With feeling of gratitude and deep appreciation to my father, Nazarov Mugbil Khalil oglu, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, who went through the whole war from Leningrad to Berlin and met the end of the war in Berlin, with infinite respect remembering the German people as highly cultured, hardworking and well-organized, to my mother Ryabova Lidia Dmitrievna and aunt Ida Alfredovna Rezel, whose parents came from Germany to Azerbaijan in the early 20th century to work in the oil industry.
Economic ideas are the product of the environment in which they arise. A thought, an idea, a word-formed consciousness, an ideology, is the result of the everyday life and the social order where it is created and developed.
V.V.Svyatlovsky, Russian historian, economist, writer
– I came to you through the dense forest, through the dense thicket, through the high mountains, through the wide rivers… I thought of you! I came to you! Come out, come out, queen of my soul’s dreams!
And hearing the quiet sound of slow footsteps, the knight Hazir even squeezed his eyes shut: he was afraid that he would be blinded by the sight of the marvelous beauty.
He stood there with his heart beating hard, and when he plucked up courage and opened his eyes, there before him was a naked old woman. Her skin, brown and wrinkled, hung in folds. Her gray hair was piled in tangles. Her eyes were watery. She was hunched over, leaning on a beak. Hazir recoiled in disgust.
– I am the truth! – she said. – Did you think you’d find a beauty? Yes, I was! On the first day the world was created. Allah himself has only seen such beauty once! But, after all, centuries have passed by since then. I’m as old as the world, I’ve suffered a lot, and that doesn’t make me more beautiful, my knight! It doesn’t!
Hazir felt he was going mad… He stood before her, looking mad, clutching his head:
– What shall I say? What shall I say?
Truth fell on her knees before him and, stretching out her hands to him, said in a pleading voice:
– Lie!
Arabic parable «The Truth»
What is truth? And how can it be attained? Especially when it comes to history, the history of economic development and especially the history of economic doctrines. In ancient times, when religion played an important role in human life, chroniclers who lived under rulers presented events from the standpoint of the interests of the ruler and the church. In the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the first scientific and technological revolution, there were works of a social nature that described the events and achievements of the rulers from the standpoint of the state and society, and the church receded into the background, although it continued to have a fairly active influence on people’s lives. Today the task of a researcher in the field of history of economic science is not only to search for the truth, but also to present it objectively and comprehensively, so that its study by researchers can be further developed, economic recommendations can be developed, and the economic policy of the state can be formed.
As noted Russian historian and historiographer Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky, it is necessary to find meaning in nonsense, it is in this unpleasant duty of the historian, and in an intelligent case to find meaning will be able to any philosopher.
Defining the meaning and usefulness of the study of history, a representative of the neo-Austrian school, economist Ludwig von Mises in his work «Theory and History: Interpretation of Socio-Economic Evolution, comparing his understanding of the tasks of history with the views of German historians, noted that the task of history – to record not all past events, but only historically significant. Therefore, it is necessary to find a criterion that would allow to filter what is historically significant from what is not. And, according to the representatives of the historical school, the study of history provides man with road signs that show him the path he should follow. Man can succeed only if his actions are in accordance with the tendencies of evolution. To discover these tendencies is the main task of history. The opinion of the representatives of the historical school seems to be more significant from the point of view of the realities of the 21st century, since there is still no one who has found the criteria that would allow to filter out what is historically significant from what is not. And should this be done? In this regard, the main task of the author of this monograph is to present materials related to the retrospective analysis of the emergence and development of economic thought in Germany, which went from the economic policy of the free cities, the «educational, national protectionism» of Friedrich List, to the ordoliberalism, to the ordo-liberalism of the second half of the twentieth century and the economic policy of modern Germany of the twenty-first century, with its successes and failures, in the context of the crisis of world migration, the coronavirus pandemic and the bacchanalia of sanctions against Russia, in which it is involved. The ideas of the historical school were, in fact, a product of the environment in which they were born, and gave roots to the formation of economic policy in Hitler’s Germany and post-war Germany, and gave quite significant sprouts in tsarist Russia (it is enough to recall the economic policy of S.Y. Witte).
