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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

August Lösch (1906–1945): Moral Sentiments, Scholarly Rigor

Author : Peter Nijkamp

Published in: Great Minds in Regional Science

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

More than 70 years after his tragic death, the great German economist, August Lösch, remains a source of scientific reflection and debate. An intellectual giant who inspired the growth of regional economics and laid essential foundation stones for regional science, Lösch’s scholarly life in Nazi-Germany is characterized by a painful dilemma between moral integrity in a harsh period of political oppression and the growing need for independent and rigorous scholarly thinking on important political, societal, and spatial issues. In this chapter, Peter Nijkamp assesses Lösch’s all too brief career: his early research on population economics and international trade, which led on to his major contributions on location theory and regional development and to his great ambition to rewrite economic theory from a spatial perspective. The author also highlights the scientific footprints of Lösch in modern regional science.

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Footnotes
1
These statements—in translated form—are mostly taken from a publication in 1971, on the occasion of the memory of his death on May 30, 1945 (Riegger 1991), and from a vademecum on Lösch’s life, edited by Beckmann et al. (2001).
 
2
It is noteworthy that Lösch makes only passing reference to the earlier central place findings of Christaller, which may be caused by the fact that—in addition to deep cleavages in political views of these two scholars (Christaller was a supporter of the Third ‘Reich’; see also Barnes (2016) for a very informative and detailed historical analysis of the contradictory minds of Lösch and Christaller)—also the disciplines of economics and geography were totally disjoint.
 
3
It is interesting to see that, as early as 1949, Isard published an article that was directly inspired by August Lösch (Isard 1949a, b).
 
Literature
Barnes, T.J. 2016. A morality tale of two location theorists in Germany: Walter Christaller and August Lösch. In Hitler Geographies, ed. C. Minca and P. Giaccaria, 141–162. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beckmann, M.J., R.H. Funck, and H. Giersch (eds.). 2001. August Lösch “Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft.” Düsseldorf: Verlag Wirtschaft and Finanzen.
Blaug, M. 1979. The German hegemony of location theory. History of Political Economy 11: 21–29.CrossRef
Bröcker, J. 2007. Lösch and Economic Geography after 1990. In Space-Structure-Economy: A Tribute to August Lösch, ed. U. Blien, R.H. Funck, J.S. Kowalski, A. Kuklinski, and W Rothengatter, 211–228. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Bröcker, J. 2015. German roots of regional science. In Regional Science Matters, ed. P. Nijkamp, A. Rose, and K. Kourtit, 87–106. Berlin: Springer.
Chiswick, B.R., and P.W. Miller (eds.). 2015. Economics of international migration. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Christaller, W. 1933. Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Jena: Gustav Fisher.
Florence, P.S. 1948. Investment, location and size of plant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fujita, M., P. Krugman, and A.E. Venables. 1999. The spatial economy: Cities, regions and international trade. Cambridge: MIT Press.CrossRef
Funck, R.H. 2007. August Lösch and the Concept of Region. In Space-Structure-Economy: A Tribute to August Lösch, ed. U. Blien, R.H. Funck, J.S. Kowalski, A. Kuklinski, and W. Rothengatter, 69–80. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Hoover, E.M. 1948. The location of economic activity. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Isard, W. 1949a. The general theory of location and space economy. Quarterly Journal of Economics 62: 476–506.CrossRef
Isard, W. 1949b. Location of the space-economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Isard, W. 1960. Methods of regional science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kourtit, K., P. Nijkamp, and R. Stough (eds.). 2015. The rise of the city. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Lösch, A. 1937. Population cycles as a cause of business cycles. Quarterly Journal of Economics 51: 649–662.CrossRef
Lösch, A. 1938. The nature of economic regions. Southern Economic Journal 51: 71–78.CrossRef
Lösch, A. 1940. Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft, Gustav Fischer, Jena, (English translation by WH Woglom and W F Stolper: The Economics of Location, Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 1954).
Lösch, A. 1941. Um eine neue Standorttheorie. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 54: 1–11.
Martin, R. 2017. The spatial order of the economy (book review), Regional Studies, 5112), 1873–1875.
Paelinck, J.H.P., and P. Nijkamp. 1975. Operational Theory and Method in Regional Economics. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Riegger, R. (ed.). 1991. August Lösch – In Memoriam. Heidenheim: Meuer.
Weber, M. 1928. Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Metadata
Title
August Lösch (1906–1945): Moral Sentiments, Scholarly Rigor
Author
Peter Nijkamp
Copyright Year
2020
Book
Great Minds in Regional Science

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-46156-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-46157-7

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46157-7_6