacifist and

social democrat Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote soc ...

, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and contributor to the socialist newspaper '' Arbeiter-Zeitung''. He endorsed philosophical

monism Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished: * Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., i ...

, and his scepticism of traditional religious beliefs caused him to abandon Judaism during 1921. He died in Vienna on 6 October 1931. His funeral was attended by the city's socialist mayor

Karl Seitz Karl Josef Seitz (; 4 September 1869 – 3 February 1950) was an Austrian politician of the Social Democratic Workers' Party. He served as member of the Imperial Council, President of the National Council and Mayor of Vienna. Early life Sei ...

, and the municipal council soon afterwards named a street in his honour.

Theories

In contrast to

social Darwinism Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in We ...

and

Malthusianism Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. This event, ...

, Goldscheid's theory of the human economy emphasised the idea of humans as a type of "organic capital" within a broader "developmental economy". A healthy economy would protect and promote the rights and welfare of all workers: to ignore "the direct and in particular the indirect costs" of phenomena such as lack of education, child labour, the exhaustion of workers and the spread of diseases among the labour force, was to "indulge in a fiction of productivity". Goldscheid adopted a neo-Lamarckian philosophy concerning inheritance of acquired characteristics, arguing that negative environments could damage human capabilities lastingly: what was needed, he argued, was a social environment that would foster human , "upward development" or "evolution". Goldscheid's concept of organic capital was a precedent for later theories of human capital. Goldscheid also developed the idea that a sociology of the

state State may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State * ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States * ''Our S ...

must emphasize understanding

public finance Public finance is the study of the role of the government in the economy. It is the branch of economics that assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achiev ...

. His 1917 book ' ("State Socialism or State Capitalism") invented the term , fiscal or financial sociology, arguing that the "budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies". Goldscheid's idea of fiscal sociology influenced the economist

Joseph Schumpeter Joseph Alois Schumpeter (; February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an Austrian-born political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at H ...

's description of the "tax state". Schumpeter and Goldscheid had opposing opinions of the role of

public debt A country's gross government debt (also called public debt, or sovereign debt) is the financial liabilities of the government sector. Changes in government debt over time reflect primarily borrowing due to past government deficits. A deficit oc ...

, however: after

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, while Schumpeter argued that Austria needed to work to extinguish its debt burden, Goldscheid drew on the

cameralist Cameralism (German: ''Kameralismus'') was a German science of public administration in the 18th and early 19th centuries that aimed at strong management of a centralized economy for the benefit mainly of the state. The discipline in its most na ...

tradition to endorse the recapitalisation of the debt, in order to allow the state to assume a more active and entrepreneurial role.

Life

Theories

References

Further reading