The State as Utopia

Abstract

Aims and Scope The European heritage in economics and the social sciences is largely locked in languages other than English. Witness such classics as Storch's Cours d'Economie Politique, Wicksell's Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen and Geld, Zins und Güterpreise or Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia Generale. Since about 1937, partly caused by the forced exodus of many scholars from the German language countries and the international reactions to this event, English has become the undisputed primary language of economics and the social sciences. For about one generation, this language shift did not result in a loss of access to the European non-English sources. However, after foreign language requirements were dropped as entry pre-requisites for receiving the PhD at major research universities, the European heritage in economics and the social sciences has become largely inaccessible to the vast majority of practicing scholars. In this series, we hope to publish works that address this problem in a threefold manner. An aspect of the European heritage in a language other than English should be critically documented and discussed, reconstructed and assessed from a modern scientific point of view, and tested with respect to its relevance for contemporary economic, social, or political discourse. We welcome submissions that fit this bill in order to make the European heritage in economics and the social sciences available to the international research community of scholars in economics and the social sciences.