Economic Thought of Werner Sombart:

A Survey of the Past Twenty Years

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to survey German and Japanese studies of Werner Sombartʼs thought during the past 20 years. The Heilbronn Conference in 1991, organized by Jürgen Back-haus, led to a Sombart revival that followed “a renaissance of the German Historical School” in the 1980s. Many scholars were encouraged to reconsider the contributions of Sombart to the development of German economics. Section I of this paper offers an explanation of why an energetic rediscovery of Sombart has occurred in the past 20 years. Section II proffers commentary on three excellent books and arti-cles on Sombart published in Germany （Appel 1992; Brocke 1992; Lenger 1994）. These three works deserve to be discussed in detail because they provide fresh insights into Sombartʼs life, academic achievements, and his influence on contemporaries as well as later generations. In addition, the three volumes edited by Backhaus （1996 a; 1996 b; 1996 c） that summarize the re-sults of the Heilbronn conference are noted, along with the work of Takebayashi （2003）, which is one of the most valuable studies focus-ing on Sombart and Weber during the past dec-ade. Section III considers recent publications on Sombart in Japan. Since the late 1990s, Japanese Sombart studies concerning the history of eco-nomic thought have been on the rise, perhaps in-spired by the outstanding studies in Germany that occurred nearly a decade earlier. Tamura（1996; 1997; 1998）, Yanagisawa （1998; 2001）,　Makino （2003）, and a few emerging scholars will be reviewed here. In this section, the rela-tive novelty of recent Japanese studies on Som-bart is elucidated in comparison with that of re-cent German scholarship. Section IV provides suggestions as to what subjects may merit fur-ther exploration in the future. JEL classification numbers: B 15, B 21, B 31.