Századok – 2014
MŰHELY - Buza János: Az "árforradalom" nyomában V/1297
1314 BÚZA JANOS prices (he used also for instance Preisveränderungen = changes in prices, große Preiserschütterung = great perturbation in prices). The term was consequently adopted by others, among them by Roscher’s Hungarian disciple Gy. Kautz, and G. Schmoller (both of them as early as 1860), then by E. Nasse (in 1863) and K. Haebler (in 1888), but the usage did not become general. As far as we know, J. Helferich for instance never used it, and Schmoller also abandoned it after a while. Yet the spread of the term in public usage is beyond doubt, as is proved by the separate article devoted to it in 1886 by the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon; the several editions of Roscher’s work cited above, and by the historical synthesis of economic theory (W. Roscher. Geschichte der National-Oekonomik in Deutschland. /A History of Political Economics in Germany/ München, 1874. p. 1085) may have played an important role in this process. The interest of Wiebe in the history of prices was supported by his professors, K. Lamprecht and especially A. v. Miaskowski. The excellent doctoral dissertation of their disciple was defended in 1894 and published a year later. This first monography of the price revoluton was widely acclaimed by the scholarly public, and Naudé encouraged the author to undertake further research, but Dr. Wiebe decided for reasons still unknown to embark on a practical career and became legal consultant for the Chamber of Commerce at Bochum. In 1906 he published a work on the half-century-long history of the Chamber, but no work on economic history written by him is known thereafter. The details of his biography are not contained in the thick biographical volumes. Georg Wiebe was born on 27 January 1867 in a small town called Morungen in Eastern Prussia (today Mor'g in Poland). His father, Leonhard Wiebe was a local tradesman. Wiebe studied at the universities of Breslau (Wrocz3aw, Poland), Tübingen, Berlin and Leipzig; his initial interest in history later turned towards economics. He died as a reservist captain on the Russian front on 30 May 1915. It was the interwar historiography that elevated Georg Wiebe to the rank of the „father of the price revolution”. Without calling his merits into doubt, it should be stated that the term itself of the price revolution emerged not at the end but around the middle of the 19th century, and its birth can be linked to the historical school of political economics in Germany and its founder, Wilhelm Roscher, who paid a good deal of attention to English and French researches on economic and price history. Although the price revolution became known in Hungary thanks to the translation of Roscher’s groundbreaking work in 1872, it remained outside the interests of economic historians until the middle of the 20th century. The spread of the price revolution as a term known and used worldwide is a process that needs further research.
