9 0

The influence of contemporary economic thinking on elements of ‘Faust Part II’ seems so obvious, until one asks: what kind of “contemporary economic think-ing” do we have in mind here? If we actually examine what was being written in German during the period of the conception and composition of ‘Faust Part II’ we immediately strike a problem; for the preoccupations of German-language writers on political economy contemporary with Goethe were seemingly very different to those of any Faustian economy. Occasional links can be established—the German translation of Sir James Steuart’s ‘Inquiry into the Principles of Po-litical Oeconomy’ (1767);1 direct echoes of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ (1776);2 use of Büsch on the circulation of money;3 Goethe’s interest in Möser’s ‘Patriotische Phantasien’;4 a letter thanking the Göttingen professor Georg Sartorius for his copy of an 1806 critique of Smith. But nothing we find in any of these sources seems to provide the kind of clue or insight into what Hans Schulte has so fit-tingly called ‘the “velociferous” dynamics of eternal dissatisfaction’5 that runs through ‘Faust’, a recognisable description of economic modernity.

And it is this dynamic and its instrumentalisation in “projects” that we need to keep in view; not the occasional reflections upon agricultural improvement or other economic matters in Goethe’s correspondence around which Bernd Mahl constructs his account of “Goethe’s economic knowledge”. ‘Faust II’, with its projects, catastrophes, gold and paper money, is the most obvious point of contact between Goethe’s writing and economic discourse; but its action is not set in any recognisable eighteenth-century context. If we are to assign some kind of temporality to the action, then it is a work broadly placed in the sixteenth century: post-Reformation, pre-Thirty Years’ War. However, it makes use of the “Klugheitslehre” of the seventeenth century, when ambitious young men coun-selled rulers on the most advantageous route to wealth and power in a world ruined by the Thirty Years’ War, a war which in turn would not have been pos-sible without the Reformation. And finally, the work was conceived in the later eighteenth century, when the teaching of cameralism, turning on the mutual dependency of ruler and subjects in the promotion of “Glückseligkeit”, was giving way to a new emphasis on the role of the individual in creating his own satisfac-tion—as Jakob wrote in 1805, ‘Alle Einwohner des Staats sind Consumenten.’6 We have, therefore, a series of nested reflections, or as Schulte has also suggested,7 three images of modernity separated by four centuries: from the present day, to the economic language of Goethe’s own time, though his use of imagery and personalities from the seventeenth century, applied to scenarios placed in the sixteenth century.

“StaatSwirtSchaft”, “StaatSwiSSenSchaft” and “nationalökonomie”.German economic diScourSe in the time of Goethe

1 Sir James Steuart was exiled following the Jacobite Rising of 1745; the compo-sition of his ‘Inquiry’ consequently reflects contemporary French and Ger-man writing; it was quickly translated into German and remained more widely read than his fellow-Scot Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ until the later eighteenth century.2 The reference to “Fleischer, Bäcker, Schenken” in Faust II, Act One, verse 6091 could be read as a direct allusion to Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ I.ii.2: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ Gustav Körner and Michael Sielaff, “Goethe und die Volkswirtschaftslehre”, in: Goethe-Jahrbuch 119 pp. 165–182 discuss Wealth of Nations at length (pp. 167–169) without however relating this to the contempo-rary reception of Smith, which was very limited until the mid-1790s. See my ‘Governing Economy’, Cambridge 1988, Ch. 7 “The ‘Smith Reception’ and the Function of Trans lation”.3 Johann Georg Büsch was a mathe-matics teacher in Hamburg who wrote extensively on trade and commerce; his relevance to Goethe is discussed below.4 During a visit of Karl August to Goethe in Frankfurt Goethe expressed at length his interest in Möser’s text—Bernd Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wissen, Frankfurt am Main, 1982 p. 118.5 Hans Schulte, “Introduction” to Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber (eds.) Goethe’s Faust. Theatre of Modernity, Cambridge, 2011, p. 3.6 Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Grundsätze der National-Oekonomie oder National-Wirthschaftslehre, Halle, 1805, § 880 p. 480.7 Schulte, “Introduction”, see above, (fn. 5), pp. 20–23.

