This volume attempts to present a period of around three hundred years of the Germanlanguage tradition in economic theory. The German tradition originated as part of a larger Continental tradition in economics, the origin of which can be seen as the massive impact of Italian economist Giovanni Botero's 1588 bestselling On the Greatnesse of Cities— soon incorporated into a larger work on the Reason of State— which appeared in about 45 editions in Italian, Latin, Spanish, French and German between 1588 and 1666. Reflecting the cosmopolitical nature of Jesuit activism, Botero's connection to Germany and Mitteleuropa was strong. His first four publications appeared, respectively, in Krakow, Würzburg, Nürnberg and Frankfurt. Before the Thirty Years’ War— which marks the starting point for the present volume— there were already four Latin editions of Botero's Greatnesse of Cities published in Germany.

The broad and cross-disciplinary social science tradition started by Botero came to dominate economics in Germany more and longer than in other nations. We can find partial explanations for this in the fact that Germany— compared to countries like Holland, England or France— was a relative latecomer: eine verspätete Nation. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Germany also consisted of many states— several hundred states after the Thirty Years’ War (1648) and still around 30 three centuries later. We can speculate if the diversity and large number of small competing states with small populations may have encouraged researchers to be cross-disciplinary. To paraphrase Adam Smith, the small size of the partly regional markets for social sciences may have limited the division of labor. This may also have reinforced a cultural tendency to attempt to understand large and complex structures in a holistic way: the desire for a Ganzheitslehre.

German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762– 1814) certainly thought German political diversity, rather than unity, would cause increased learning and emulation: