Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Gustav v. Schmoller und die Probleme von heute” (1926)

Schumpeter’s commemorative essay presents Schmoller less as a completed historical monument than as a still-active problem for economics. Its immediate occasion is contemporary: the empirical, statistical, and institutional orientation associated with American economics, especially Wesley C. Mitchell. Schumpeter sees in this development not a wholly new departure, but a renewed version of the old methodological conflict over whether economics should be abstract-theoretical, historical-institutional, or some disciplined combination of both.

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.

The essay’s central question is how Schmoller’s legacy bears on the relation between science and economic policy. Schumpeter accepts the core claim of Wertfreiheit: science cannot prove ultimate ends. Yet he resists the conclusion that all practical judgment is merely subjective or partisan. Between absolute ethical principles and arbitrary preference lies a historically concrete field in which institutions, constraints, shared interests, and accumulated experience can make some policies more adequate than others.

Und wie hat Schmoller „gewertet“ und „zielgesetzt“ — hat er, wenn auch vielleicht zu großem Zweck, die Wissenschaft als Sozialpolitiker missbraucht, oder können wir aus seiner Art, es zu tun, für uns etwas lernen?

English translation: And how did Schmoller 'evaluate' and 'set goals'—did he, perhaps in the service of some great purpose, misuse science as a social-policy advocate, or can we learn something for ourselves from his manner of doing so?

Schumpeter’s answer is deliberately qualified. Schmoller did not deduce final values from economic science, but neither did he simply smuggle class interests into scholarship. His social policy rested on the possibility that a people at a given historical moment may possess overlapping practical necessities, even amid conflict. Scientific analysis cannot create those common directions of will, but it can clarify them, distinguish feasible compromise from fantasy, and expose the institutional conditions under which policy becomes meaningful.

Ebenso sicher hat er sich aber auch nicht die Interessen und Ideale einer bestimmten Gruppe zu eigen gemacht und etwa daraus Wertmaßstäbe gewonnen, für die er zu Unrecht allgemeinere Bedeutung in Anspruch genommen hätte.

English translation: Just as certainly, however, he did not adopt the interests and ideals of a particular group and derive from them value standards for which he would then have wrongly claimed a more general significance.

This also explains Schumpeter’s treatment of history. He rejects the caricature of Schmoller as an enemy of theory or a mere collector of facts. Schmoller’s achievement lies in a research program that moves from empirical detail and institutional monographs toward social-historical synthesis. Economics must attend to law, administration, custom, psychology, statistics, and social organization, not in order to dissolve economic analysis, but to supply the concrete material without which its categories become empty.

At the same time, Schumpeter refuses anti-theoretical historicism. Facts become intelligible only through concepts, while concepts are corrected by historically informed research. Schmoller’s continuing value, therefore, is methodological reciprocity: theory organizes inquiry, but institutional and historical investigation reshapes the problems theory must solve. This is why Schumpeter can link Schmoller to modern empirical economics while warning that measurement and description cannot replace analytical construction.

Ist man sich über diesen Tatbestand klar, so fällt eine wesentliche Ursache der scheinbar so klar erwiesenen Unmöglichkeit eines einheitlichen wirtschaftspolitischen Wollens der jeweiligen Gegenwart eines Volkes fort.

English translation: Once this state of affairs is clearly grasped, an essential cause disappears of what seemed so plainly demonstrated: the impossibility of a unified economic-policy will on the part of a nation at any given moment.

The closing comparison with Marshall reinforces the point. Schmoller and Marshall differ in style, training, and intellectual language, but both press economics beyond simplified competitive abstractions toward a more realistic science of social-economic life. Schumpeter’s judgment is admiring but not uncritical: Schmoller’s formulations belong to his time, yet his deeper program remains fertile—an economics at once empirical, institutional, theoretical, and capable of disciplined practical judgment.