Heinrich Pesch's Solidarism and Boris Ischboldin's Scientific Reformism

Abstract

Professor Boris Ischboldin has devoted a lifetime of productive scholarship to economic science. By virtue of his native gifts and a highly cultured background he has attained to a breadth of scholarship which is reminiscent of that giant of modern economics, Joseph Schumpeter. Ischboldin's linguistic skills have enabled him to acquire an uncommon familiarity with the works of economists that is truly international in scope, and that is one factor which prompts me to compare him with Schumpeter. Among the results of his efforts are an approach to, or school of, economics which he chooses to call the School of Economic Synthesis. It involves, among other things, a synthesis of various approaches to analysing economic realities—approaches whose various practitioners often tended to regard their own as the one correct and only legitimate method. In less skillful hands, or perhaps because of less charitable hearts, diversity often resulted in a kind of tension that was not always creative, as well as a mutual exclusiveness and even scholastic in‐tolerance which put an unneeded burden on the progress of the science. With Professor Ischboldin and the co‐founder of the School of Economic Synthesis, Arthur Spiethoff, variety became instead the basis for complementary creativity! Thus, such disparate figures as David Ricardo and Wesley Mitchell, or Leon Walras and John Commons find themselves embraced into a single schema that Ischboldin calls, “a theory of economic laws and methodology”.