Friedrich Lenger

European cities in the modern era, 1850 - 1914

In European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850-1914 Friedrich Lenger offers the first truely European account of Europe’s major cities in a period crucial for the development of much of their present shape and infrastructure.

Towards an urban nation : Germany since 1780

For many people, urbanization and the growth of big cities promised new lives, employment opportunities and increased prosperity. And in the long run this fundamental process of social change witnessed the spread of a new urban way of life. In the short run, however, the rapid urbanization of German society brought a range of pressing social, political and environmental concerns. Rapidly expanding cities meant overcrowding, sickness, pollution and growing inequality between the rich and poor. While some of these problems were largely overcome in the course of the twentieth century, German cities faced new challenges due to the Nazi dictatorship, the bombing of World War II, and the interventions of city planners in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.This book explores the nature and impact of Germanys urbanization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and emphasizes the range of solutions and reforms, both private and governmental, introduced to address these issues. What did these new cities look like? How did they develop? Who ran them? How were cities perceived by their inhabitants? Exploring these and other key questions, this book makes a vital new contribution to studies of urbanization, one of the most fundamental factors in the creation of the modern era.

Ethics and Economics in the Work of Werner Sombart

The work of Werner Sombart (1863–1941) presents an especially interesting case for any attempt to take stock of the contribution of the historical school to the relationship between economics and ethics. One the one hand Sombart started out as a student of Schmoller following many characteristic paths of the historical school. On the other hand he used his reading of Marx to press for a more theoretical historism and sided with Weber in his attempt to separate carefully between scientific propositions and value judgements.1 When Sombart published the first edition of his opus magnum Modern Capitalism in 1902 it was directed above all against “the foggy veils of ‘ethical sentiments’” that to him seemed characteristic of the work of the ethical and historical school of economics so dominant in turn of the century Germany.2 Since he is usually treated as a representative of the last generation of the historical school his critical stance is in need of explanation. It is due to the nature of Sombart’s work that such an explanation has to proceed historically itself.3 It is well known that Sombart changed his political positions considerably over the course of his long life: from the socialism of the chair to fascism, as an East German author stated in the early 1960s, or from state socialism to romantic anticapitalism, as could be argued more accurately.4 These changes were often accompanied by methodological reorientations and were clearly mirrored in his scholarly work as well. Thus the chronological approach being used in this article is not only the consequence of a deformation professionelle of the historian but also the reflection of Sombart’s work itself. This work, however, will only be discussed as far as it touches upon the relationship between ethical values and economic and social science on the one hand, the role of ethical motivation in economic history and in economics more generally on the other.5

Metropolenkonkurrenz. Die Weltausstellungen in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts

Competing Metropolises. The World Expositions of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century The article analyses the world expositions from 1851 to 1900 as representations of western modernity and focuses on three of its dimensions: The first one is crystallised in the dominance of modern machinery as symbol of the industrial era in the expositions themselves. The second concerns the rise of mass culture and mass tourism already obvious in the earliest expositions but usually attributed by researchers to an «organised modernity» of later days. And finally the negotiations over standards of the modern city are considered which were pushed forward by the intertwinement of expositions and urban development. With respect to all three dimensions the tension between the claim of universality manifest in these celebrations of western modernity and the representation of the non-western world at the world fairs is of special interest.