Die Entwicklung des „Steuerstaates“: Ursprung, Aufstieg und Ende eines finanzwirtschaftlichen Fortschrittsparadigmas

For decades, the Schumpeterian tax state was considered the central paradigm of Fiscal Sociology. However, it increasingly fails to meet many of the conceptual challenges of contemporary public finance. To demonstrate this, the paper undertakes a double re-contextualization of the discourse on public finance. Its development is traced back to evolutionary thinking, which Joseph Schumpeter updated around 1918. However, and following the rise of democratic capitalism after 1945, thinking about the tax state became intertwined with economic control. Its socio-political specifics were marginalized. Since the Great Recession of 2008/2009 and widening fiscal crises in advanced capitalist economies, this discursive narrowing has again become the subject of political and economic controversies.

Problems of conflict zones in the educational space of a modern university

Актуальность статьи обусловлена практической необходимостью исследования зон конфликтогенности образовательного пространства. Выделяя отдельную проблему противоречий в содержании преподаваемых дисциплин, автор рассматривает предметную область подготовки специалистов в сфере налогообложения. Противоречивость его анализа с позиций экономики, права, социологии и философии отражается в конфликте преподавания соответствующих курсов. В практике ведущих университетов мира решением конфликта стало преподавание философии налогов, фискальной социологии, а также исследования налоговой культуры. Это позволило дополнить инструментальные характеристики налогов символическим анализом их роли в различных аспектах социальной реальности. В проведенном исследовании налогообложение представлено как способ конструирования социальной реальности, что акцентирует внимание на ценностных и мировоззренческих установках субъектов налогообложения. Построение образовательного процесса на этой основе способно внести гуманитарную составляющую в преподавание ряда учебных дисциплин. Это, в свою очередь, приведет к устранению определенных зон конфликтогенности образовательного пространства современного университета. The relevance of the article is due to the practical need to study the conflict zones of the educational space. Highlighting a separate problem of contradictions in the content of the taught disciplines, the author consider the subject area of training specialists in the field of taxation. In the practice of the world's leading universities, the solution to the conflict was the teaching of tax philosophy, fiscal sociology, as well as research on tax culture. This made it possible to supplement the instrumental characteristics of taxes with a symbolic analysis of their role in various aspects of social reality. In the study, taxation is presented as a way of constructing social reality, which focuses on the value and ideological attitudes of the subjects of taxation. Building the educational process on this basis is capable of introducing a humanitarian component into the teaching of a number of academic disciplines. This, in turn, will lead to the elimination of certain zones of conflict in the educational space of a modern university.

Beyond death and taxes: Fiscal studies and the fiscal state

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in fiscal studies, from the new fiscal sociology to fiscal geographies and beyond, with roots in the 20th century theories of Schumpeter (liberal) and O’Connor (Marxian). The notion of a ‘tax state’ remains particularly germane, and indeed fiscal studies have all but narrowed to assessments of the relations and implications of taxation. This paper calls for a meaningful engagement with the ‘fiscal’ in fiscal studies where taxation is better understood as being but one component of public sector revenue and expenditure (alongside other important features like asset ownership, debt/credit, and intergovernmental transfers). More than an academic quibble over terminology or unit of analysis, narrowing ‘fiscal’ to ‘tax’ obscures many budget items and misses out on important temporal trends in the political economy of state revenue and expenditure. These issues are explored in two parts: the roots of fiscal studies (politicizing theoretical underpinnings), and the various conjunctural features of the fiscal state (tracing the temporal through Canadian examples).

Tax philosophy versus fiscal sociology: choice problem in teaching

The inconsistency of the established attitudes in the analysis of taxation within the framework of the philosophy of taxes and fiscal sociology is reflected in the conflict of teaching these disciplines. One of the ways to resolve the conflict was introducing in the educational environment of the world’s leading universities courses that considered the tax culture of contemporary societies. They allowed formulating new concepts that generalized the results of the symbolic analysis of taxation, complementing the consideration of it as a tool of the state’s fiscal policy. The analysis of this practice formed the basis of the present study. According to the results of the study, a way to overcome the indicated conflict is proposed based on the compatibility of the subject certainty of the philosophy of taxes and fiscal sociology. The authors put forward provisions for the coexistence of different tax systems competing in the taxpayer’s mind for the right to represent the social whole. On this basis, the following conceptual statement concerning taxation is formulated as a special kind of way of constructing social reality, which is diversely analyzed in different university courses. This kind of approach can bring the necessary humanitarian component not only to the teaching of special disciplines but also to the educational environment of a contemporary university in general.