A tanner's son without a degree became a professor and dreamed up Germany's common market
Friedrich List hated manual work in his father's tannery, trained as a clerk, and ended up a professor at Tübingen by patronage, to the fury of established academics. In 1819 he rallied Frankfurt merchants behind a radical idea: tear down customs borders between German states.
List was baptised in August 1789 in Reutlingen, a free imperial city in Württemberg, the youngest child of a prosperous master tanner who also served as a city official. After the town's Latin School and an unenthusiastic apprenticeship in the tannery, he qualified as an administrative clerk and entered government service in 1805. Posted to Tübingen in 1811, he sat in on university lectures and read widely.
Reform under the new king, William I, sped his rise from 1816. Backed by minister Karl August von Wangenheim, he became chief auditor at the finance ministry in Stuttgart and surveyed emigrants to understand why so many were leaving. Asked to modernise civil service training, he complained in 1817 that nobody at the university taught national economics, agriculture, industry or trade, and that government methods were so antiquated a 17th-century official could return to his desk unchanged. A new political science faculty opened in Tübingen that October, with List appointed professor despite fierce objections that he owed the post to favouritism.
His liberal journalism made the government suspicious, and he had to petition the king to rebut charges of subversion. In 1819 he organised the General German Trade and Industry Association, regarded as Germany's first modern business association, which campaigned for a single German market as the precondition for industrialisation, protected by retaliatory tariffs against foreign trade barriers.
Over time his thinking became a nationalist political economy with influence in Europe and the United States: free trade inside the nation, tariffs on imports, and the cost of protection treated as an investment in future productivity. He pushed for the Zollverein customs union, helped shape the German historical school and the American school of economics, and worked on a major liberal encyclopedia of political science. The French thinker Emmanuel Todd sees him as a forerunner of Keynes. He died on 30 November 1846.
Source: Friedrich List
