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History of Economics Review
ISSN: 1037-0196 (Print) 1838-6318 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rher20
Georg von Charasoff: A Neglected Contributor to
the Classical-Marxian Tradition
Christian Gehrke
To cite this article: Christian Gehrke (2015) Georg von Charasoff:
A Neglected Contributor to
the Classical-Marxian Tradition, History of Economics Review, 62:1, 1-37
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18386318.2015.11681279
Published online: 10 Mar 2016.
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History of Economics Review No. 62 (Summer)
Georg von Charasoff:
A Neglected Contributor
to the Classical-Marxian Tradition
Christian Gehrke*
Abstract: Since their re-discovery in the 1980s Georg von Charasoff’s previously
neglected contributions to the classical-Marxian approach to prices and income
distribution, which anticipate concepts and analytical results of Piero Sraffa, John
von Neumann, and Nobuo Okishio, have been appraised in several articles. Until
recently, however, not much was known about Charasoff’s life and the
intellectual, political, and artistic circles in which he moved. The present paper
fills this gap. It documents traces of Charasoff’s life and of his intellectual
preoccupations that have been assembled from various archive sources in
Azerbaijan, France, Georgia, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland.
‘… a gifted scoundrel, mystical anarchist and proven
genius, mathematician, poet, anything you like.’
(Boris Pasternak on Georg von Charasoff)
1
Introduction
Since Georg von Charasoff’s previously neglected contributions, Karl Marx über
die menschliche und kapitalistische Wirtschaft (1909) and
Das System des
Marxismus. Darstellung und Kritik (1910), were rediscovered by Egidi and Gilibert
(1984) several articles and book chapters have been published that provide
summary accounts, critical appraisals and comparative assessments of Charasoff’s
pioneering work on the classical-Marxian approach to prices and income
distribution.
1
Until recently, however, not much was known about Georg von Charasoff’s life.
Prior to the essay of Klyukin (2008), who discovered some interesting details
concerning the later phase of Charasoff’s life, almost all the known facts came from
a short curriculum vitae, which Charasoff wrote at the age of 25 on the occasion of
the submission of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg, and
from the Prefaces of his two books on Marx’s economic theory. The printed version
of Charasoff’s ‘Lebenslauf’, which he submitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and
Natural Sciences at the University of Heidelberg in 1902, reads:
2
I was born on 24 June 1877 in Tbilisi. My parents were Russian Armenians.
From 1886 to 1890 I attended the first classical gymnasium in Tbilisi; then
after the death of my father I was sent to Odessa, where I attended the
classical Richelieu gymnasium. In 1893 I returned to Tbilisi and one year
later I passed my final exam at the already mentioned gymnasium as an
external pupil at the age of 18. Thereafter, I became a student of medicine in
Moscow. During the students’ protests of 1896 I was expelled and forced to
go abroad in order to continue my studies. I came to Heidelberg and here I
decided, following an inner impulse which already in Moscow I had difficulty
in suppressing, to give up medicine and to turn to mathematics. So I enrolled
at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Ruprecht-Karls-
Universität Heidelberg and after four years of study I submitted my
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History of Economics Review, 62:1, 2015
2
History of Economics Review
_____________________________________________________________________________
dissertation and passed my doctoral examination on 27 February 1901,
3
choosing mathematics as the main field and physics and mechanics as
supplementary fields. (Charasoff 1902: 68)
From the Preface of his first book on Marx’s economic theory we also know that
Charasoff was living in Zurich in October 1908, and that the book had emanated
from a series of (public) lectures which he had given in the course of the preceding
three years. Moreover, Charasoff dedicated his book to ‘My dear children Alex,
Arthur, and Helene’ and concluded his Preface with a note of thanks to ‘my friend
Dr Otto Buek’ (1909: ii and v). The Preface of the second book, Das System des
Marxismus, is dated ‘Lausanne, on 24 December 1909’ and it is dedicated to ‘My
friends Marie Charasoff and Otto Buek’.
The purpose of this essay is to supplement these slender pieces of information
with some further biographical details, in an attempt to reconstruct the personal,
cultural and intellectual milieu in which Charasoff developed his contributions to
economic analysis. The main emphasis will be on the period from 1897 to 1915,
which Charasoff spent predominantly in Germany and Switzerland, and on which
some new findings can be presented, based on archival research in Heidelberg,
Zurich, Lausanne and elsewhere. It needs to be emphasised that the portrait of the
man which emerges is still based on rather fragmentary pieces of information, and
that the available documents on which it draws exhibit a particular bias: as
Charasoff lived the life of a private scholar during most of this period the few
documents that have been preserved are mostly from administrative bodies.
The essay is organised as follows. Section 2 provides a short summary account
of Charasoff’s contributions to the classical-Marxian tradition in economic theory.
Section 3 provides some additional details on Charasoff’s family background and
early education. In Section 4, the focus is on Charasoff’s study period at the
University of Heidelberg, from 1897 to 1902, and on his friendship with Dr Otto
Buek. In Section 5, some traces of Charasoff’s life in Zurich, in the period from
1902 to 1909, are documented. Section 6 turns to Charasoff’s stay in Clarens and
Lausanne during the years 1909 and 1910. In Section 7, the contemporary reception
of his two books is briefly summarised. Section 8 covers the period from 1910 to
1912, in which Charasoff enrolled as a student of political economy at the
University of Zurich. Section 9 discusses Charasoff’s planned contribution to
Roberto Michels’s Handwörterbuch der Soziologie project. Section 10 then
documents the circumstances of Charasoff’s return to Tbilisi in February 1915, and
Section 11 informs about the (unauthorised) re-publication of major parts of his
books in two German literary-political journals in 1918, 1920 and 1921. Last,
section 12 provides an account of Charasoff’s life and intellectual preoccupations in
the period from 1917 to 1931, which he spent in Tbilisi, Baku, and Moscow.
2
Charasoff’s Contributions to the Classical-Marxian Tradition
Charasoff was one of the first economic theorists to recognise that prices of
production and the rate of profit can be determined by the eigenvector and
eigenvalue of the input coefficients matrix respectively. He not only anticipated
most of the arguments that were proposed later in the discussion of Marx’s
‘transformation problem’, but also noted the duality property of the price and
quantity system, a finding that is usually associated with the seminal paper of John
von Neumann (1945-6 [1937]). Moreover, in the course of his investigation he
defined and made use of the concepts of a ‘production series’ (Produktionsreihe), of
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