Johann Karl Rodbertus

Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805 to 1875), also known as Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, was a German economist and socialist and a leading member of the centre-left in the Prussian national assembly. Born in Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania, he studied law at Gottingen and Berlin and philosophy at Heidelberg, served in the Prussian justiciary and settled on his Pomeranian estate of Jagetzow in 1835. By 1837 he had set out his social platform in Die Forderungen der arbeitenden Klassen. He defended the labor theory of value, held that interest and profit result from the exploitation of labor, and argued that capitalist economies tend toward overproduction because production and consumption fall out of step. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848, he served briefly as Minister of Education and spent his last twenty years in retirement. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk thought his account of exploitation superior to that of Karl Marx in profundity and coherence.