keith tribe

9 1

8 As in Gottlieb Hufeland, Lehrsätze des Naturrechts und der damit verbundenen Wissenschaften zu Vorlesungen, Jena 1790; Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Philoso-phische Rechtslehre oder Naturrecht, Halle, 1795.9 Otto Brunner, “Das ‘Ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische ‘Ökonomik’” [1958], in: O. B., Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 3rd edition, Göttingen, 1980, pp. 103–127.10 Fundamental to our understanding of this is Michael Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge. Public Dept, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, Princeton / New Jersey, 2007.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a new discourse of wealth and welfare developed in the German territorial states, displacing the conception that wealth was gold, and that power was the possession of much gold. Instead, the argument was formed that the true wealth of a ruler lay not in the possession of bullion, but in having a populous territory of active subjects whose labours created “welfare for all”. The power and wealth of a ruler and his Court became directly linked to that of his people. In the early eighteenth century this language of counsel was transformed into a university science, “Cameralwissenschaft”, introduced chiefly in northern, Protestant universities as a means to improve the training of state officials. The idea that a flourishing state was based on prin-ciples of good order, and that these principles should be taught to young men in a systematic way, persisted through the century, until the vogue for Critical Philosophy, beginning in the 1790s, linked with the rise of a new natural law,8 under-cut the ideas of state and society upon which the discourse of “Cameralwissen-schaft” had been based.

“Political economy” was understood in mid-eighteenth century Britain and France as the internal organisation of nations—the organisation of the body politic by analogy with the “animal oeconomy” that François Quesnay described in the ‘Encyclopédie’. In Germany “Ökonomie” retained its Aristotelian roots as domestic economy, the organisation of the rural household and its means of sub-sistence, reflected in the genre of “Hausväterliteratur”, classically described by Otto Brunner.9 The patriarchal ordering of the “oikos” was therefore doubled in the relation of the ruler to his own “economy”, his “Staatswirtschaft”, so that both domestic and state economy functioned according to the same principles of good order; indeed, until the very end of the eighteenth century the terms “Staat” and “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” were interchangeable for this reason. Early in the nineteenth century, under the influence both of Critical Philosophy and the role of the French Revolution in disseminating a new understanding of republi-canism, economic literature transmuted into a new doctrine of economic order which, while still conceiving the wealth of a nation as founded upon the activity of a labouring population, now took its point of departure from the needs of the individual. This new discourse was referred to variously as a “Volkswirtschafts-lehre”, a “Nationalökonomie”, or indeed a “politische Ökonomie”.

Examination of the literature of the “Staatswissenschaften” of the eighteenth century, and of the “Nationalökonomie” developing from the early 1800s, reveals a disconnect from what we might anticipate to be the real economic issues of the day: the inexorable rise of public debt which finally wrecked the French “ancien regime”,10 and severely shook the British economy; the wars between the revo-lutionary French armies and European monarchies; the rise of Napoleon as a re-incarnation of Louis XIV, occupying and controlling large swathes of Western Europe; the reorganisation of Prussian public finances in order to bear the huge costs of French conquest and occupation; the creation of a postwar order in the Restauration, and the transmutation of republicanism into new utopian social movements such as the Saint Simonians. None of this is directly registered in the economic literature of the day.

In the light of this it seems appropriate to organise these brief remarks into three parts: first, consideration of the nature of the emergent discourse of eco-nomic counsel from the seventeenth century, which does indeed resonate with Goethe’s “economics”; second, the problems of money and public credit of the eighteenth century that climaxed during Goethe’s lifetime; third, the economic writing of the later eighteenth century with which Goethe was familiar, but which seem to have so little to do with his writing.

Let us begin with a leading example of the seventeenth century literature, Hörnigk’s ‘Österreich über alles, wann es nur will’ (1684). The novelty of this and

9 2

11 Wilhelm von Schröder, Fürstliche Schatz- und Rentkammer, Leipzig, 1686, Vorrede § 9.12 See Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State. German Cameralism as Science and Practice, Chicago, 2009, pp. 84 ff.

similar contemporary texts lies in the manner in which a specific form of eco-nomic management is recommended as the path to wealth and hence power. Hörnigk emphasised the importance of money as a means of circulation that promotes activity, and so the augmentation of the money supply results in an expansion of activity in general. However, the fact that money = coin = bullion represents a significant constraint; and it is in the light of this constraint that we should understand his injunction to attract as much gold and silver as pos-sible into the land. This has little to do with the usual conception of hoarding, nor with the casual attribution of a confusion of bullion and wealth that is so often made in relation to “mercantilist thought”. As he states in Ch. XXIV, ‘Dem Kaufer selbst, der es ausgelegt, kann es wieder zu gut werden’—money as a means of circulation promotes activity, and so the augmentation of the money supply results in an expansion of activity in general.

