Friedrich List - Biography

Biography

List was born in Reutlingen, Württemberg. Unwilling to follow the occupation of his father, who was a prosperous tanner, he became a clerk in the public service, and by 1816 had risen to the post of ministerial under-secretary. In 1817, he was appointed professor of administration and politics at the University of Tübingen, but the fall of the ministry in 1819 compelled him to resign. As a deputy to the Württemberg chamber, he was active in advocating administrative reforms. He was eventually expelled from the chamber and in April 1822 sentenced to ten months' imprisonment with hard labor in the fortress of Asperg. He escaped to Alsace, and after visiting France and England returned in 1824 to finish his sentence, and was released on undertaking to emigrate to America.

Arriving in the United States in 1825, he settled in Pennsylvania, where he became an extensive landholder. He first engaged in farming, but soon switched to journalism and edited a German paper in Reading. He was active in the establishment of railroads. It was in America that he gathered from a study of Alexander Hamilton's work the inspiration which made him an economist of his pronounced “National System” views which found realization in Henry Clay's American System. In 1827 he published a pamphlet entitled Outlines of a New System of Political Economy, in which he defended the doctrine of protection. The discovery of coal on some land which he had acquired made him financially independent.

In 1830, he was appointed United States consul at Hamburg, but on his arrival in Europe in he found that the Senate had failed to confirm his appointment. After residing for some time in Paris, he returned to Pennsylvania. He next settled in Leipzig in 1833, where for some time he was U. S. consul. He was a journalist in Paris from 1837 to 1843. He wrote several letters for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, which were published in 1841 in a volume under the title of Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie.

In 1843 he established the Zollvereinsblatt in Augsburg, a newspaper in which he advocated the enlargement of the custom's union (German: Zollverein), and the organization of a national commercial system. He strongly advocated the extension of the railway system in Germany. The development of the Zollverein to where it unified Germany economically was due largely to his enthusiasm and ardour.

In 1841, his ill health had led him to decline an offer to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a new Cologne paper of liberal views, and Karl Marx took the post. He visited Austria and Hungary in 1844. In 1846, he visited England with a view to forming a commercial alliance between that country and Germany, but was unsuccessful. His latter days were darkened by many misfortunes; he lost much of his American property in a financial crisis, ill-health also overtook him, and killed himself on 30 November 1846.