OF SOCIETY. 553 , 



an independent landed proprietor, born in the north- 82. 



J. H. von 



west of Germany, and occupied during the greater Thunen. 

 part of his life with the management of an estate in 

 Mecklenburg, one of the independent sovereign states 

 of North Germany. 



With a natural bent towards abstract and mathe- 

 matical reasoning, and possessed of great practical ex- 

 perience and influence, he certainly carried out, more 

 than Fichte himself did, the injunction of the latter 

 not to leave things which could be calculated to a 

 fatal hazard. Born in 1783, he published, after pro- 

 longed studies and experience, his principal work, with 

 the characteristic title, ' The Isolated State with re- 

 spect to Agriculture and Economies' (1826). The 

 title further indicates that the book deals with the 

 influence which price of corn, fertility of the soil, 

 and taxes have upon agriculture. In order to in- 

 vestigate the relation and influence of these different 

 factors he adopts a method similar to that used in 

 the mechanical sciences, as, e.g., in physical astronomy, 

 where the motion of cosmical bodies, subject to a 

 definite law, is first calculated upon the supposed 

 simplest arrangement, and then corrected by intro- 

 ducing perturbations such as are to be met with 

 actually in nature. 



of subsistence of the mass of the 

 community. He arrived ... at 

 a formula which expresses the 

 amount of natural wages. . . . To 

 this formula he attributed so much 

 importance that ... it led him 

 to establish on his estate a system 

 of participation by the labourers 

 in the profits of farming, of which 

 some account will be found in Mr 



Sedley Taylor's ' Profit- Sharing be- 

 tween Capital and Labour' (1884). 

 Von Thunen deserves more atten- 

 tion than he has received in Eng- 

 land ; both as a man and as a 

 writer he was eminently interest- 

 ing and original, and there is much 

 in his works that is awakening and 

 suggestive." (Ingram, 'History of 

 Political Economy,' 1893, pp. 187-8.) 



