1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
From the Bank of England's slow evolution, from privileged private bank to bankers' bank to guardian of the currency, Schumpeter draws a lesson against the reformers: central-bank rules grew organically from the needs of capitalist money, not from theory, and discount policy can correct small disturbances but not panic or structural impoverishment. Across four sections this 1925 article defends the return to gold as second-best rather than ideal, warns that Britain's restoration at prewar parity ignored the gap with purchasing-power parity, and rejects the Keynes-Hawtrey claim that the trade cycle is a monetary disease curable by price stabilization. Credit creation, banks making means of payment that did not previously exist, is capitalism's mechanism for financing innovation. Managed credit, he concludes, would turn money into economic governance and quietly prepare the way for socialism.
Und von diesem Standpunkt versteht man dann diese ganze Gedankenrichtung und besonders den Keynesplan als sehr ernstzunehmende Vorarbeit für einen ernstzunehmenden Sozialismus.
English translation: “And from this standpoint one then understands this entire line of thought, and especially the Keynes plan, as very serious preparatory work for a serious socialism.”
Written for the Berliner Börsen-Courier at the close of 1925, this short essay takes up the anti-inflation orthodoxy of post-stabilization Germany, raise taxes and tighten credit, and turns it against itself. Both tools, Schumpeter grants, were necessary to defend the currency, yet excessive taxation and monetary tightening can paralyze production and deepen unemployment; necessity is not success, and the patient's condition is what matters. His conceptual move is to detach credit policy from the narrow role of servant to the exchange rate. Because the value of money and the tempo of development depend on bank-created means of payment rather than on gold stocks and savings alone, credit becomes an instrument of therapy. The program is selective, not loose: channel credit to firms with real futures, expand capacity, and cut unemployment without endangering the currency.
Man kann damit Konjunkturen schaffen und verhindern, Produktionszweige fördern und drosseln, Richtung und Temperatur der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung diktieren.
English translation: “By this means one can create and prevent booms, promote and throttle branches of production, dictate the direction and temperature of economic development.”
Austria's monetary history from 1892 to 1924 becomes, in this English-language report, a case study in how stability depends on more than a loan. Schumpeter traces the late-Habsburg gold-exchange crown, its destruction by wartime finance through discounted treasury bills and bank advances, the monetary dismemberment that followed imperial collapse, and the 1922 Geneva protocols that brought League of Nations control. The achievement, he insists, was not restoring the old crown but stabilizing at the fallen parity, 14,400 paper crowns to one gold crown, once note issue for the treasury had stopped and an independent National Bank could defend the exchange. His verdict stays guarded: inflation had wrecked saving, imports outran exports, and Vienna's financial role remained uncertain. A gold-exchange standard holds only when fiscal discipline, banking, and productive recovery sustain the promise.
The program of reconstruction was essentially a program of economic liberalism.
The occasion is commemorative but the target is contemporary: Schumpeter reads the empirical, statistical, institutional economics coming out of America, above all Wesley Clair Mitchell, as a latent revival of the old German Methodenstreit that once swirled around Schmoller. Rather than embalm Schmoller as a monument, this 1926 essay treats him as an unresolved problem. Schumpeter accepts the doctrine of Wertfreiheit, that science cannot prove ultimate ends, yet refuses the conclusion that all policy is mere class ideology; emergencies, interdependence, and shared necessities create a concrete field where analysis can distinguish feasible compromise from fantasy. He defends Schmoller against the caricature of the mere fact-collector, arguing for reciprocity between theory and historical research, and closes by pairing him with Marshall as one who pushed economics beyond simplified competitive abstraction.
Gelegentlich hören und lesen wir aus Amerika Symptome von etwas, das man nur als latenten Methodenstreit bezeichnen kann.
English translation: “Occasionally we hear and read from America symptoms of something that can only be described as a latent Methodenstreit.”
