Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg

Inama-Sternegg came from a family long settled in the Nonsberg region (today Val di Non) in Trentino and was the eldest son of the Royal Bavarian municipal court assessor Johann Nepomuk Inama von Sternegg. After secondary school in Neuburg an der Donau, Amberg and Munich, he studied law and political science as well as history from 1860 at the University of Munich, where in 1865 he received his doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) with a prize essay on the economic consequences of the Thirty Years' War. After a court traineeship and his habilitation in 1868, he moved in the same year to the University of Innsbruck as associate professor, where in 1871 he became full professor of political science and in 1876/77 held the rectorship. In 1880 came the call to Prague as full professor of political economy; a year later he went to Vienna as director of the Bureau of Administrative Statistics. At the same time he taught as honorary professor of political science at the University of Vienna and, from 1882 to 1896, directed the Statistical Seminar, first alone and then together with his student Franz von Juraschek. Appointed Hofrat (court councillor) and president of the Imperial-Royal Central Statistical Commission in 1884, he developed the official statistics of the Cisleithanian (Austrian) half of the empire into a modern administrative apparatus. On his initiative, the census of 1890 was processed centrally by Theodor Schäffler using electric tabulating machines of the Hollerith-Schäffler system, which attracted international attention. In scholarly terms Inama belonged to the Historical School of economics, but held an independent position within it: he rejected the exaggerated inductivism of the younger generation around Gustav von Schmoller and defended the value of deduction. His programme was to combine the statistical and the historical method in order to present the course of development of social and economic conditions; the three-volume "Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte" (German Economic History; 1879, 1899, 1901) is regarded as the first attempt at a comprehensive economic history of the German-speaking world. Apart from scholarship, from 1891 Inama was a life member of the Austrian House of Lords (Herrenhaus) and was active as president of the Society against Impoverishment and Begging. In 1899 he was elected president of the Institut International de Statistique. Honorary doctorates from the universities of Kraków, Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi), Cambridge and Vienna, as well as membership of the Viennese, the Prussian and the Leopoldine academies, underline his international standing. In 1905 he withdrew from active service to Lichtenwert Castle near Brixlegg, where he died three years later.