The linkage of wealth to power was expressed most pithily in Schröder’s affir-mation that there were just two key principles that a ruler had to observe: the maintenance of a standing army and the knowledge that there was ‘viel geld im kasten.’11 The addressee was the ruler and his Court; the explicit concern for the ruler’s well-being was implicitly linked to the prospects of personal advance-ment. Here chemistry and commerce could become variant options for the am-bitious projector in search of patronage; and the resulting careers typically combined the skills of alchemy and of business. The prototypical Projector, adept in these new arts, offered to the territorial rulers of Europe surefire ways of amassing gold, wealth and prestige. Once successful in gaining position at Court, such persons could then turn it to their own advantage in the exploitation of mines, the construction of factories, the fabrication of perpetual motion ma-chines and various wheezes for the turning of base into precious metal.

However, by the mid-eighteenth century counsel regarding the path to univer-sal prosperity was no longer the province of individual adventurers of this type; it had instead been institutionalised in the university system as systematic teaching on national wealth and welfare. The final representative of the type was Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, who in 1765 made personal representations to Frederick the Great regarding the Prussian iron industry, based on his special knowledge of chemistry. By 1768 he had ruined the industry and was imprisoned.12 But during the 1750s Justi had made a name as a theorist of state management, publishing in 1755 his “Staatswirthschaft”, which deals not only with the work of political and economic management, but also includes provisions for the good order of social life, excluding only the conduct of private households. The object of management, according to Justi, is state property—defined as including not simply all moveable and immoveable goods within the frontiers of the land, but also the capacities and skills of its inhabitants—and the purpose of manage-ment is the augmentation of state property to the greatest extent possible. Many other writers subsequently elaborated on these themes, which remained dominant in the German language area to the end of the century, and whose echoes we shall shortly see in Büsch.

First however we need also to introduce the two outstanding monetary disas-ters of the eighteenth century, both of which were linked to the new phenome-non of public debt. Linked to these was the brief experiment in Britain with paper money, following the suspension of cash payments by the Bank of England in 1797. As we shall see, Goethe was certainly familiar with this experiment; but before examining this, we must first deal with the actual monetary disasters of which Goethe would have been aware.

The creation of public debt as a means of financing warfare was a British in-vention, and throughout the eighteenth century was linked to an efficient system of domestic taxation. The increasingly disorderly nature of French public finances

9 3

13 See Antoin Murphy, Richard Cantillon. Entepreneur and Economist, Oxford 1986 pp. 69 ff.;14 Gabriel Etienne de Sénovert (ed.), Oeuvres de J. Law, Paris, 1790, pp. i-ii, cited: in Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, Princeton / New Jersey, 2008, p. 315.15 This account draws on Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, see above (fn. 14), pp. 319 ff.16 Henry Thornton, Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, London, 1802.17 Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wissen, see above (fn. 4), pp. 406 ff. On Thornton see Edwin Cannan, The Paper Pound of 1797–1821. A Reprint of the Bullion Report, second edition, London 1925.18 Ernst Klein, Von der Reform zur Restauration, Berlin, 1965, p. 16. See also the section “Die finanzielle Lage von 1810–1822”, pp. 82 ff.

is by contrast part of the story leading up to 1789, but in fact both countries sought a similar solution to their difficulties following the end of the Spanish War of Succession in 1713. In Britain, the South Sea Company was formed in 1711 and exchanged the various debts arising from the war into stock, reducing the rate of interest by one-third. By 1720 the directors of the Company devised a plan to abolish the National Debt over a twenty-five year period by converting long and short-term annuities into Company stock, and selling stock options on a market which rapidly began a rise to several multiples of the par value. This model was followed by John Law in Paris, but with the important variation that his bank was also able to issue bank notes, with the assistance of which its stock options could be purchased.13 The upward spiral that this practice engendered could not last long, and in the late summer of 1720 the bubble burst in both London and Paris.

