Friedrich Otto Hertz

Born Mar. 26, 1878. Austrian Social Democrat, sociologist, historian, and economist.

Hertz graduated from the University of Vienna. In the 1920’s and 1930’s he was an adviser to the minister at the Austrian Federal Office; from 1930 to 1933 he was a professor of economics and sociology at the university in the city of Halle. In 1938 he emigrated to England. Following E. David and E. Bernstein, he espoused a revision of Marxist agrarian teachings. Hertz attempted to establish a theoretical base for the stability of small-scale production in agriculture and defended the “law of diminishing returns from the soil.” Hertz’ propositions made use of the Russian bourgeois apologists S. N. Bulgakov, V. M. Chernov, and others in the debate with Marxists on the question of capitalist development in Russian agriculture. Hertz’ views were criticized analytically by V. I. Lenin in his work “The Agrarian Question and ‘Critics of Marx’” (1901, 1970).