Lujo Brentano

Lujo Brentano (1844 to 1931) was a German economist and social reformer, born into a German Catholic intellectual family of Italian descent. He studied at several universities, took a doctorate in law at Heidelberg and a doctorate in economics, and habilitated in economics in Berlin in 1871. He then held chairs at Breslau, Strasbourg, Vienna and Leipzig and, most importantly, at the University of Munich from 1891 to 1914. With the statistician Ernst Engel he investigated the English trade unions, and in 1872 he fell into a long dispute with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, accusing Marx of falsifying a quotation from Gladstone. A Kathedersozialist, a professor who advocated social reform, he was a founding member of the Verein für Socialpolitik. He signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914 and served nine days in December 1918 as People's Commissar for Trade and Industry in Kurt Eisner's Bavarian government. He influenced the social market economy and later economists such as his doctoral student Arthur Salz, and died in Munich in 1931.