Of more immediate relevance to Goethe was the rerun of this catastrophe during the early years of the French Revolution. During the autumn of 1790 the first collected edition of John Law’s writings was published in Paris, and its editor highlighted its relevance to the current concern with public debt, taxation and credit. Citing Steuart in support, he wrote in his introduction that:

credit plays so considerable a role in the political economy of modern na­tions, and is connected so intimately to their prosperity, and even to their existence, that it could be said that the science of government is nothing but the science of credit itself.14

The idea behind the issue of “assignats” was to link newly-nationalised church property to a paper instrument that could be used to buy land and as a currency.15 Although when first issued against land the “assignats” were bonds, they quickly became monetised and then, given the lack of regulation in their issue, their face-value fell. As with the earlier crisis of the South Sea and Mississippi com-panies, this did not take the form of a general inflation, since coin remained in circulation; instead it disrupted the relationship between assets and credit, failing to retire debt in an orderly fashion but at the same time creating paper assets whose value quickly plummeted.

This was therefore distinct to the British move from a convertible paper to a non-convertible paper currency in 1797, for this involved a sovereign currency, not a separate monetary asset. Goethe was familiar with Thornton’s contem-porary account of this experiment16 since his friend Sartorius reviewed the text in 1804 for the ‘Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung’, Goethe editing it with great interest.17 But in this case the introduction of paper money did not lead to any great monetary turbulence, nor did Thornton anticipate this as a likely outcome.

There is of course a fourth case, not involving the issue of a paper currency, but of a severe financial crisis involving public credit. Here the defeat of Prussia in 1806 led to the imposition of a substantial levy and occupation costs, prompt-ing a series of measures known collectively as the Prussian reforms. In the early days of the crisis, for example, Wittgenstein proposed that the Contribution de-manded could be funded by a forced loan on the Prussian population, 25 % in cash and the rest in paper money. To effect this he proposed the foundation of a national bank, on the model of the Bank of England.18 The underlying financial dynamics of the Prussian Reforms upon which Klein lays so much emphasis would have been evident to Goethe, together with many other financial schemes canvassed in seeking to deal with the problem of the Contribution, and here again there is in evidence the intimate relationship between warfare, public debt and schemes for monetary expansion.

94

19 Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wissen, see above (fn. 4), p. 123.20 Gottlieb Hufeland, Neue Grundlegung der Staatswirthschaftskunst, vol. 1, Gießen, 1807, Vorrede.21 Hans-Jürgen Schings, “Magicians of Modernity: Cagliostro and Saint-Simon in Goethe’s Faust II”, in: Schulte (et al.) (eds.), Goethe’s Faust, p. 82, citing: Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wissen, see above (fn. 4).

The point that emerges from this brief outline is that in Goethe’s lifetime there were three separate major events involving debt, credit and paper currency. While these find no direct resonance in Goethe’s writings, more important is the fact that neither can we find any direct resonance of these events in most contemporary economic writing. In any case, consideration of the books that Goethe actually had in his library underscores this point. Although of course Goethe read far more than the works in his own library, there is some merit in considering the material he collected and sometimes read, for the existence of these books has been taken as evidence of Goethe’s knowledge of contempo-rary economic writings without, however, considering the actual content of the books in question.

The section “Nationalökonomie” in Ruppert’s catalogue of Goethe’s library includes 84 titles; but the overwhelming majority of these titles are specialised works on trade and agriculture of little general interest. There is no copy of Steuart’s ‘Inquiry’, no copy of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’. There is a copy of Sar-torius’ summary and critique of Smith, discussed below, but this is a radically-abbreviated conspectus of ‘Wealth of Nations’; and just two significant economic texts from the early 1800s: Gottlieb Hufeland’s ‘Neue Grundlegung der Staats-wirthschaftskunst’ (originally in two parts 1807/1813, here in an 1813–1818 edition), and Jakob’s ‘Grundsätze der National-Ökonomie oder Theorie des National- Reichthums’ in its third 1825 edition. Hufeland and Jakob contributed to the crea-tion of “Nationalökonomie” in the early 1800s; notably, Jakob was the translator of Jean-Baptiste Say’s ‘Traité’, also writing his own textbook based on Say. The second (1813) part of Hufeland’s work is entirely devoted to money: coins, types of money, banks and circulation; but Goethe’s copy of the book is uncut, so while we know that Goethe did not read this copy, whether he read another is simply a matter for speculation. There is also a copy of Johann Georg Büsch’s ‘Ab-handlung von dem Geldumlauf in anhaltender Rücksicht auf die Staatswirtschaft und Handlung’ (1780), which he bought in 1784 and 1785.19 But including the two Sartorius volumes, that is five works out of 84 that in any respect represent general discussion of economic phenomena; and one of these five is uncut. The Büsch text does indeed refer to Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’; but in the second 1800 edition of his book Büsch admitted that he had not read Smith very care-fully, a point noted by Hufeland in his review of the early German reception of Smith; but of course Goethe never read his own copy of Hufeland.20 Furthermore, there is nothing, apart from Büsch, among these books that Goethe owned which directly addresses the issues of money and value so often associated with Goethe; so I will consider Büsch first, and then Sartorius.

