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Rudolf Goldscheid (12 August 1870 – 6 October 1931) was an Austrian writer and sociologist, co-founder of theGerman Sociological Association, known for his theory of human economy (German:Menschenökonomie) and for developing the topic offiscal sociology.[1][2] He has been described as "the founder of scientific sociology in Vienna",[3] though he never had a job with a university.[4]
Rudolf Goldscheid was born inVienna on 12 August 1870 as the fifth child of a Jewish family of merchants. After graduating from a Viennese secondary school, in 1891 he enrolled atFriedrich Wilhelm University inBerlin to study philosophy and sociology, but quit without a degree in 1894. He remained in Germany for some years, writing novels and plays using the pseudonym Rudolf Golm, and married Marie Rudolph inLeipzig in 1898, returning to Vienna soon afterwards. Politically, Goldscheid was apacifist andsocial democrat, a member of theSocial Democratic Party of Austria and contributor to the socialist newspaperArbeiter-Zeitung. He endorsed philosophicalmonism, and his scepticism of traditional religious beliefs caused him to abandon Judaism during 1921. He died in Vienna on 6 October 1931. His funeral was attended by the city's socialist mayorKarl Seitz, and the municipal council soon afterwards named a street in his honour.[1]
In contrast tosocial Darwinism andMalthusianism, Goldscheid's theory of the human economy emphasised the idea of humans as a type of "organic capital" within a broader "developmental economy". A healthy economy would protect and promote the rights and welfare of all workers: to ignore "the direct and in particular the indirect costs" of phenomena such as lack of education, child labour, the exhaustion of workers and the spread of diseases among the labour force, was to "indulge in a fiction of productivity". Goldscheid adopted aneo-Lamarckian philosophy concerning inheritance of acquired characteristics, arguing that negative environments could damage human capabilities lastingly: what was needed, he argued, was a social environment that would foster humanHöherentwicklung, "upward development" or "evolution".[3] Goldscheid's concept of organic capital was a precedent for later theories ofhuman capital.[5]
He was early proponent of an expressly socialisteugenics in Germany.[6][7]
Goldscheid also developed the idea that a sociology of thestate must emphasize understandingpublic finance. His 1917 bookStaatssozialismus oder Staatskapitalismus ("State Socialism or State Capitalism") invented the termFinanzsoziologie, fiscal or financial sociology, arguing that the "budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies".[8][9] Goldscheid's idea of fiscal sociology influenced the economistJoseph Schumpeter's description of the "tax state".[8] Schumpeter and Goldscheid had opposing opinions of the role ofpublic debt, however: afterWorld War I, while Schumpeter argued that Austria needed to work to extinguish its debt burden, Goldscheid drew on thecameralist tradition to endorse the recapitalisation of the debt, in order to allow the state to assume a more active and entrepreneurial role.[10]
Goldscheid was financially independent, and never held a university position in any discipline.
