Josef Pazourek

Jan Pazourek became an economist later than his colleagues, not before middle age, however, during nearly 40 years of  work in the field of economics he produced a great body of work. He entered the history of  Czech economic science as a promoter of modern accountancy and university commerce education and as a co-author of the first Czech economic encyclopaedia, that serves up to present day as a unique source of information about Czech economic thought and economic conditions in the first quarter of the 20th century in Bohemia and Europe.

He was born on 3 January 1862 in the family of a barley-dealer in Hořice, which is bellow the Krkonoše Mountains. He attended the teacher training institute in Hradec Králové (1877 – 1880). He started his teaching career  at schools in Hořice. He consistently learned with an unusual assiduity. As a distance student he graduated from the grammar school in Mladá Boleslav (1883). Between 1887 and 1893 he published many stories of fiction in the magazines Lyra (The Lyre), Květy (The Blossoms), Český venkov (The Czech Country), Učitelské listy (Teacher Papers) and Národní Listy (National Papers). Through his self-education he reached the teacher's qualification for higher-level schools of commerce (1894). In 1895 he was appointed professor at the commercial college in Chrudim and shortly after that at the newly opened commercial college in Hradec Králové. At that time he began to publish his professional works. From 1901 he was publishing the Accountancy Papers (Účetní Listy) where he promoted enterprise economy from various angles. Despite his great work strain, he studied law at the Prague and Vienna universities. In 1904 he got  a PhD in law. In 1907 after a second doctorate procedure he became a private docent at  the Czech Polytechnics in Prague. In 1909 after becoming an adjunct professor (since 1912 an ordinarius) of commercial sciences at the Czech Polytechnics, he left the college in Hradec, a place where he acquired a reputation for himself and the university. In 1912 he began to edit the three-volume Otto's commercial encyclopaedia, which was published after the war in 1925. At the Polytechnics he established the Institution of Commercial Sciences, which he considered to be a basis for the future University of Commerce. He started to prepare and promote its foundation very intensively. The plan was carried out not before the radical change and reorganization of the Czech University of Polytechnics in 1919. He became the first dean of the University of Commerce (UC), where he performed extensive organizational and teaching activities. In the summer of 1920 he made a research journey to Belgium, France and Switzerland in order to get acquanted with the organization of universities of commerce abroad. In 1927 he visited the United States. During nearly 40 years of  work in the Czech education of commerce he taught three generations of "strong commercial characters" who had independent thinking. He created a welfare fund for the students of the UC and supported everyone who needed help. At the same time issues of private economy occupied him, he is assumed to be the founder of private economy at the time of the Czechoslovak Republic before the Munich occupation.

In the following years he worked two more times as dean of the UC (1920-21, 1926-27) and in the academic year 1929-30 he became  rector of the ČVUT. He was a prominent member of a number of economic and science institutes, e.g. member of the Advisory Body for Issues of National Economy. His writing activity had a large scope. He wrote over 2,000 research papers. In his research activities he worked on the problems of  price formation, money theory and monetary policy. He also paid attention to the popularisation of scientific findings; he was a chairperson of one of  the professional boards of  Masaryk's work college and a frequent visitor to the Czech Economic Society. He died on 26th November 1933 shortly after he retired as a generally recognised teacher, economist, scientist, and a top expert for money and accountancy issues. Pazourek's research work shows that he was not only a narrowly specialized expert, but a complex scientific personality of high calibre in the field of economics. He get credit for edifying the Czech science of commerce and economics at the UC in Prague.

Mgr. Vladimír Seidl

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