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The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century. By David F. Lindenfeld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. x; 382 pp. $57.00.
David Lindenfeld invites us to reconceptualize the oeuvre of Karl Heinrich Rau, Friedrich List, Johann Heinrich von Th*nen, Gustav Schmoller, Carl Menger, Adolph Wagner, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and numerous other thinkers of interest to this journal's readers. By his lights, what these men were doing was not "economics," "political economy," "historical economics," or "economic sociology," so much as Staatswissenschaft, literally the "science of state." Staatswissenschaft was specific both in time (the nineteenth century) and in space (German-speaking universities). On the one hand, it must be distinguished from the Machiavellian literature of "statecraft" which preceded it, in that it took its brief more as a science...