Julius Wolf does not rank as one of the great social thinkers of the German Empire. But he played an important role in several contexts between 1890 and 1933: as a critic of Marxist economics, as an advocate of east-central European economic union under German hegemony, and as a scholar of sexuality and population concerned to reverse Germany's declining birthrate. His discussions of morality and the rationalization of sexuality were central to the discussion of sexual reform and abortion during the Weimar Republic. It is the accomplishment of Kiesewetter to link together Wolf's many contributions in this new intellectual biography. Lacking Wolf's papers, which disappeared after his death and his wife's emigration in 1937, Kiesewetter has pieced together the course of Wolf's academic life from published works, far-flung correspondence, and university and press archives.

Wolf first appeared in print at age eighteen, with a short work on the sugar industry, research he was led to while an employee of the Anglo-Österreichische Bank in charge of correspondence with sugar factories and sugar commissioners. His subsequent, breathtaking academic career—dissertation and Habilitation by the time he was twenty-four years old!—gives evidence not only of his skill as an economist with knowledge of taxation and cartels but also of his ability to play the bureaucratic academic system in the German-speaking world. By the early 1890s, Wolf was established as a professor of economics in Zurich; in 1897, he received a prestigious appointment in Breslau.

Wolf's reputation spread in the early 1890s, after the legalization of Social Democracy in Germany, when he wrote a series of attacks on Marxist economics. He criticized in particular the relationships among value, price, and profit in the newly edited second and third volumes of Marx's Capital, and took aim at the theory that workers would become increasingly impoverished under capitalism. Wolf extended his criticism of socialism to the Kathedersozialisten on the right, who advocated social reform through a strong state; he defended instead the free market, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. Wolf's work was polemical; it was also quickly written and at times sloppy in presentation, offering his adversaries easy targets even where, in Kiesewetter's estimation, the criticism was correct.

Wolf became an important voice on the right, close to the Free Conservatives and National Liberals. His liberal economics were clearly connected to German nationalism and the existing, undemocratic political system. Wolf was especially concerned with the international competitiveness of the German economy in an imperial age. In 1901, he declared that the real enemy in the economic competition of nations was the United States. In response, he called for a unified central European market, a project that he sought to promote after 1904 with his Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein. That group aimed to increase Germany's competitiveness, not to start a trade war; Kiesewetter argues that the organization thus stood as a precursor to the Treaty of Rome and not the imperialist notion of Mitteleuropa that was later associated with Friedrich Naumann and German aims in World War I. In doing so, however, Kiesewetter may make too simple a distinction between the two aims of a European common market and German power, which were not so distinct before World War I. Indeed, before the war Wolf was giving speeches to the German Navy League, and during the war he wrote pro-German articles that crossed the line between scholarship and propaganda—speeches that Kiesewetter documents, but does not reflect upon.

Wolf also made a name with his statistical work on population and racial hygiene. Here, too, Wolf stood on the right, concerned that the declining German birthrate would mean a shift of power to Russia. He sought to halt the tendency, especially in strongly Social Democratic areas, to limit family size. One remedy proposed by Wolf involved impeding access to contraceptives. His aim, however, at least as Kiesewetter reports it, was the quantitative increase of Germans rather than their qualitative improvement. It is interesting that he also favored abortion rights during the Weimar Republic—not because he defended a woman's right to self-determination, but because he made a realistic assessment of the limits of state power. Abortion was illegal but common, and was carried out in ways that cost many women their lives. Its legalization, Wolf argued, made sense from an economic perspective. These interesting arguments open up new perspectives on the debates on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. Unfortunately, analysis of the context of eugenics and population policy takes second place to summaries of Wolf's arguments in the book.

Wolf's later disappearance from accounts of the history of German economics was certainly, as Kiesewetter suggests, related to his outsider status as an economic liberal, his polemical nature, and, especially after the Nazi takeover, his Jewish ancestry (Wolf himself was Catholic). Another explanation presents itself from Kiesewetter's text: Wolf's importance seems to lie in context-specific disputes, not in economic theory. And in these disputes, historians and social scientists have not forgotten Wolf. This side of Wolf could have received better treatment. Most of Kiesewetter's long book is dedicated to paraphrasing Wolf's texts, many of limited value. The last fifty pages of the book, for example, summarize Wolf's late works on physiognomy and lineage among the Habsburgs and the ancient Egyptians—work whose larger importance is questionable at best. Ten pages are spent summarizing Rosa Luxemburg's dissertation, for which Kiesewetter has little respect, and more than thirty pages are spent describing a petty conflict with the dilettante Adolf von Wenckstern. By the end of the book, the reader has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. More's the pity: Kiesewetter convinces me that Wolf's life and work are in need of further study.