A note on david hansemann as a precursor of chadwick and demsetz

Abstract

Beat Blankart has always had a strong interest in the history of the German railways. In a very thought provoking paper published in 1987 he deals with the question in how far the history of the Prussian (later German) railways in the 19th and 20th century can be explained by political cycles in the sense of the Arrow theorem (Blankart 1987). Prussian railway policy in the 19th century was characterized by frequent swings between nationalization and privatization. In the period 1820-1847 railways saw a stormy growth with no intervention by the Prussian state at all. From 1849 to 1879 there was a mixed system with private and state owned railways, sometimes in direct competition to each other. In the period from 1884 to 1919 all Prussian railways were nationalized. Finally in 1919/20 all German railways were integrated into one unified state owned system the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Blankart explains these major swings between privatization and nationalization by the Arrow instability. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.