Felix Somary’s short review of Richard Ehrenberg’s study of the Hamburg merchant house Parish makes a methodological objection to economic history dominated by personal anecdote. While acknowledging Ehrenberg’s industry and the value of material in his earlier work, Somary distinguishes the accumulation of evidence from its scholarly interpretation:
Das rein Persönliche und Individuelle tritt in allen seinen Monographien allzu breit in den Vordergrund, und wenn manche Ökonomen heute zur Methode des Merkantilismus zurückkehren, will Ehrenberg uns gar in die Zeit der mittelalterlichen Chronisten zurückführen.
English translation: The purely personal and individual comes far too broadly to the fore in all his monographs, and while some economists today are returning to the method of mercantilism, Ehrenberg would actually lead us back into the age of the medieval chroniclers.
The comparison with medieval chroniclers frames Ehrenberg’s practice as a retreat from analysis into narration. Somary then sharpens this general criticism into a judgment on the Parish study: its substantial scholarly yield, he claims, could be stated in three sentences, whereas its presentation resembles popular sensational fiction. Details of John Parish’s gardening, meals, sleep, guests, and wine consumption serve as evidence of misplaced emphasis. Somary’s objection is not simply that these details are domestic, but that their extensive recounting produces no demonstrated explanatory gain.
The review’s second movement tests Ehrenberg’s claim that Parish became an original theorist and teacher after retiring from business. Somary treats the invocation of Parish’s maternal relationship to Adam Smith and proximity to Smith’s birthplace with overt irony. He then contrasts the promise of a treatise on the value of time with its actual content: paternal advice against weekday dinners, late bedtimes, and missing exchange hours. Parish’s recommendations for becoming wealthy likewise amount to orderliness, early rising, and thrift—the last undercut, Somary observes, by Parish’s own household accounts.
In dieser väterlichen Ermahnung erblickt Ehrenberg „den Anfang einer wissenschaftlichen Verwertung privatwirtschaftlicher Erfahrungen“.
English translation: In this paternal admonition Ehrenberg discerns "the beginning of a scientific utilisation of private-economic experience".
This sentence isolates the conceptual inflation at issue: Ehrenberg elevates practical admonition into the scientific use of business experience without, in Somary’s account, establishing the intervening intellectual work. The review closes by challenging the very standards behind that elevation:
Was mag sich wohl mancher Mann unter „Wissenschaft“ und „Theorie“ vorstellen?
English translation: What may many a man conceive by "science" and "theory"?
The review’s relevance lies in this forceful policing of the boundary between biographical documentation, commercial common sense, and economic theory. Somary does not develop an alternative research programme; his compact, polemical argument demands that historical detail and private experience earn their scholarly significance through analysis rather than through their association with a successful merchant.
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