THÜNEN, Johann Heinrich von.

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Der isolirte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie, First edition of this classic, which Roscher considers one of the most important works written in Germany in the field of exact economics. According to Mark Blaug, Von Thünen was a neglected genius, and his magnum opus, Der isolirte Staat, is today recognized as a fundamental and pioneering economic study concerning the location of agriculture. "He was the first to develop an exact definition of marginal productivity in the modern sense (although he did not use the term) and to apply the principle generally in the theory of production and distribution. He was a founder of mathematical economics and of econometrics, combining systematic empirical research with a genius for abstract reasoning and generalization... Von Thünen's book won him considerable recognition during his lifetime. According to Schumacher (1868), Rodbertus credited von Thünen with bringing to economics the rare combination of a most exact method and a human heart, and the British Parliament used von Thünen's calculations of the grain production of the European continent in its deliberations on the corn laws... Alfred Marshall acknowledged a major debt to von Thünen" (International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences). "If we judge [Thünen and Ricardo] exclusively by the amount of ability of the purely theoretical kind that went into their work, then, I think, Thünen should be placed above Ricardo or indeed above any economist of the period

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