Keep two things apart, Schumpeter insists, the businessman's forecasting and the scientist's theory of crises, and the whole field of Konjunkturforschung comes into focus. Prompted by the new German Institute for Business Cycle Research and by American barometer work at Harvard and Babson, this 1926 essay refuses both extremes: abstract crisis theory without data, and curve-reading without a theory of causal sequence. Collecting and charting series, he warns, is not yet prediction; indicators earn forecasting power only when arranged by their place in the wave. From Juglar's discovery that crises are phases of a recurrent cycle to Spiethoff's schema of upswing and depression, Schumpeter puts capital investment, with iron consumption as its best measurable expression, at the causal center, treating prices as mostly derivative. Better forecasting cannot abolish the cycle without harming development.
Wissenschaft dieser Art ist Praxis der Zukunft.
English translation: “Science of this kind is the practice of the future.”
Against the textbook picture of banks as mere intermediaries of prior savings, Schumpeter insists that they create purchasing power outright, and that this single fact reorganizes the theory of prices, cycles, and crises. Delivered as Bonn-period lectures after the war and peace inflations, the 1926 argument defends the return to gold less as doctrine than as an institutional brake on arbitrary monetary expansion, then treats credit-financed innovation as the engine of the boom and its self-liquidating reversal. Deliberate Kreditinflation and deflation become therapeutic tools, precise but perilous. The attached 1928 wage lecture extends the same anti-voluntarist reasoning: durable gains in workers' living standards rest on productivity and capital formation, not nominal wage pressure, which makes Germany's wage question inseparable from taxation.
Mit der Waffe bewußter, planmäßiger Kreditinflation und -deflation kann man offenbar den Pulsschlag des Wirtschaftslebens wirksam beeinflussen.
English translation: “With the weapon of conscious, planned credit inflation and deflation one can evidently influence the pulse of economic life effectively.”
What can a people be made to pay without destroying the conditions that make future payment possible? Amid Weimar fiscal strain and the reparations debate, Schumpeter recasts tax capacity as a problem of national time rather than an accounting residue, and rejects the seductive arithmetic that takes national income, subtracts a subsistence minimum, and hands the remainder to the state. Fiscal extraction is not a neutral transfer of purchasing power; it changes conduct, and reparations cost more than their nominal sum by worsening export terms. His decisive distinction is between short emergencies, which citizens endure without changing their habits, and permanent high taxation, which reshapes savings, ambition, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. Protect saving, he urges, and load the burden onto consumption; a society cannot demand capitalist performance while suppressing capitalist motives.
Die unmittelbaren Wirkungen einer Politik oder einer bestimmten Maßregel springen in die Augen.
English translation: “The immediate effects of a policy or of a particular measure leap to the eye.”
Bankrupt firms and idle workers are political facts no government can ignore, yet Schumpeter refuses to treat postwar business stagnation as one uniform European disease, insisting that depression, inflationary aftermath, war damage, and each nation's fiscal position combine differently across Germany, Austria, England, and France. His sharpest objection to general subsidy is that a state funding relief out of the very income stream already sustaining private demand creates no new purchasing power but merely reroutes what exists. The essay's original turn takes up Alfred Mond's proposal to convert unemployment relief into employment subsidies, which Schumpeter reads not as demand stimulus but as a cheapening of labor costs that permits lower prices and greater output. He grants the risks of propping up weak firms, yet concludes the policy is no logical absurdity.
Subventionen müssen ja aus Quellen stammen, die ohnehin den Strom der Wirtschaft speisen, und wer der Wirtschaft damit aufhelfen will, erhält infolgedessen eine fatale Aehnlichkeit mit Münchhausen, der sich an seinem eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpfe zog.
English translation: “Subsidies, after all, must come from sources that already feed the stream of the economy, and whoever wishes to help the economy in this way therefore acquires a fatal resemblance to Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”
There is no unified state of science in economics, only a disorderly interaction of problems and traditions, and so this survey of German-language economic theory quickly becomes an anti-nationalist argument about method. Schumpeter accepts Marshall's claim that the nineteenth century built qualitative analysis and that the next task is quantitative and institutional; theory, he insists, is an apparatus, not a worldview. He praises the factual richness of Schmoller, Sombart, and Max Weber while diagnosing German economics as lacking a sustaining tradition and squandering energy on epistemology and methodological labels. Writing after the Methodenstreit, inflation, and the international triumph of marginalism, he defends marginal utility not as one competing doctrine but as the single common instrument of contemporary price theory, shared by Walras, Pareto, Marshall, and the Austrians alike.
