Gustav Gross on Kleinwächter’s Die Nationalökonomie als Wissenschaft (1884)

Gustav Gross’s brief review assesses Friedrich Kleinwächter’s published inaugural address as rector of the University of Czernowitz. Gross regards its limited scope as distinct from the recent treatments by Dilthey and Menger, but finds it worthy of attention. His judgment follows the address’s two central questions: whether political economy qualifies as a science, and where it belongs among the disciplines. He endorses the defense of its scientific standing while challenging its disciplinary classification.

Kleinwächter distinguishes science from art by defining scientific inquiry through knowledge of facts, their governing laws, their development, and the laws governing that development. Political economy qualifies because research has at least begun in each of these directions. Gross draws a methodological implication from this account:

Stillschweigend weist er dadurch auch — u. E. vollkommen mit Recht — sowohl der Deduktion als der induktiven Forschung ihren Platz innerhalb der Wissenschaft, nur an verschiedenen Stellen an.

English translation: Tacitly he thereby also assigns — in our opinion entirely rightly — to deduction as well as to inductive research its place within the science, only at different points.

Gross thus reads Kleinwächter as implicitly accommodating both deduction and induction, assigning them different places within scientific inquiry. The defense does not depend on political economy having reached maturity: Kleinwächter answers the objection of incompleteness by observing that other sciences likewise remain unfinished and may never achieve complete knowledge.

The review becomes more critical when it turns to the hierarchy of disciplines. Kleinwächter divides the sciences according to inorganic bodies, organisms, and the mental life of animals or humans; within the last group, he distinguishes individual from social life and places political economy among the legal and political sciences. Gross questions this arrangement, especially its account of the relations to jurisprudence and statistics:

Hinsichtlich der Jurisprudenz scheint uns namentlich der Umstand zu wenig hervorgehoben, daß eigentlich die Nationalökonomie die wichtigste Basis der Rechtsphilosophie bildet.

English translation: With regard to jurisprudence, it seems to us that too little emphasis in particular has been given to the circumstance that economics really forms the most important basis of the philosophy of law.

This objection gives political economy a foundational role in the philosophy of law, rather than merely a place alongside legal disciplines. Gross also disputes Kleinwächter’s exclusion of statistics from the sciences and its treatment solely as an art. The review’s significance lies in this combination of methodological openness and resistance to disciplinary boundaries that understate political economy’s contribution to legal thought or deny statistics scientific standing.