[570] Petition presented to a meeting of the German princes at Vienna in 1820 (Werke, vol. ii, p. 27).
[571] Baden, Nassau, and Frankfort joined in 1835 and 1836. But there still remained outside Mecklenburg and the Free Towns of the Hanse, Hanover, Brunswick, and Oldenburg.
[572] List’s expression “exchangeable value” merely signifies the mass of present advantages—the material profit existing at the moment. It is not a very happy phrase, and it would be a great mistake to take it literally or to attach great importance to it. In his Letters to Ingersoll, p. 186, he gives expression to the same idea by saying that Smith’s school had in view “the exchange of one material good for another,” and that its concern was chiefly with “such exchanged goods rather than with productive forces.” We note that List never speaks of Ricardo, but only of Smith and Say, whose works alone he seems to have read.
[573] “In the Italian and the Hanseatic cities, in Holland and England, in France and America, we find the powers of production and consequently the wealth of individuals growing in proportion to the liberties enjoyed, to the degree of perfection of political and social institutions, while these, on the other hand, derive material and stimulus for their further improvement from the increase of the material wealth and the productive power of individuals.” (National System, p. 87.)
[574] He defines “political or national economy” as “that which, emanating from the idea and nature of the nation, teaches how a given nation, in the present state of the world and its own special national relations, can maintain and improve its economical condition.” (Ibid., p. 99.)
[575] It was the example of England that gave List the idea, but the whole conception is based upon a historical error. England possessed a navy, had founded colonies and developed her international trade long before she became a manufacturing nation. Since the time of List various categories of national development have been proposed. Hildebrand speaks of periods of natural economy, of money economy, and of credit economy (Jahrbücher für National Oekonomie, vol. ii, pp. 1-24). Bücher proposed the periods of domestic economy, of town economy, and of national economy as a substitute (Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, 3rd ed., p. 108). Sombart, in his turn, has very justly criticised this classification in his book Der moderne Kapitalismus (vol. i, p. 51; Leipzig, 1902). But would that which he proposes himself be much better?
No one, we believe, has as yet remarked that List borrowed this enumeration of the different economic states, almost word for word, from Adam Smith. In chap. 5 of Book II, speaking of the various employments of capital, Smith clearly distinguished between three stages of evolution—the agricultural state, the agricultural-manufacturing, and the agricultural-manufacturing-commercial. Smith considered that this last stage was the most desirable, but in his opinion its realisation must depend upon the natural course of things.
[576] The term “normal” is one of the vaguest and most equivocal we have in political economy. It would be well if we were rid of it altogether. What controversies have not raged around the ideas of a normal wage or a normal price! One of the chief merits of the Mathematical school lies in the success with which it has effected the substitution of the idea of an equilibrium price. The idea of a normal nation is about as vague as that of a normal wage, and it is curious that our author describes as normal a whole collection of characteristics which, according to his own account, were at the moment when he wrote only realised by one nation, namely, England.
[577] P. 292. The idea of national power is, moreover, not completely lost sight of by Smith, as is proved by the following passages: “The riches and, so far as power depends upon riches, the power of every country must always be in proportion to the value of its annual produce.… But the great object of the political economy of every country is to increase the riches and power of that country.” (Wealth of Nations, Book II, chap. 5; Cannan’s edition, vol. i, p. 351.)
[578] On the question of the industrial vocation of the temperate zone and the agricultural vocation of the torrid compare National System, Book II, chap. 4.