Karel Engliš

Karel Engliš was born on 17 August 1880 in Hrabyně in Silesia, the ninth child of a village butcher. After the Czech secondary school in Opava (school-leaving examination 1899), he studied law at the Czech Faculty of Law of the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, where the economist Albín Bráf shaped his intellectual orientation. He completed his studies in 1904; a subsequent stay in Munich as private tutor to Count Czernin gave him the opportunity to attend lectures by Lujo Brentano. After posts at the Provincial Statistical Office in Prague and at the ministry in Vienna, he completed his habilitation in 1910 at the Czech Technical University in Brünn (today Brno) under Jan Koloušek, with a study of standard wage rates. In 1911 he became associate professor and in 1917 full professor in Brünn. With the founding of Masaryk University in 1919 he moved to its Faculty of Law and, as its first rector (1919/20), oversaw its constitution. In Brünn the so-called Brünn School of economics arose; here he also received Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, whose visits are recorded in the family guest book. At the same time he was a politician of the Czechoslovak National Democracy and, between 1920 and 1931, six times finance minister; he is credited with the stabilization of the crown, the tax reform of 1927 and the management of the consequences of the Great Depression. From 1934 to 1939 he served as governor of the Czechoslovak National Bank, pushed through the first devaluation of the crown in 1934, and resigned after the German occupation in February 1939. In the same year he went to Charles University in Prague as a full professor. In December 1947 he became its rector, but already on 27 February 1948, two days after the Communist coup, he had to step down. Engliš's main theoretical contribution is the teleological method: against the causal-subjectivist theory of value of the Austrian School, and starting from Kant's critique of knowledge, he developed an economic doctrine that understands economic relationships as a purpose-directed order. In the methodological dispute of the 1920s and 1930s he wrote polemical essays against Böhm-Bawerk's theory of value and against the Engländer and Bilimovič schools; at the same time he shared the Austrian School's core conviction that economic individualism remains indispensable for a modern market order. His two-volume main work, *Soustava národního hospodářství* (A System of National Economy; 1938), summarizes this system. In 1952 he was compulsorily transferred by administrative order from Prague to his birthplace Hrabyně, his pension was drastically cut, and his works were removed from the public libraries. There he died, impoverished, on 13 June 1961. His rehabilitation came only after 1989: in 1991 President Václav Havel posthumously awarded him the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk; in 2022 the Czech National Bank dedicated a commemorative banknote to him.