Gerhart Von Schulze-Gävernitz

Born July 25,1864, in Breslau; died July 10,1943, in Crainsdorf, near Neurode. German economist.

In 1891 and 1892, Schulze-Gävernitz studied the textile industry and agrarian relations in Russia and taught at Moscow University. From 1893 to 1926 he was a professor of political economy at the University of Freiburg. An adherent of the historical school in bourgeois political economy, he sought to prove that it is possible to establish social peace in a capitalist society. He considered monopoly capital and the hegemony of the large banks an expression of organized capitalism, in which the industrial state consciously regulates the economy, thereby supplanting the action of automatically functioning economic laws.

The bourgeois apologetic views of Schulze-Gävernitz were subjected to a profound critique by V. I. Lenin. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin cited several passages from Schulze-Gävernitz’s The German Credit Bank (1915), a work on German banks, and pointed out that “the task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favorable light” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 27, p. 335).