Friedrich Lütge

Friedrich Lütge (21 October 1901 – 25 August 1968) was a German economist, social historian and economic historian.

He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management (HHL) and at Leipzig University between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that social and economic history emerged as an alternative strand to the prism of historical materialism that was mainstream in many German universities during this period. From this followed an insistence in his economic research that the subject needs to be studied not simply from a theoretical quasi-mathematical standpoint, but also empirically and in the context of broader historical considerations.