Josef Kaizl

Who was Josef Kaizl?

Josef Kaizl was a Czech professor and politician in the Austria-Hungary Empire. He was a member of the Imperial Council, and finance minister between 1898 and 1899.

Kaizl studied law at the Charles University in Prague, and economics at University of Strasbourg, where he studied under Gustav von Schmoller and Georg Friedrich Knapp. He started teaching political economy at the Charles University in 1879, becoming a full professor in 1883, in the then Czech section of the university. He was closely associated with Jan Gebauer and Tomáš Masaryk, who later became the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic.

In 1885, Kaizl would be elected to the Imperial Council for the Old Czechs, but returned his seat in 1887. He then worked with Masaryk on the expanding the Realist philosophical movement. They would join the Young Czechs in 1890. In 1891 and 1895, the Young Czechs were highly successful in elections; this political power was transferred in Kaizl receiving the post of finance minister in the Count Thun government, the highest political position a Czech would ever come to hold in Austria-Hungary.