Schings, citing Mahl, talks confidently of Goethe’s knowledge of economics based on Johann Georg Büsch’s ‘Abhandlung von dem Geldumlauf’, suggesting that Goethe drew on this source for his understanding of inflation.21 There are two problems here: what do we understand by inflation, and does Büsch’s text contain anything relating to this?

Inflation in the modern sense, as a general depreciation in monetary value, first appeared during the First World War; it not only involves paper money, but a developed system of credit and banking. Eighteenth-century bubbles were not inflation in this modern sense, since it was only the value of particular mon-etary assets that diminished, not the currency in general. Hence, contra Schings, Büsch’s treatise could not include any discussion of “inflation”. In pre-twentieth century economies, the money in circulation was usually either bullion, or linked to bullion, besides the brief episodes noted above when paper money was heavi-ly used. Inflation is not simply a rise in prices, however rapidly this occurs; this is usually a natural part of the price mechanism. It is more properly conceived as an accelerating rise in prices fed by monetary expansion. Here the echoes of

9 5

22 Johann Georg Büsch, Abhandlung von dem Geldumlauf in anhaltender Rücksicht auf die Staatswirtschaft und Handlung, second edition, Hamburg, 1800. “Vorrede zur ersten Auflage”. I refer to the second edition of this work, which Goethe did not own, for reasons that will become plain.23 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), Einleitung § 10—a clear echo of Smith as cited in fn. 2.24 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book II § 62, pp. 309–311.25 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book II § 62, pp. 312–314.

the eighteenth century are clear, but at that time the money supply was almost entirely in silver and gold, the banking system was compartmentalised and very undeveloped, and credit a matter almost entirely limited to commercial trading and public debt.

Early modern economies were founded upon a bullion coinage; since eco-nomic output grew very slowly, if at all, the fixed nature of this money supply was not necessarily a problem. There were recurrent problems of currency de-basement—alloying gold or silver with other metals—and clipping coins, so that their face value was no longer their bullion value. However, in such circumstances there was no quick and reliable way of increasing one’s stock of money, apart from conquest and plunder. Trade and economic development first emerged in the seventeenth century as a means to national wealth. It was recognised that a general shortage of money would slow the activity in an economy, just as a plentiful supply of money would stimulate it. And it was also for this reason that the exploitation of gold mines, or alternatively the short cut through alchemy, was the stock in trade of the projectors swarming around the courts of Europe. The principal instabilities of early modern economies came from warfare, disease and bad harvests, not from endogenous fluctuations in economic activity, and consequent problems with the stock of coin and its circulation.

So Schings must be mistaken, and by extension Mahl. This can be demonstrated by actually looking at Büsch’s book, and determining any relation it might or might not have to the various issues discussed above.

First, there is a lengthy “Vorrede” in which Büsch firstly describes the Wissen-schaft relating to “Staatswissenschaft” as a “relatively newly-created knowl-edge”.22 He identifies a flourishing “Staatswirtschaft” with a “good circulation” of money, and in this respect he recapitulates the substance of seventeenth-century writing in a new context. He notes that de Pinto’s ‘Traité de la circulation et du credit’ (1771) is the first book to deal explicitly with these matters, but he then argues that the works of Steuart and Smith are superior and less abstract. However, even these writers do not properly deal with the general influence that the circulation of money has on the “Staatswirtschaft”. He follows on with remarks on Cantillon, Forbonnais, Melon and Du Tot. This completes his survey of the existing literature.

