Biographical Notes
List was born in 1789 in Reutlingen in south-west Germany (for biographical details, see Henderson 1983; Wendler 2013). In the course of the territorial re-organizations of the Napoleonic era he aimed for a career in the public administration.
During his early reform attempts within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, the Faculty of State Sciences (Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultat) was founded at the University of Tubingen, and List, possessing neither a high school diploma nor a university degree, was appointed Professor of Administration Practice. After the Restoration, he had to leave the university owing to his liberal convictions. In the following years he was entirely committed to the introduction of a German customs union (Zollunion), which was eventually realized in 1834, partly based on his efforts.After authoring a petition against the illiberal practices of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg he was forced into exile, eventually settling in the United States, where he spent the years 1825-30 as a highly successful entrepreneur in the emerging railroad industry. It was during this period that he first developed the idea of a protective duty. With this idea he joined the presidential campaign of the Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson and, after the latter’s victory, used his political connections to get back to Germany, eventually returning as an American envoy to the Kingdom of Saxony. Here he acted as a major figure in the development of the German railroad system, in his view a key factor (along with the customs union) for the industrialization of the country. After some disappointments in this field, he left Germany for Paris, and between 1839 and 1840 wrote his major work, Das nationale System der politischen Okonomie (The National System of Political Economy), published in 1841. Following further serious setbacks in his last years in Germany, he committed suicide in 1846 at the age of 57.