Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Sozialwissenschaften — Summary

Schumpeter’s lecture-essay is a history and prognosis of the social sciences, but also a methodological intervention. Its opening denies that “social science” is an ordered system: it is a conflictual plurality of disciplines, methods, practical needs, and intellectual temperaments.

Und deshalb gibt es im Grunde keine Sozialwissenschaft, sondern nur Sozialwissenschaften, deren Kreise sich vielfach schneiden.

English translation: And so at bottom there is no social science, but only social sciences, whose circles intersect in many ways.

The main thesis follows from this pluralism: progress in the social sciences does not occur through planned unity, but through a turbulent alternation of analysis, reaction, specialization, and later reintegration. Schumpeter’s central standard is not moral or political usefulness but scientific explanation: the attempt to grasp social phenomena causally, empirically, and theoretically.

Wem die trockenste analytische Kausalkette leuchtet, wer den feinsten Reiz spezifisch wissenschaftlicher Arbeit erfaßt, der verliert sehr bald den Geschmack an jenem Antichambrieren vor den wahren Problemen, zu dem ein jeder verurteilt ist, der der intellektuellen Situation unserer Zeit nicht ins Auge blicken und sich mit ihr nicht abfinden will.

English translation: He for whom the driest analytic chain of causation shines, who grasps the finest charm of specifically scientific work, soon loses all taste for that waiting in the antechamber before the true problems to which everyone is condemned who will not look the intellectual situation of our age in the face and come to terms with it.

The essay’s first movement explains why the social sciences arose later than the natural sciences. Antiquity and the Middle Ages had poetry, history, theology, and jurisprudence, but not social science in Schumpeter’s sense, because they treated norms as revealed or authoritative rather than as phenomena to be explained. The decisive break comes in the eighteenth century, when industrial and political revolutions make “society” itself problematic. The old order no longer seems self-evident; law, state, economy, morality, and religion become objects of inquiry.

Schumpeter’s most striking rehabilitation is of eighteenth-century natural law. Against nineteenth-century simplified accounts of it as barren rationalism, he presents it as the matrix of modern sociology, legal theory, economics, ethics, and historical theory. Its errors were real—especially its tendency to infer universal ideals from empirical knowledge—but its scientific achievement was fundamental: it sought the social sources of law, morality, and economic life.

Was der Nil für Ägypten ist, das war das Naturrecht im 18. Jahrhundert für das sozialwissenschaftliche Geistesleben und selbst über die Grenzen der Sozialwissenschaften hinaus, vor allem in Deutschland.

English translation: What the Nile is to Egypt, natural law was in the 18th century to the intellectual life of the social sciences and even beyond the boundaries of the social sciences, above all in Germany.

This is why Schumpeter insists that natural law’s inquiry into society was not merely jurisprudence or philosophy. Once stripped of metaphysics and universal legislation, it becomes the first great theory of social relations.

Das war nichts anderes als Soziologie — in ganz demselben Sinn wie wir sie heute treiben, und von uns nur getrennt durch Fortschritte der Technik der Wissenschaft.

English translation: That was nothing other than sociology — in exactly the same sense in which we pursue it today, and separated from us only by advances in the technique of science.

A core conceptual move is Schumpeter’s separation of explanation from valuation. The eighteenth century’s greatness lay in causal analysis; its mistake lay in believing that science could also prove what ought to be. Schumpeter treats this as a permanent boundary for social inquiry.

Und die Forscher meinten um so mehr die Dürstenden tränken und die Hungernden speisen zu können, als sie die unüberbrückbare Kluft zwischen Erkenntnis und Zielsetzung nicht sahen.

English translation: And the researchers believed all the more that they could give the thirsting to drink and feed the hungering, precisely because they did not see the unbridgeable gulf between knowledge and the setting of aims.