What is the relation of money to monetary circulation according to Büsch? In Book One, ‘Von dem Entstehen und den ersten Wirkungen des Geldumlaufs, überhaupt’ he shows how money in circulation creates incomes for those with wares to sell, a small amount of money creating greater incomes the faster it passes from hand to hand. Consequently the emphasis is upon the ways in which the path of money can be smoothed, and the various ways in which the exchange of money for goods and services can itself impede the circulation of money. Within this process the self-interest of one serves the interest of all, concluding in his “Einleitung” that ‘Das Geld schafft den Reiz, der freie Menschen veranlaßt, für das Auskommen anderer zu sorgen, in dem sie sich selbst zu die-nen glauben.’23 To demonstrate how this works he begins in the first book with a condition in which money does not exist, showing how each family is forced on to its own resources and any exchange is impeded by the absence of money. Once money exists, however, then exchange can begin and the economy forms into a process of circulation: money against goods and services. The second book then deals with economic value, loosely related to the value of labour; and so therefore the prices at which goods are bought and sold reflect the labour which has entered into their creation. In passing he criticises Hume’s concep-tions of public debt, commerce and circulation;24 and he clearly distances himself from any idea that rising prices can directly be related to the amount of money in circulation.25

9 6

26 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book III § 35.27 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book III § 57, p. 498.28 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book III § 59, p. 502.29 Büsch, Abhandlung, see above (fn. 22), book III § 61, p. 508.30 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford, 1976, V.iii.92.31 Büsch states in the “Vorbericht zur zweiten Auflage” that he only began serious work on the revision of the first edition in 1798.

The third book deals with domestic circulation, and here he does finally come to credit and public debt, the latter being described however as a “nutzbares Eigenthum”.26 Discussing instances where Austria and Russia introduced paper money to a limited extent, he summarised:

aber neben diesen Bankpapieren hat fast jeder Staat so viele andere Papiere in kriegszeiten unter allerlei Benennungen in Gang gesetzt, und eine schein­bare hülfe darinn gefunden, daß man mit Gewißheit sagen kann, für die Ge­schichte dieses Jahrhunderts sei eine Geschichte des mannigfaltigen Papier­geldes, wenn sie in einiger Vollständigkeit geschrieben würde, äusserst wichtig. Sie haben allen in den welthändeln tähtigen [sic] mächten scheinbare kräfte gegeben, in deren Gefühl sie gewagt haben, was sie sonst nimmer würden gewagt haben, oder auch, wenn sie in dieselben verwickelt waren, länger darinn ausgehalten haben, als ihnen sonst möglich gewesen würde, gewiß aber nicht zum wohl der Völker. und wie sehr haben wir zu fürchten, daß england bald ein schreckliches lehrgeld über das Papier­unwesen geben werde. wie gern schrieb ich noch jetzt eine Geschichte des papiernen Jahr­hunderts, zu welcher das oben angeführte Blatt ein vorläufiger entwurf war, in einiger Vollständigkeit.27

But for that, he went on, his age and his lack of overall command of the material stood against him. He then turned to a brief account of the “assignats”, noting that the principal problem of any paper money is that its quantity had no direct relationship with the quantity of things, a relationship that paper money could only achieve with full convertibility into gold.28 Naturally, argued Büsch, paper money was also of no use in war if the war was fought beyond the borders of a state that had issued it; but, he added, recounting the internal turmoil of France and the Terror, ‘… so habe ich freilich nicht dabei an solch ein Krieg gedacht, wie dieser war.’29 From there he proceeds to a financial history of the war of the kind that he perhaps had wished to write, showing how the use of new monetary instruments first extended activity and related costs, and then led necessarily to an increased tax burden.

