Background and strategic perspectives of his thought
Wagner is influenced by a specific mix of philosophic currents in nineteenth-century Germany, including Krause, von Gierke, Ahrens, Roeder, and Ihering (see Corado and Solari 2010).
Those influences led to a particular kind of natural rights perspective, which is clearly at odds with the individualist perspective of the Lockean tradition regarding private property rights. Instead, there is a foundational interdependence of private property (including the market) and the state, implying a critical stance regarding traditions in which the state is a necessary evil, justified solely as an enforcement agency for pre-political property rights. In short, there is no such thing as (modern) property rights without a state. The ideal type of the bourgeois property-owning agent with its historical and theoretical contingencies must not be mistaken for the human condition in general. Compared to a Locke-inspired framework, modern taxation thus can much more easily be reconstructed as a legitimate mechanism of distribution adequate for a modern society; socialization of natural monopolies and social insurance can be justified, even if seemingly violating principles of private property and contract freedom. More generally, the idea of a quantitative expansion of the public sector going along with a qualitative transformation is close at hand. Within modern economic development, the “prevention principle” becomes more important as a guiding principle of public agency, complementing the traditional principle of repression.Other influences include Malthus (whose population theory he endorsed) and the classical economists. He emphasized that achievements such as Ricardo’s rent theory are of lasting importance for the study of economics. His respect for more theory-oriented German economists is obvious, notably for Karl-Heinrich Rau, whose public finance textbook was re-edited by Wagner several times, with an ever increasing amount of additional material (see Wagner 1876).