ABSTRACT
The economics of Malthus and Ricardo ended with a justification of the seamy side of capitalism by demonstrating that the defects of the capitalist order were inevitable. Socialist thinkers, on the other hand, drew from the existence of these evils the inference that a communistic society must be established. But in Germany another trend became manifest. Here economists turned away from an atomist and mechanist view towards an organic conception of society, a conception which was rooted in philosophy and bore fruit in the romanticist movement. A universalist social and economic idea was contraposed to an individualist one. The hour for this mental revolution struck in 1794, when Fichte published his Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (translated as The Science of Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1868, London, 1889), which gave a decisive impetus to romanticism. This impetus was reinforced when two years later the same philosopher, in the Grundlage des Naturrechts (translated as The Science of Rights, Philadelphia, 1868, London, 1889) for the first time superseded individualist natural right.
