Eugen Schmalenbach

Vocation

Notable

German academic and economist. Schmalenbach is best known as a professor at the University of Cologne, and as a contributor to German language journals on the subjects of economics, and the emerging fields of Business Management and financial accounting. He retired from active university life in 1933; one reason for this was to avoid attention, since his wife was Jewish. Schmalenbach was the founder of the Schmalenbach Society, which works for closer links between research in business economics and the world of business business. In his works he examined questions pertaining chiefly to the theory of balanced accounts and the financing of capitalist enterprises. Elevating the capitalists’ notions about their day-to-day activities to the status of theoretical concepts, he created a “science of enterprises,” which systematized rules for the most profitable management of the economy. Writing as a defender of monopoly capital, he outlined paths for the improvement of accounting, techniques of commerce, commodity circulation, and credit as means of increasing profits and overcoming the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. An ideologist of “organized” capitalism, Schmalenbach advocated the organization of the economy into trusts with the help of the state. He died 20 February 1955, Cologne. Link to Wikipedia biography