The arguments about public debt and paper money developed by Büsch in the second edition of his ‘Abhandlung’ are naturally of great interest, drawing as they do upon Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ keynote definition of wealth as the ‘annual labour of a nation’. Smith ended his work pondering upon the conse-quences of the ‘project of an empire’ that Britain had pursued ‘on the west side of the Atlantic’, in the last line of the text suggesting that it would be better to ‘accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her cir-cumstances’.30 The work was published in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was signed and the American Revolution got truly under way, creating the first world republic and becoming the predecessor of the French Revolution. The second edition of Büsch’s text forms a valuable yet neglected commentary on all this; but it is not the edition that Goethe owned. He bought the first edition in January 1784, a few months after the Treaty of Paris brought the American Revolutionary War to and end; and that first edition contained none of the material that makes the second so interesting in this connection.31 In the second edition Büsch includes a note of the revisions made to the first edition, and this records that the paragraphs upon which the summary of Books 1 and 2 above is based remain unaltered, while paragraphs 36–42 are enlarged, and 55 to 64 are entirely new. All of these paragraphs contain exactly the materi-al on state debt and paper money that might seem most obviously related to ‘Faust II’; but they were not, nor could they have been, included in the first edition of Büsch’s text. It is of course possible that Goethe did read the second edition

97

32 Georg Sartorius, Handbuch der Staatswirthschaft zu Gebrauche bey akademischen Vorlesungen, nach Adam Smith’s Grundsätzen ausgearbeitet, Berlin, 1796, p. iv. See my Governing Economy, see above (fn. 2), pp. 165–166.33 Georg Sartorius, “Vorrede” to ‘Von dem Elementen des National- Reichthums, und von der Staatswirth-schaft’, Göttingen, 1806, p. IV.34 Georg Sartorius, Abhandlung, die Elemente des National-Reichthums und die Staatswirthschaft betreffend. Erster Theil, Göttingen, 1806.

of Büsch’s text; but the edition of the book which he actually owned did not in-clude material on the kind of phenomena to which Schings alludes.

What, then, of the summary of Smith which Sartorius had given to his friend Goethe? In 1796 he declared that Smith had discovered “the truth”, and in seeking to disseminate this truth he made a 40,000 word summary of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’, some 10 % of the original.32 The first two books of the work, containing what are still today recognisable as Smith’s “economic principles”, summarises each chapter in one paragraph. More discursive sections of ‘Wealth of Nations’, dealing for example with money and its circulation, are reduced to bare propo-sitions; importantly, the argument concerning the human propensity to exchange is suppressed entirely. Once the summary reaches the end of Smith’s Book II, Sartorius inserts his own section which summarises the principles of Books III to V as if they were part of a cameralistic treatise on “Staatswirtschaft”. But it is the 1806 revision of this text which Sartorius sent to Goethe, now in two separate texts: the summary of Smith, and his commentary upon it. He was now less enchanted by Smith’s work, its historical inaccuracies and the false conclu-sions drawn therefrom.33 The 1806 edition of the précis therefore presented a simple abstract of Smith’s work, rendering the principles “briefly and faithfully”, even where these might be deemed erroneous. Commentary upon ‘Wealth of Nations’ was now reserved for a separate book, published in the same year, in which Sartorius drew in part upon Lauderdale’s criticisms of the work, especially in Section Three where a distinction is made between national wealth and the wealth of individuals, the origin of such wealth and the means for its increase.34 In particular, Sartorius here took exception to Smith’s account of value, suggest-ing that Smith sought “an equal and unchanging measure of value”.

Whatever the faults of Sartorius’s treatment of Smith, two points can be made. Firstly, he did provide in his 1806 summary a workable outline of the argu-ment of ‘Wealth of Nations’, although he makes no reference to the important editorial introduction to the new French edition that Garnier edited in 1802, and which would shape the reading of Adam Smith everywhere for the next fifty years at least. Secondly, his criticisms of Smith concerned his abstracting ap-proach, and in particular his account of labour and value. There is no generalised critique of Smith’s wider project concerning commerce, luxury and the forma-tion of wealth, nor of the way in which Smith related human action to economic development.

While it is plausible that a writer like Goethe might be drawn to this broader understanding of Smith’s view of commercial society, and there is evidence in his writings of direct knowledge of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’, he would have found no hint of this in his friend’s writings. As with Büsch, who elaborated arguments relevant to Goethe in an edition that Goethe did not possess, no use-ful conclusion about Goethe’s wider knowledge of Smith, or of contemporary economic writing, can be made on the basis of the books in his library whose subject matter was broadly related to “Nationalöko nomie” and political econ-omy. Which is not to say there is no relation between Geothe’s conception of economic organisation and contemporary literature; just that any evidence of such connection remains buried in his papers and correspondence.