1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Seventeen members, a war pressing on every schedule, and yet more papers offered than the weekly meetings could hold — such is the wartime seminar Schumpeter describes for 1915/16. The report doubles as a manifesto for institutional differentiation. Only when the planned institute at the Meerschloss opens, he argues, will genuinely professional training, real competition with foreign universities, and service to state economic policy become possible; hence his appeal for a fresh allocation of a thousand Kronen. The semester's coordinated theme was the effect of grain tariffs on the national economy, parceled into linked reports on history, classical theory, incidence, and land prices, supplemented by papers on Vico, Schopenhauer, and the wartime economic process. Beneath the administrative surface stands Schumpeter the institution-builder, already turning toward social classes and economic democracy.
Schon die vor drei Jahren gewährte Subvention von 500 Kronen für Bücheranschaffungen hat auf den ganzen Betrieb belebend gewirkt und den dringendsten momentanen Bedürfnissen abgeholfen.
English translation: “Already the subsidy of 500 Kronen granted three years ago for the acquisition of books has had an invigorating effect on the whole operation and has met the most pressing immediate needs.”
Midway through the First World War, a questionnaire from the Verband »Para pacem« asked whether one should already resist the practices — slander of national character, refusals of trade, scholarship, and travel — that threatened to outlast the fighting. Schumpeter's emphatic yes turns the survey into a compact argument against cultural nationalism. Hatred, he warns, is not merely a by-product of war but a force seeking to survive it, and the proper function of intellectuals is to set themselves against the hatred of their own people rather than amplify it. Reconciliation, he adds, is also national self-interest. The struggle must begin at home, with the admission that one's own side has sinned quite enough — never with the denunciation of enemy peoples.
Keine Nation auf dieser Erde kann ein würdiges Dasein führen ohne alle die andern.
English translation: “No nation on this earth can lead a worthy existence without all the others.”
Schumpeter answered Leopold Stocker's 1916 attack on his wartime lectures with an uncomfortable claim: a state cannot afford to preserve obsolete crafts and small farms artificially when large-scale industry would put the same labor to more productive use and speed national recovery. His decisive move is from Profit to goods produced in relation to labor, industrialization framed as a productivity problem rather than capitalist greed, even as he denies any wish that the artisan or peasant estate should vanish. He doubts that protective tariffs have truly served the peasant, ties future military strength and population quality to industrial capacity, and insists that emigration is remedied not by suppressing recruiting agents but by improving the conditions of life that drive people abroad.
Damit wollte ich keineswegs die Bedeutung der technischen Ausrüstung über die persönliche Leistung erhöhen. Aber vorhanden muss diese technische Ausrüstung sein, sonst nützen die höchsten persönlichen Eigenschaften nichts.
English translation: “By this I did not in any way mean to elevate the importance of technical equipment above personal performance. But this technical equipment must be present; otherwise the highest personal qualities are of no use.”
To train officials, lawyers, and politicians worthy of the name, Schumpeter argues in this 1911 memorandum, the University of Graz needs more than its lecture-and-exam regime, which leaves students meeting Nationalökonomie only as examination material and never as a living discipline. He proposes an Institute for Staatsrecht und Nationalökonomie that would join legal and economic instruction through seminars, guided reading, written research, and a working library, advanced together with his colleagues Hauke and Layer. Against the better-funded institutes at Prague and Vienna, he insists that such training is at least as important and far cheaper, and he specifies the sums, some 15,000 Kronen for furniture and books plus annual running costs, warning that any serious reduction would doom the project. Knowledge, for him, is organized practice.
Auf diese Weise gibt es speziell für die Nationalökonomie – der Referent erlaubt sich nicht, über andere staatswissenschaftliche Fächer zu sprechen – schlechthin keine Möglichkeit eines der Idee der Universitäten entsprechenden Studiums.
English translation: “In this way, specifically for political economy — the rapporteur does not permit himself to speak of other political-science subjects — there is simply no possibility of a course of study corresponding to the idea of the universities.”