Starting especially from the 19th century and, let’s not say throughout the 20th century, there was a very strong intellectual battle of opposing economic theses. As its creators were very high-level economists, this battle has been splendidly presented in the work of the great economist Schumpeter, Historia del análisis económico (citations from the translation by Manuel Sacristán, Ariel, Barcelona, 1971). In the section the Mephodenstreit was extraordinarily violent. As Schumpeter notes, Schmoller reviewed Karl Menger’s work negatively “in his Jahrbuch, and Menger countered with a pamphlet entitled The Errors of Historicism in German Political Economy, in which he brimmed with anger and naturally provoked rejection. The incident caused much unrest and set off an avalanche of literature; both took decades to settle down.” This struggle was introduced into economic policy and, through it, into social policy, beginning to orient, as regards Schmoller’s historicist line, the whole of German politics.
Of course, Bismarck’s imperial approaches became linked, since then, with historicist positions, which in the German intellectual sphere itself gave rise to opposite approaches, derived from the famous Vienna School of Economics, from which consequences were derived in Germany, for having been defeated in World War I, and for the economic disaster created by the harsh conditions imposed by the allies, in the Treaty of Versailles.
Hence the acceptance of the theses, after that defeat, of the National Socialist party led by Hitler, author of a basic work for that ideology, entitled Mein Kampf. Reading him makes it very clear that he is the heir to the historical school, but in conflict, not with the Vienna School, but with very high-ranking economists located both in Switzerland and in England, with a systematic maintenance of opposite attitudes. The triumph of National Socialism moved German economists opposed, at the same time, to historicism and Nazism, even to go into exile, such as Hayek, for example, in England, or Stackelberg, in Spain.
Still linked to Germany – the University of Freiburg im Breisgau was next to the Swiss border – a disparate nucleus of the line arose that we might call Nazi-historicist. Such was the case of Eucken, formulator of totally opposite theoretical approaches to the official orientation of the Government of Berlin, headed by Hitler.
A pretty young lady named Edith Stein, the daughter of a medium-sized businessman, mainly related to the lumber trade, came to have an extraordinary intellectual vocation, and, at the same time, an admiration for her family environment. All of this is clear in her work Estrellas amarillas. Autobiography: childhood and youth (Editorial de Espirituality, 2019). Throughout her youth, she became more and more linked to the Catholic Church, until her conversion, attracted by the personality of Saint Teresa of Jesus. But she, eager to receive a high university education, especially in philosophy and theology, she went first to the University of Breslau and, then, to the aforementioned Freiburg im Breisgau. In that university course she experienced a very strong intellectual link with Husserl, that great philosopher admired by Ortega y Gasset. Very intelligent, Edith Sthein also observed something that she had lived up to then in her business family environment, and automatically, she became Husserl’s assistant, perceiving the atmosphere on economic issues existing in the whole of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. . She was totally abandoning the historicist line, to enter into economic policy approaches that followed the aforementioned line of abandoning historicism. We see Edith Sthein, perhaps due to the aforementioned family link, along with that line of economic science, and with projections towards Catholic thought, sustained on the Swiss border with the theses exposed in the Ordo magazine, with economic and social approaches. An admirer of our Saint Teresa –and also, by the way, a direct heiress of Jews settled in Spain–, she entered the Carmelite order. The persecution of the Jews in Germany forced her to change her residence and, when she was in the Echt convent, in the Netherlands, she was arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was martyred in the gas chamber, dying on the 9th. August 1942.
I must point out that Saint John Paul II had had a theological, philosophical university orientation and critical admiration towards the economic approaches of Edith Stein, whom he went on to praise, in a just and extraordinary way, when she was canonized, considering it wonderful that she became known. with the previous name of Santa Teresa.
For this reason, the heterodox historicist line also caused the martyrdom of this extraordinary Saint.