GOTTLIEB

HUFELAND (1760-1817)  , German economist and jurist, was born at Dantzig on the 19th of October 1760 . He was educated at the gymnasium of his native town, and completed his university studies at Leipzig and Gottingen . He graduated at Jena, and in 1788 was there appointed to an extraordinary professorship . Five years later he was made ordinary professor . His lectures on natural law, in which he developed with great acuteness and skill the formal principles of the Kantian theory of legislation, attracted a large audience, and contributed to raise to its height the fame of the university of Jena, then unusually rich in able teachers . In 1803, after the secession of many of his colleagues from Jena, Hufeland accepted a call to Wurzburg, from which, after but a brief tenure of a professorial chair, he proceeded to Landshut . From 18o8 to 1812 he acted as burgomaster in his native town of Dantzig . Returning to Landshut, he lived there till 1816, when he was invited to Halle, where he died on the 25th of February 1817 . Hufeland's works on the theory of legislation—Versuch fiber den Grundsatz Naturrechts (1785); Lehrbuch des Naturrechts (1,790); Institutionen des gesammten positiven Rechts (1798) ; and Lehrbuch der Geschichte and Encyclopadie aller in Deutschland geltenden positiven Rechte (1790), are distinguished by precision of statement and clearness of deduction . They form on the whole the best commentary upon Kant's Rechtslehre, the principles of which they carry out in detail, and apply to the discussion of positive laws . In political economy Hufeland's chief work is the Neue Grundlegung der Staatszoirthschaftskunst (2 vols., 1807 and 1813), the second volume of which has the special title, Lehre vom Gelde and Geldumlaufe . The principles of this work are for the most part those of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which were then beginning to he accepted and developed in Germany; but both in his treatment of fundamental notions, such as economic good and value, and in details, such as the theory of money, Hufeland's treatment has a certain originality .

Two points in particular seem deserving of

notice . ,Hufeland was the first among German economists to point out the profit of the entrepreneur as a distinct species of revenue with laws peculiar to itself . He also tends towards, though he does not explicitly state, the view that rent is a general term applicable to all payments resulting from differences of degree among productive forces of the same order . Thus the superior gain of a specially gifted workman or specially skilled employer is in time assimilated to the payment for a natural agency ofkmore than the minimum efficiency . See Roscher, Geschichte der Nationalukonotnik in Deutschland, 654 662 .