Jan Koloušek

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century Jan Koloušek ranked among the well-known and very prolific Czech economists who had the good name of a "poly-historian" with an admirable memory for history and mathematics. He acquired his knowledge of Economics through Bráf and Kaizl. He was a professor of economics at the Polytechnics in Brno and afterwards he also helped Engliš and ten years later  Macek.

He was born on 15 December 1859 in Horní Rožínka in Moravia. In Brno he graduated from the Slavic grammar school and in Prague from the Law Faculty of the Czech university. After his studies he taught at a commercial college in Chrudim and then at the Czechoslovak commercial college in Prague. Publishing articles on history, philosophical issues and financial topics he soon drew attention to himself. In 1899 he was offered the position of section councillor at the ministry of finance in Vienna to work in the department for state debt conversion. Between 1903 and 1912 he worked as a professor of economics, financial science and statistics at the Czech Polytechnics University in Brno. When he was leaving Brno for Prague to work at the Czech Polytechnics, he recommended Karel Engliš as his successor. After the outbreak of the First World War he published quite advanced articles in Our Time (Naše doba) about the Czech economy, which aim was to demonstrate its surplus and independence. Koloušek's figures helped  T. G. Masaryk in his activities abroad, and later at the peace negotiations in Paris, in which Koloušek participated as an important expert of the Czechoslovak delegation (among other experts there was the young economist Josef Macek). After returning to Prague, he joined the foundation process of the University of Commerce at the Czech Polytechnics (ČVUT). Apart from other things, he was the head member of the second-doctorate committee that assessed the application of the  second doctorate in economics for Josef Macek, who worked at that time as a section councillor of the National Settlement Board. Koloušek managed to approve Macek's second-doctorate work and to propose continuation in the procedure. Shortly after that, in spring 1921, Koloušek died. Josef Macek took on his position at the University of Commerce.

Koloušek was not involved in politics much. He was a member of parliament for the National Democratic Party in the revolutionary National Assembly. He was not a supporter of Rašín's effort to revalue of the Czechoslovak currency and he explained his view for legal devaluation in his work Rašín's Currency Reform 1919.

Koloušek was not a creative theorist; he was more an observer and an interpreter of economic events. A three-volume National Economy is a comprehensive end of Koloušek's research work

Mgr. Vladimír Seidl

On this page there can be found the following from the works of J. Koloušek: