Politische Fragmente;

Against physiocracy

First edition of each work by the German lawyer and anti-physiocrat Johann Georg Schlosser (1739-1799). A native of Frankfurt-am-Main, friend and later brother-in-law of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Schlosser gained public attention in 1771 with his first work, Katechismus der Sittenlehre für das Landvolk. In March 1773 he obtained employment from the Margrav of Baden, whose physiocratic experiments under the suoervision of Schlettwein he was familar with, and of which he initially approved. But within a year he transferred to the post of Oberamtsverweser in Emmendingen, where two of the three villages participating in the physiocratic experiment were located. Observing the experiments at close hand, Schlosser was soon dissolusioned with the system and was to become one of the chief opponents of the physiocrats in Germany.

"The physiocratic system was to be dismissed not only because it suggested a tax that was damaging in its incidence, or solely because it denied historical reality, but because it rested on fallacious notions of economics. One of these was a theory of value also adopted by Adam Smith. Schlosser was able to refute it because he presented a more modern one. He agreed that it was not easy to separate the finished product from the raw material, the form from the material. But the raw material had a different value from that of processing or manufacture (Formgebung). It was necessary to distinguish a two-sided kind of property. Property inhered in the production of raw material (and thus in land, mining concessions, etc.) but also in that mass of form-giving forces which had been set to work in the modern state, namely in industry. All the working forces of society had been set in motion by necessity and they produced both raw material and agricultural goods as well as industrial goods. All of the forces were in motion and could not be paid by barter alone, or as Schlosser said, by Productionen" (Liebel).