Brentano, Lujo

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Brentano, Lujo

The German economist Lujo Brentano (1844–1931) was born in Frankfurt am Main into a patrician family of Italian descent whose members left a strong mark on the cultural life of Germany. Clemens Brentano, the poet, was his uncle; Bettina von Arnim, the writer, his aunt; and Franz Brentano, the philosopher, his brother. The anti-Prussianism characteristic of south Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century and a home environment of strict Roman Catholicism were the dominant influences of his adolescence.

It was not until after 1866, when he had already received a doctor of law degree from the University of Heidelberg, that Brentano decided to become an economist. He spent a year at Göttingen and, after writing a thesis on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s theory of distribution, received a second doctorate in 1867.

His first appointment was with the Prussian Statistical Office, then under the direction of Ernst Engel (of Engel’s law). Engel’s concern for social questions influenced Brentano, who then became involved with two of the problems that were to concern him for the whole of his long professional career: improvement of the wage earner’s lot and the preservation of harmony between capital and labor.

Engel was particularly interested in profit sharing as a method of at least attenuating, in an authoritarian and inflexible Prussian environment, some of the social tensions that were the byproduct of rapid industrialization. To study this measure more thoroughly, he planned a visit to England and asked Brentano to accompany him. Brentano went, only to find the potentialities of profit sharing quite limited. Instead, he became interested in other reform movements, in particular the growing trade-union movement. Investigating the emergence of the trade unions and their role within the English framework, on his return to Germany Brentano published the celebrated On the History and Development of Gilds, and the Origin of Trade Unions (1870). In this essay, later attacked by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Brentano argued that unions were the descendants of medieval guilds. He attempted to show that in every social setting the laboring man—whether corporate journeyman or free wage earner—must band together with his fellow workers to offset his basic weakness within the labor market and defend his interests against the employer, be he patrician burgher or capitalist entrepreneur.

The inherent disadvantages of the individual wage earner in the market for his services were a recurrent theme in Brentano’s writings. Since the ordinary kind of buyer–seller relationship did not prevail in the labor market, he thought the classical economists were wrong in not exempting labor from their general laissez-faire prescriptions. Brentano believed that through trade-union activity workers were able to gain at the expense of the employers’ monopsonistic position rather than at the expense of the earnings of the rest of the working class. Furthermore, insofar as very few markets are purely competitive, employees could, if sufficiently well organized to bargain effectively, share in the benefits of the employer’s monopoly power to raise prices within an industry.

Brentano advocated higher wages and better working conditions as social expedients and as sound business, and he urged that they be established through collective agreements negotiated by vigorous and enlightened management. He was against preserving the employment contract as a private matter between capitalist and wage earner, as others, such as Bastiat, propounded. Moreover, Brentano regarded labor organizations and cooperatives as means for the raising of working-class morale and self-esteem. He further believed that higher earnings and shorter working hours would expedite mechanization and spur worker productivity and efficiency and thus reduce the unit costs of labor. In the same spirit of advancing both social peace and economic progress, Brentano pressed for the extension of social insurance as a way of alleviating the worst aspects of proletarian misery and insecurity that lead to demoralization.

Although in principle he was skeptical of state intervention, he considered factory legislation (above all, that covering the employment of minors) and the enactment of a minimum wage law prerequisites of a civilized industrial environment.

He also supported all efforts to improve working-class housing and adult education. His population theory, which attempted to correlate rising standards of living with a declining birth rate, was meant both as an attack upon the Malthusian postulates and as an expression of faith in the possibilities of reform.

After leaving the Prussian Statistical Office, Brentano spent the rest of his life as a professor at the following German universities: Berlin, from 1871 to 1872; Breslau, from 1872 to 1882; Strassburg, from 1882 to 1888; Vienna, from 1888 to 1889; Leipzig, from 1889 to 1891; and finally Munich, where he remained until his death. A founding member of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Brentano played a leading role in some of the important research projects undertaken by the Verein as background material for its policy recommendations on social and economic issues in general and industrial relations in particular. However, he never supported the pro-Prussian, imperialist attitudes of the majority of its members.

Brentano was neither an original theorist nor an economic historian whose basic research opened new vistas of the past. His forte was exposition (for example, his study of the development of value theory), and some of his writings are excelglent popularizations of history. Judging by the memoirs of some of his students (notably those of Theodor Heuss and M. J. Bonn), Brentano must have been an effective teacher as well as a popular lecturer. Yet it is difficult not to conclude that, as a John Stuart Mill liberal in an environment that was a far cry from Gladstonian England, he could not exert much influence as a social scientist.

Herbert Kisch

[Other relevant material may be found inLabor unionsand in the biographies ofEngelandMalthus.]

WORKS BY BRENTANO

1870 On the History and Development of Gilds, and the Origin of Trade Unions. London: Trübner.

(1876) 1894 Hours and Wages in Relation to Production. New York: Scribner; London: Sonnenschein.

(1877) 1898 The Relation of Labor to the Law of To-day. New York: Putnam.

1879 Die Arbeiterversicherung gemäss der heutigen Wirtschaftsordnung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.

(1899) 1924 Alte und neue Feudalität: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Erbrechtspolitik. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Meiner.

1904 Wohnungs-zustände und Wohnungs-reform in München. Munich: Reinhardt.

1908 Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre. Munich: Königlich Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

1909 Die Malthussche Lehre und die Bevölkerungsbewegung der letzten Dezennien. Munich: Franz. → Also published in volume 24 of the Abhandlungen of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich, Historische Klasse.

(1910) 1911 Die deutschen Getreidezölle. 2d rev. ed. Stuttgart (Germany) and Berlin: Cotta.

1923 Der wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte. Leipzig: Meiner.

1924 Konkrete Grundbedingungen der Volkswirtschaft. Leipzig: Meiner.

1927–1929 Eine Geschichte der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Englands. 3 vols. in 4. Jena (Germany): Fischer.

1931 Mein Leben im Kampf um die soziale Entwicklung Deutschlands. Jena (Germany): Diedrichs.