Economic thought of the Zurich Enlightenment

The Physical Society and its economic commission

The Zurich Enlightenment reflected on the economy of the city-state from within its ruling class. Its principal institutional home was the Physikalische Gesellschaft, later the Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Zürich, founded in 1746 under the leadership of the professor and canon Johannes Gessner by some thirty members. The society received official approval on 10 August 1746. From the outset it had an economic commission devoted to the improvement of agriculture, which led its historian Eduard Rübel to consider it probably the first association in the German-speaking world to address economic questions systematically.¹ From 1763 the society organised conversations with farmers (Bauerngespräche) and prize competitions on agricultural questions, issuing some fifty questions until 1804. The winning answers were printed and distributed free of charge to farmers and village schools.²

The orientation of this movement was agrarian. Like the Physiocrats in France, whose doctrines were known and discussed in Zurich, the members of the economic commission regarded agriculture as the foundation of the wealth of the state and sought to raise its productivity through better fertilisation, irrigation, crop rotation and forest management. A countryside in which a growing share of the population lived from spinning and weaving for distant markets was vulnerable to trade crises, as the famine of 1770–71 showed, when a slump in the textile trade deepened the effects of the harvest failure.³

Hirzel and Kleinjogg

The most famous product of this movement was a book about a farmer. Hans Caspar Hirzel (1725–1803), second city physician from 1751 and first city physician from 1761, member of the Great Council from 1763 and of the Small Council from 1778, published in 1761 Die Wirthschaft eines philosophischen Bauers, an account of the model farm of Jakob Gujer, called Kleinjogg, of Wermatswil near Uster. The book showed how peasants could increase the yields of their soil through better manuring, irrigation and proper management of woodland. Hirzel was also a founder and first president of the Helvetische Gesellschaft of 1762, which sought to overcome the internal divisions of the Confederation.⁴

Kleinjogg (1716–1785) became a European celebrity. Visitors came to see him, among them Johann Caspar Lavater, Mirabeau and Goethe, who visited in 1775 and 1779. Rousseau is reported to have called him a rustic Socrates. In 1768 the Zurich government entrusted him with the management of the Katzenrütihof near Rümlang, a state-owned farm, as a model for the region.⁵ The figure of the “philosophical peasant” embodied an ideal of rational, frugal and independent economic conduct, which the Zurich elite held up to the countryside as a model. It is telling that the model chosen was a farmer: the urban patriciate that lived from the putting-out system and from the export of capital preferred to praise the virtues of agriculture.

Johann Heinrich Waser: political arithmetic and its price

A more radical voice was that of Johann Heinrich Waser (1742–1780), a pastor who became the first systematic statistician and economist of Zurich. Ordained in 1764 and appointed pastor at the church Zum Kreuz in 1770, he was suspended in 1774 and devoted himself thereafter to statistical and economic studies. He sought to found rational government on what he called political arithmetic, compiling long historical series of data. This research contributed to the creation of a municipal fire insurance fund in 1782. Most of his writings did not pass the censorship and remained unpublished.⁶

Waser’s published works included a treatise on the size of the Confederation (1775), reflections on the dwelling houses of Zurich (1778) and a treatise on money (1778). An unpublished chronology of grain prices, the Ceres Thuricensis, also belongs to his work.⁷ In the treatise on money he distinguished between nominal, real and effective value, advocated a decimal currency with a fixed metal content to protect creditors and property owners against losses through debasement, and examined the historical ratio between gold and silver. He also calculated that fire insurance premiums would reduce mortgage interest rates by between half a percentage point and one percentage point, because insured buildings were safer security for lenders.⁸ His study of Zurich houses traced price movements and wages over a long period and attempted to explain inflation by a range of factors.⁹

Waser’s end was tragic. In 1780 he published, in August Ludwig Schlözer’s Briefwechsel in Göttingen, criticism of the management of Zurich’s war fund and figures on the city’s population and finances. He was accused of betraying state secrets and of stealing documents from the archives, sentenced to death by a narrow majority of the council and beheaded on 27 May 1780.¹⁰ The case caused a scandal throughout the German-speaking world. For a history of the financial centre it has a particular significance. Waser was executed, among other things, for publishing information about public finances. The ancien régime of Zurich regarded the state’s financial position as a secret of government. In 1780 the idea that the public had a right to know how public money was managed was a capital offence. The transparency that is today demanded of public finances and of listed companies, and the balance that Swiss law strikes between that transparency and the protection of confidential information, have a long and at times violent prehistory in Zurich.

Notes

1. Eduard Rübel, Geschichte der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich 1746–1946, Neujahrsblatt der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich 1947, https://ngzh.ch/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Neujahrsblatt_NGZH_1947.pdf. ↩
2. Rübel, Geschichte der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft (cited above). According to Rübel the first prize question, on the best method of fencing, received sixteen written answers. ↩
3. HLS, Kurmann, “Hungersnöte” (cited above), on the famines of 1770–1771 as “mitverursacht durch Konjunktureinbrüche in der Textilindustrie”, which aggravated them in regions with a proto-industrial employment structure. ↩
4. Deutsche Biographie, “Hirzel, Hans Caspar”, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd119020890.html. ↩
5. Deutsche Biographie, “Guyer, Jakob (genannt Kleinjogg, der Musterbauer)”, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz24836.html. ↩
6. HLS, Reto Weiss, “Waser, Johann Heinrich”, version of 2012 (edited 27 December 2014), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026273/. ↩
7. Emil Egli, “Waser, Johann Heinrich”, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 41 (1896), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz69112.html. ↩
8. Arthur Vogt, “Johann Heinrich Waser als Volkswirtschafter, Statistiker und Pionier des Versicherungswesens”, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik 128 (1992), no. 1, pp. 69–81, https://www.sses.swiss/journal/archive/pdf/1992-I-5.pdf/. ↩
9. Hans Ulrich Jost, “Johann Heinrich Waser, die Zürcher Wohnhäuser und die Inflation”, traverse 2017/3, https://revue-traverse.ch/article/johann-heinrich-waser-die-zuercher-wohnhaeuser-und-die-inflation/. ↩
10. HLS, Weiss, “Waser, Johann Heinrich” (cited above); Egli, “Waser, Johann Heinrich” (cited above), on the publication in Schlözer’s Briefwechsel and the date of execution. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.