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Raumforschung und Landesplanung , an important German spatial planning institu-
tion. Walter Christaller also belonged to the group and explicitly supported the
plans. Central Places turned out to be a helpful concept to stabilise the Nazi power
in the conquered areas. Still, Christaller also defended the scientific planning
approach against leading Nazi ideologists in a planning debate around 1940 (see
Rieter ( 2014 ), and further references there).
Pred ¨ hl
7.8
The other less known scholar most extensively reviewed by Isard is Andreas
Pred¨hl, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy from 1934 until
his dismissal by the British administration after the end of the war. 1953 he became
professor in M¨nster. In a 1925 response to Weber, 1928 prominently published in
the Journal of Political Economy (Pred¨hl 1928 ), he made an attempt to bring
spatial economics back into the framework of neoclassical equilibrium theory.
Criticizing Weber as having moved away from the basic concepts in economics
was right. But in my opinion Pred¨hl's alternative was a cul-de-sac. The style was
vague, not only according to today's standards but also according to the standards in
equilibrium theory of his time. The main message is a common place about
substitution. The impossibility of reconciling an endogenous location theory with
the constant returns to scale version of neoclassical equilibrium was not touched
upon. In later writings, Pred¨hl gathered interesting observations on the spatial
structure of the global economy (Pred ¨ hl 1949 ). But this work is unrelated to the
theoretical attempt just mentioned and reviewed by Isard. It is worth mentioning,
however, that Pred ¨ hl was the missing link between pre-war and post-war spatial
economics in Germany. His students from the University of M ¨ nster, Rolf Funck,
Karin Peschel and others, revived the spatial economics tradition in the 1960s and
founded the German section of the Regional Science Aassociation in 1965.
Conclusion
Isard deserves admiration for having forcefully brought back the spatial dimen-
sion into economics afterWorldWar II. It was largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon
literature, and under the dominating influence of this literature also in mainstream
economics in general. Isard discovered the strong German tradition dealing with
the issue and having brought up many interesting and fruitful ideas. Spatial
economics today is a respected and integral part of mainstream economics, in
particular since Krugman's groundbreaking paper showing, in a fully developed
general equilibriummodel, how endogenously a spatially differentiated structure
emerges in an initially perfectly homogeneous world. With hindsight one can see
more clearly than in the late 1940s, which elements of the German tradition turned
out to be helpful and lasting, which ones just expressed wishes and ambitions for a
general theory that never could be fulfilled, and which ones even proved to be
misleading and hindering scientific progress.
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