HUFELAND, GOTTLIEB (1760-1817)

This article appears in Volume V13, Page 856 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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HUFELAND, GOTTLIEB (1760-1817) , German economist and jurist, was born at Dantzig on the 19th of October 1760. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native town, and completed his university studies at

Leipzig

LEIPZIG

and Gottingen. He graduated at Jena, and in 1788 was there appointed to an extraordinary professorship. Five years later he was made

ordinary

ORDINARY (med. Lat. ordinarius, Fr. ordinaire)

professor. His lectures on natural law, in which he developed with great acuteness and skill the formal principles of the Kantian theory of legislation, attracted a large audience, and contributed to raise to its height the fame of the university of Jena, then unusually rich in able teachers. In 1803, after the secession of many of his colleagues from Jena, Hufeland accepted a

call

CALL (from Anglo-Saxon ceallian, a common Teutonic word, cf. Dutch kallen, to talk or chatter)

to Wurzburg, from which, after but a brief tenure of a professorial chair, he proceeded to Landshut. From 18o8 to 1812 he acted as burgomaster in his native town of Dantzig. Returning to Landshut, he lived there till 1816, when he was invited to

Halle

, where he died on the 25th of February 1817.
Hufeland's works on the theory of legislationVersuch fiber den Grundsatz Naturrechts (1785); Lehrbuch des Naturrechts (1,790); Institutionen des gesammten positiven Rechts (1798) ; and Lehrbuch der Geschichte and Encyclopadie aller in Deutschland geltenden positiven
Rechte (1790), are distinguished by precision of statement and clearness of deduction. They form on the whole the best commentary upon Kant's Rechtslehre, the principles of which they carry out in detail, and apply to the discussion of positive laws. In political

economy

ECONOMY

Hufeland's

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

work

WORK

is the Neue Grundlegung der Staatszoirthschaftskunst (2 vols., 1807 and 1813), the second volume of which has the

special

SPECIAL

title, Lehre vom Gelde and Geldumlaufe. The principles of this

work

WORK

are for the most part those of

Adam

Smith

's Wealth of Nations, which were then beginning to he accepted and developed in Germany; but both in his treatment of fundamental notions, such as economic good and value, and in details, such as the theory of money, Hufeland's treatment has a certain originality. Two points in particular seem deserving of notice. ,Hufeland was the first among German economists to point out the profit of the entrepreneur as a distinct species of revenue with laws peculiar to itself. He also tends towards, though he does not explicitly state, the view that rent is a general term applicable to all payments resulting from differences of degree among productive forces of the same order. Thus the superior gain of a specially gifted workman or specially skilled employer is in time assimilated to the payment for a natural agency ofkmore than the minimum efficiency.
See Roscher, Geschichte der Nationalukonotnik in Deutschland,
654 662.

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