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obviously a must, even though Isard left the first two more or less aside. Perhaps he
thought them to be sufficiently known anyway, but I will show that their respective
contributions to spatial economics are not sufficiently appreciated even until these
days, and even certain discoveries regarding economics in general might not yet be
fully perceived in the scientific community. Furthermore, regarding the Historical
School, I will mention Sch
¨
ffle only in passing, but devote a section to Roscher,
because I want to convince empirical economic geographers to rediscover him as
one of their early masters. Though influential on the development of spatial
economics in Germany, he has been largely ignored since a century because of
modern economics' verdict on the Historical School being a-theoretical and there-
fore useless. Finally, I will also deal with Pred¨hl and Weigmann, just because Isard
devoted so much space to them. In the same year when Isard's paper appeared,
Pred¨hl published a topic in the spirit of the Historical School reporting interesting
observations on the spatial dynamics of the global economy (Pred¨hl
1949
), but his
theoretical attempt of 1928 that Isard refers to did not turn out to be fruitful for
progress in Regional Science. The writings of Weigmann before 1933 are confuse
and those after 1933 cannot be called anything but awful. Regarding the other
mentioned authors, I briefly mention Christaller in the context of L¨sch and Central
Place Theory. I skip Schneider due to space limitation; his work on spatial pricing,
internationally well perceived at the time, would need an own treatment. Finally,
I also skip Engl¨nder (
1924
,
1926
,
1927
) and Ritschl (
1927
) because of minor
originality. Readers interested in an extensive review and comprehensive list of
references are referred to Ponsard (
1983
). Blaug (
1997
) gives a short historical
overview which, in my opinion, overvalues Weber and undervalues L¨sch.
7.2
Th ¨ nen
Marc Blaug, in his authoritative “Economic Theory in Retrospect”, wonders about
the fact that spatial economics “has always been the peculiar province of German
economists.” (Blaug
1997
, p. 614). His conjecture is that this “historical curiosity”
is just a coincidence to be explained by the fact that the 'father' of spatial
economics, Johann Heinrich von Th¨nen, was a German. As Isard (
1949
, p. 479)
pointed out, there may be other reasons related to the fact that geography was more
important on the continent than in England, the hotspot of classical economics, in
the nineteenth century. But no doubt, as Samuelson said in his masterful recon-
struction of von Th¨nen's theory at Th¨nen's 200th anniversary, “Among
geographers and location theorists, Th¨nen is the founding god.” (Samuelson
1983
).
Johann Heinrich von Th¨nen was born 1783 in Lower Saxony. After an edu-
cation in agriculture he bought an estate (
Gut Tellow
) in north Germany and ran it
profitably during his lifetime. In economics Th¨nen was an autodidact, naming
Adam Smith as his main teacher. Th¨nen was not only an agricultural entrepreneur
and private scholar, but also an active social reformer and innovator in agricultural
technology. He died on
Tellow
1850.