The third section narrates the nineteenth-century reaction: Romanticism, Carlyle, Comte, and the historical school all attacked the analytic inheritance of the eighteenth century, often misunderstanding it. Yet Schumpeter’s deeper claim is that they did not really destroy it. Even historical research, when it collected facts against theory, supplied the material for later theory. Apparent discontinuity conceals functional continuity.

This leads to the essay’s sociology of science. Schools fight, exaggerate, denounce predecessors, and imagine that they begin anew; nevertheless, research is driven by objective problems and by the structure of inquiry itself. Schumpeter names this impersonal pressure the "Logik der Dinge":

Dieser „Logik der Dinge“ auf dem Gebiet der Forschung entspricht ein analoges Phänomen auf allen unterscheidbaren Gebieten sozialen Lebens, von denen die Geschichte erzählt. Freilich ist der Ausdruck sehr ungenau und leicht mißzuverstehen. Selbstverständlich handelt es sich da nicht um eine reale „Kraft“, sondern um die Tatsache sehr zwingender Situationen.

English translation: This "logic of things" in the field of research corresponds to an analogous phenomenon in all distinguishable domains of social life of which history tells. Admittedly the expression is very imprecise and easily misunderstood. It is of course not a matter of a real "force," but of the fact of very compelling situations.

The fourth section argues that this “logic of things” explains why no major method or problem once discovered can be permanently suppressed. Historical research, theory, psychology, sociology, and economics all return because each answers a real intellectual need. Scientific development is therefore neither smoothly rational nor arbitrary: it is conflict-ridden on the surface, cumulative underneath.

The final section turns to Schumpeter’s present and future. He is sharply critical of dilettantism, political sermonizing, and philosophical invasion, especially in economics. Yet beneath the noise he sees serious work: legal sociology, religious psychology, ethical sociology, economic theory, and statistically informed analysis. The future belongs neither to grand metaphysical synthesis nor to mere archival accumulation, but to specialized, empirically nourished theory.

Je mehr Wasser unsere Flüsse hinabströmt, desto mehr wird sowohl die Tatsachensammlung an sich und ohne Hinblick auf einen bestimmten theoretischen Zweck wie auch die Gestaltung dieser Tatsachen um ihrer selbstwillen, wie sie die Geschichtsschreibung betreibt, vom Wege der Sozialwissenschaften abrücken und desto klarer wird der analytische Zweck aller Wissenschaft — das spezifisch wissenschaftliche Interesse an der generellen Wahrheit — auch bei uns hervortreten.

English translation: The more water flows down our rivers, the more both the collecting of facts in themselves and without regard to any particular theoretical purpose, and the shaping of these facts for their own sake, as historiography pursues it, will move away from the path of the social sciences, and the more clearly the analytic purpose of all science — the specifically scientific interest in general truth — will emerge among us too.

The essay is relevant as an early sociology of scientific development and as a defense of disciplined social theory. Schumpeter anticipates later debates over value-neutrality, specialization, interdisciplinarity, and the relation between history and theory. His conclusion is both programmatic and cautionary: the coming “epoch of culture theory” can equal the eighteenth century only if scholars resist slogans and build patiently on precise problems.

Wie schade wäre es, wenn wir unsere Kraft und unsere Chance vergeuden wollten, weil wir von der Vergangenheit nicht lernen wollen. Wie schade, wenn wir das, was das Schicksal uns auf den Weg streut, verdürben, weil wir die wissenschaftlichen Mittel, die wir ja haben, verachten. Wie schade, wenn wir nach Phrasen haschen wollten, Richtungen vernichten oder begründen, Philosophien machen, während uns die Sonne zu anderem Werke scheinen kann!

English translation: What a pity it would be if we were to squander our strength and our chance because we will not learn from the past. What a pity if we were to spoil what fate strews upon our path, because we despise the scientific means that we do in fact possess. What a pity if we were to chase after phrases, destroy or found schools, make philosophies, while the sun could be shining for us upon other work!