Adolph Heinrich Gotthilf Wagner was born on 25 March 1835 in Erlangen (near Nuremberg) and died on 8 November 1917 in Berlin.

Rudolf Wagner, his father, was a physiologist and university professor. Adolph Wagner finished his study of economics at the University of Heidelberg in 1857. His academic career included positions at the Handelshochschulen (Merchants Superior Schools) in Vienna and Hamburg, chairs at the universities of Dorpat (Livonia), Freiburg in Breisgau and, finally, the prestigious Humboldt University in Berlin, where he held the chair of Staatswissenschaften (sciences of the state) from 1870 until 1916; he was succeeded by Werner Sombart.

In terms of directly traceable influence on subsequent developments in public eco­nomics, Adolph Wagner is probably the most influential member of the triad of German Finanzwissenschaft (public finance) in its Golden Age (a phrase coined by Richard Musgrave), comprising also Lorenz von Stein and Albert Schaffle. Even today, he is fairly well known to students of public economics as the author of Wagner’s Law, refer­ring to the tendency of an increasing relative size and functional importance of the public sector in the development process of market societies, characterized by the secular trends that became clearly visible in the nineteenth century: industrialization, urbanization, and unprecedented economic growth. His successful academic career made him a figure with some influence not only in academia, but also in German tax and social policy. Nor was his reputation confined to the German-speaking academic world: apart from countries such as Italy, he had some influence in the US (see Wagner 1886, 1891; Senn 1997).

Wagner is in at least two respects the protagonist of a third way: he holds an “intermediate” position in the Methodenstreit (battle of methods) between theory- oriented and historical economists and in the confrontation of liberal individualism and collectivistic socialism. His so-called “state socialism” is basically an attempt to give indi­vidualist, socialist, and conservative principles their due, with the market and the state as functionally complementary institutions.

Wagner is a foremost protagonist of the “socialists of the chair”, a group of con­servative academics influential in social policy issues in Bismarck’s Germany. Bismarck (whom Wagner regarded as a state socialist) implemented social insurance systems much along the lines advocated by that group. Wagner is also an early member of the Christian-Social Party founded in 1878, whose social policy orientation was combined with the kind of anti-Semitism characteristic of many Christian-social-conservative movements in continental Europe of that time. Wagner seems to have endorsed some kind of pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism, speculating about an eventual correlation of the aptness of Jews for capitalist business and their alleged lack of concern for the public interest (Wagner 1893: 818). Even though such leanings attenuated during the second half of his life, he was praised by Wilhelm Vleugels (1935) for having anticipated some of the socio-economic tenets popular among the Nazi intellectual milieus, while E.A. Clark (1940) discussed those links in a denunciatory tone.

Wagner’s personal temper seems to have been somewhat belligerent, once earning him a challenge to a duel. He stressed disagreements even with scholars endorsing a by-and- large similar vision of socio-economic affairs in theory and policy. Conflicts are reported in cases where no major theoretical antagonism seems to have been at stake (for example, with von Stein in his Vienna years). Notwithstanding this, some differences with the contemporary currents were indeed substantial, notably with respect to the Historical School. He considered its weakness as it regards economic theory a real problem, not least because he felt that the Marxian current of socialism was clearly superior in that respect. Wagner (1891: 320) stressed that German writers “would wish not to be judged abroad by the narrow opinions of the younger historical school, more particularly... Professor Schmoller”.

The following characteristic features of Wagner’s approach to economics indicate his position among different currents.