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Friedrich List (August 6, 1789 - November 30,
1846), Germany|German economist, was born at
Reutlingen, Württemberg.

Unwilling to follow the occupation of his father,
who was a prosperous tanner, he became a clerk in
the public service, and by 1816 had risen to the
post of ministerial under-secretary. In 1817 he
was appointed professor of administration and
politics at the University of Tübingen, but the
fall of the ministry in 1819 compelled him to
resign. As a deputy to the Württemberg chamber,
he was active in advocating administrative
reforms. He was eventually expelled from the
chamber and in April 1822 sentenced to ten months'
imprisonment with hard labor in the fortress of
Asperg. He escaped to Alsace, and after visiting
France and England returned in 1824 to finish his
sentence, and was released on undertaking to
emigrate to America. There be resided from 1825 to
1832, first engaging in farming and afterwards in
journalism.

It was in United States|America that he gathered
from a study of Alexander Hamilton's work the
inspiration which made him an economist of his
pronounced "National" views. The discovery of coal
on some land which he had acquired made him
financially independent, and he became United
States consul at Leipzig in 1832. He strongly
advocated the extension of the railway system in
Germany, and the establishment of the Zollverein
was due largely to his enthusiasm and ardour. His
latter days were darkened by many misfortunes; he
lost much of his American property in a financial
crisis, ill-health also overtook him, and he
brought his life to an end by his own hand on the
30th of November 1846.

List holds historically one of the highest places
in economic thought as applied to practical
objects. His principal work is entitled Das
Nationale System der Politischen Okonomie (1841).
Though his practical conclusions were different
from those of Adam Müller (1779-1829), he was
largely influenced not only by Hamilton but also
by the general mode of thinking of that writer,
and by his strictures on the doctrine of Adam
Smith. It was particularly against the
cosmopolitan principle in the contemporary
economical system that he protested, and against
the absolute doctrine of free trade, which was in
harmony with that principle. He gave prominence to
the national idea, and insisted on the special
requirements of each nation according to its
circumstances and especially to the degree of its
development.

He refused to Smith's system the title of the
industrial, which he thought more appropriate to
the mercantile system, and designated the former
as "the exchange-value system." He denied the
parallelism asserted by Smith between the economic
conduct proper to an individual and to a nation,
and held that the immediate private interest of
the separate members of the community would not
lead to the highest good of the whole. That the
nation was an existence, standing between the
individual and humanity, and formed into a unity
by its language, manners, historical development,
culture and constitution. That this unity must be
the first condition of the security, well-being,
progress and civilization of the individual; and
private economic interests, like all others, must
be subordinated to the maintenance, completion and
strengthening of the nationality.

The nation having a continuous life, its true
wealth must consist — and this is List's
fundamental doctrine — not in the quantity
of exchange values which it possesses, but in the
full and many-sided development of its productive
powers. Its economic education should be more
important than the immediate production of values,
and it might be right that one generation should
sacrifice its gain and enjoyment to secure the
strength and skill of the future. In the sound and
normal condition of a nation which has attained
economic maturity, the three productive powers of
agriculture, manufactures and commerce should be
alike developed. But the two latter factors are
superior in importance, as exercising a more
effective and fruitful influence on the whole
culture of the nation, as well as on its
independence. Navigation, railways, all higher
technical arts, connect themselves specially with
these factors; whilst in a purely agricultural
state there is a tendency to stagnation. But for
the growth of the higher forms of industry all
countries are not adapted only those of the
temperate zones, whilst the torrid regions have a
natural monopoly in the production of certain raw
materials; and thus between these two groups of
countries a division of labor and confederation of
powers spontaneously takes place.

List then goes on to explain his theory of the
stages of economic development through which the
nations of the temperate zone, which are furnished
with all the necessary conditions, naturally pass,
in advancing to their normal economic state. These
are:
#pastoral life
#agriculture
#agriculture united with manufactures; whilst in
the final stage agriculture, manufactures and
commerce are combined.
The economic task of the state is to bring into
existence through legislative and administrative
action the conditions required for the progress of
the nation through these stages. Out of this view
arises List's scheme of industrial politics. Every
nation, according to him, should begin with free
trade, stimulating and improving its agriculture
by intercourse with richer and more cultivated
nations, importing foreign manufactures and
exporting raw products. When it is economically so
far advanced that it can manufacture for itself,
then a system of protection should be employed to
allow the home industries to develop themselves
fully, and save them from being overpowered in
their earlier efforts by the competition of more
matured foreign industries in the home market.
When the national industries have grown strong
enough no longer to dread this competition, then
the highest stage of progress has been reached;
free trade should again become the rule, and the
nation be thus thoroughly incorporated with the
universal industrial union. What a nation loses
for a time in exchange values during the
protective period she much more than gains in the
long run in productive power, the temporary
expenditure being strictly analogous, when we
place ourselves at the point of view of the life
of the nation, to the cost of the industrial
education of the individual.

The practical conclusion which List drew for
Germany was that she needed for her economic
progress an extended and conveniently bounded
territory reaching to the sea-coast both on north
and south, and a vigorous expansion of
manufactures and commerce, and that the way to the
latter lay through judicious protective
legislation with a customs union comprising all
German lands, and a German marine with a
Navigation Act. The national German spirit,
striving after independence and power through
union, and the national industry, awaking from its
lethargy and eager to recover lost ground, were
favorable to the success of List's book, and it
produced a great sensation. He ably represented
the tendencies and demands of his time in his own
country; his work had the effect of fixing the
attention, not merely of the speculative and
official classes, but of practical men generally,
on questions of political economy; and his ideas
were undoubtedly the economic foundation of modern
Germany as applied by the practical genius of Otto
von Bismarck|Bismarck.

See biographies of List by Goldschmidt (Berlin,
1878) and Jentsch (Berlin, 1901), also Fr. List,
ein Vorlaufer und ein Opfer für das Vaterland
(Anon., 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1877); ME Hirst's Life
of Friedrich List (London, 1909) contains a
bibliography and a reprint of List's Outlines of
American Political Economy (1827).

==See also==
*Liberalism
*Contributions to liberal theory

==Reference==
*This entry incorporates public domain text
originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.