Gunnar Heinsohn (21 November 1943 – 16 February 2023) was a German author, sociologist and economist and professor emeritus at the University of Bremen where he had a chair in social pedagogy from 1984.
Heinsohn published on a wide array of topics, starting from economics, demography and its relationship with security policy and genocide, and revisionist chronology theories in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky.
Life and work
Heinsohn was born on 21 November 1943 in Gotenhafen (Gdynia), the third son of Kriegsmarine U-boat commander Heinrich "Henry" Heinsohn (1910–1943) and Roswitha Heinsohn, née Maurer (1917–1992). Heinrich Heinsohn was stationed in Gotenhafen and died before his son was born when his submarine U-438 was sunk. In June 1944 the family came to Blankenhagen in Pomerania. In January 1945 they fled to Schashagen, and in 1950 the family moved to Pützchen near Bonn. He attended school in Oberkassel, Bonn and Sankt Peter-Böhl, where he received his Abitur in 1964. He studied from 1964 at Freie Universität Berlin. He graduated 1971 in sociology and gained a 1974 summa cum laude doctorate in social sciences; Heinsohn received a second doctorate in economics in 1982. In 1984, he became professor at the University of Bremen. He founded the Raphael Lemkin institute genocide and xenophoby. The centre was dissolved after Heinsohn retired. He taught at the management centre St. Gallen, at the Hochschule Luzern, and in demographic studies at the Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik in Berlin, and at NATO Defense College in Rome. He wrote various books and articles, was a regular in the media and talk shows and published entries at the Axis of good blog[4] and Schweizer Monat.
Heinsohn died in Gdańsk on 16 February 2023, at age 79.
Research and publications
Economics
In collaboration with a famous colleague in Bremen, economist Otto Steiger, Heinsohn criticized the "barter paradigm" of money. Instead of money as a medium of exchange to facilitate barter, Heinssohn replaced it with a property based credit theory of money that stresses the indispensable role of secure property titles, contract law and especially contract enforcement, liability and collateral to create secure, transferable debt titles that central banks will accept as collateral for issuing bank notes.
Interest is being explained as a property premium instead. The paradigm provides institutional microfoundations for monetary theories of production developed in the Keynesian tradition. Credit theories of money have existed since mercantilism but have not become the dominating paradigm in monetary theory. Besides promoting their paradigm as an alternative foundation for triggering economic development (much in line with the insights of Hernando de Soto, Tom Bethell and Richard Pipes), Steiger has applied it to an analysis of the eurosystem.
While this approach has similarities with institutional economics, its major differences are (1) a non-universalist, cross-cultural approach that is in line with results from economic anthropology (Marshall Sahlins, Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss and others) and strongly doubts on the "homo oeconomicus" concept. It provides instead a specific explanation of various strategies of economic efficiency become functional only in monetary economies based on property and enforceable contracts;. Heinssohn proposes a reconstruction of the connection between property, enforceable contracts, interest, credit/money and the banking system and a possible explanation for technical progress and innovation. The difference in innovativity and progress between the monetary economics of antiquity and modern times is being explained as well. Heinsohn and Steiger's model has been discussed in some post-Keynesian circles, and it has been criticized by Nikolaus K.A. Läufer.
Demography
Heinssohn used demographic patterns to explain various historic events and tendencies. His work on genocide and antisemitism was strongly influenced by his demographic studies.