Mit keinem dieser „ismen“ ist die Theorie auf Gedeih und Verderb verbunden, mit jedem kompatibel — hören wir doch auf, während ringsum die Probleme locken und drängen, diesen Sand zu pflügen und uns damit zu bewerfen!
English translation: “With none of these "isms" is the theory bound for better or worse; with each it is compatible — let us therefore cease, while problems all around are beckoning and pressing, to plow this sand and to pelt one another with it!”
Because modern bank credit creates purchasing power rather than merely transferring existing savings, it needs an external restraint, and gold, for all its flaws, supplies one. Written after Britain's 1925 return to gold, the essay concedes every fashionable objection: gold circulation is a superfluous luxury, money need not be materially backed, and gold discoveries can trigger arbitrary price revolutions. Against Keynes, who would free credit policy from exchange parity to fight unemployment and stabilize prices, Schumpeter argues that discretion alone is not safer. His theory of credit as forced saving, with entrepreneurs outbidding old users of labor and machinery and then repaying as new goods appear, explains cyclical price movements without reducing the cycle to money, as he thinks Hawtrey wrongly does. Gold is defensible because it works automatically yet still permits development.
Und wirklich, die Goldwährung wirkt wie eine Bremse an der Maschine des Kredits, indem sie bei freier Einlöslichkeit der Kreditinstrumente der Kreditausdehnung dort eine Grenze setzt — sonst aber nie —, wo die Parität zwischen Goldgeldeinheit und Kreditgeldeinheit in Gefahr kommt.
English translation: “And indeed, the gold standard acts like a brake on the machinery of credit, in that—given free redeemability of the credit instruments—it sets a limit to credit expansion there, but never otherwise, where the parity between the gold-money unit and the credit-money unit comes into danger.”
Bracket race entirely, and the real question sharpens: why do social classes exist at all? Set in an ethnically homogeneous milieu precisely to isolate that problem from the ethnological factors stressed by Gumplowicz, this theoretical essay argues that classes are real social organisms, not the income categories economists invent, recognized by manners, association, and above all connubium, socially accepted intermarriage. Schumpeter makes the family, not the individual, the true unit of class theory, and grounds a class's rise or fall in the social importance of its function and its success in performing it. The long case is the Germanic nobility, rising as warrior-leadership becomes vital and declining through patrimonialization once war ceases to be its living function. Classes endure, he argues, even as their constituent families are ceaselessly replaced.
Jede Klasse gleicht während der Dauer ihres Kollektivlebens oder der Zeit, während welcher ihre Identität angenommen werden kann, einem Hotel oder einem Omnibus, die zwar immer besetzt sind, aber von immer andern Leuten.
English translation: “During the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity can be assumed, every class resembles a hotel or an omnibus that is always occupied, but by ever different people.”
A single tax, budget, or loan means nothing in isolation: it takes its sense from the whole fiscal policy of which it is a part, and beyond that from the historical order, political purpose, and economic future it helps create. From this anti-formal premise Schumpeter builds a reading of finance as condensed statecraft, treating Colbert's France, Prussian state-building, and Gladstonian liberal finance not as toolkits but as integrated policy worlds whose greatness lay in the fit between fiscal form and social order. He turns the argument polemically against German practice after unification, judging Bismarck politically great but fiscally uncreative and Erzberger's reform driven by party pressure, and warns against reviving liberal slogans whose social basis has vanished. The task, he insists, is to make the fiscal system an engine rather than a leaden weight.
Eine Umsatzsteuer kann in manchen Situationen die weitaus mildeste von allen möglichen Maßregeln sein, in einer anderen eine Ungeheuerlichkeit.
English translation: “A turnover tax may in some situations be by far the mildest of all possible measures, in another a monstrosity.”