Joseph Alois Schumpeter, “Geleitwort” (1935)

This file is a brief prefatory essay: Schumpeter’s foreword to the German edition of D. H. Robertson’s Das Geld. Its scope is not to expound Robertson chapter by chapter, but to place the book within monetary theory, defend the discipline against the charge of confusion, and recommend Robertson as an unusually reliable guide for students and educated non-specialists.

Schumpeter begins by defining the book as a “bridge” from general economic instruction into monetary theory. Robertson matters because he is not merely reporting a doctrine from outside; he helped form the subject he explains. The praise is therefore methodological as much as literary:

Es ist das Werk eines Meisters, der mitgeschaffen hat an dem, was er vorträgt und dessen Vortrag daher eine Frische und ein Niveau hat, die keiner, sei es auch noch so guten, bloß berichtenden Leistung eignen kann.

English translation: It is the work of a master who has taken part in creating what he expounds, and whose exposition therefore possesses a freshness and a level that no merely reporting achievement, however good, can attain.

The central argument of the foreword is that the apparent chaos of monetary economics is misleading. Schumpeter concedes that the public, especially the “gebildeten »Laien«,” sees only disagreement. But he rejects the inference that monetary theory lacks firm methods. The problem is not the nonexistence of a scientific apparatus, but its uneven mastery and its corruption by policy fixation.

Dieser unerfreuliche und für die Wissenschaft beschämende Tatbestand kommt nicht von jener Ursache, an die man zunächst denken möchte – nämlich nicht daher, daß es ein haltbares Organon von Erkenntnissen und Verfahren, das den Erscheinungen des Geld- und Kreditprozesses gewachsen wäre, nicht gäbe.

English translation: This unfortunate state of affairs, so shameful for science, does not stem from the cause one might at first suppose—namely, that there exists no tenable body of insights and procedures adequate to the phenomena of monetary and credit processes.

Here Schumpeter’s key conceptual move is to distinguish scientific disagreement from two inferior forms of disorder: incompetence and political will. Monetary economics possesses an “Organon” of concepts and procedures, but not all economists command it as historians command sources or mathematicians integration. The lay observer mistakes this professional unevenness, and the noise of banking-policy programs, for theoretical anarchy.

Dem Laien erscheint dann als wissenschaftliches Chaos, was nur ein Chaos von Dilettantismus ist. Und er hält für hoffnungsloses Gewirr von wissenschaftlichen Meinungen, was nur ein – freilich hoffnungsloses – Gewirre von politischen Wollungen ist.

English translation: What appears to the layman as a scientific chaos is only a chaos of dilettantism. And he takes for a hopeless tangle of scientific opinions what is only a—admittedly hopeless—tangle of political wishes.

Robertson’s book is relevant because it counters both confusions. It is presented as clear, proportionate, and free of monomania: a guide that equips judgment without dictating partisan conclusions.

Robertsons Buch kann manches dazu beitragen, dieser unerfreulichen Sachlage zu steuern.

English translation: Robertson's book can contribute a good deal toward remedying this unhappy situation.

Schumpeter then locates Robertson in the Marshallian lineage alongside Pigou and Keynes. Robertson begins from Marshall, undertakes his own “Eroberungszüge,” and incorporates their results into an inherited analytical framework. Schumpeter singles out Banking Policy and the Price Level, Robertson’s essays, and his business-cycle work, which protected him from superficial “monetäre Krisentheorien.” The German Das Geld rests, in Schumpeter’s account, on both tradition and independent research:

Auf dieser Tradition einerseits, auf diesen eigenen Leistungen andererseits ruht der Text, der nun dem deutschen Leserkreis vorgelegt wird und als eine ausgeglichene Darstellung empfohlen werden kann, die wohl die meisten Fachgenossen unterschreiben würden.

English translation: Upon this tradition on the one hand, and upon these own achievements on the other, rests the text which is now presented to the German readership and which can be recommended as a balanced presentation to which most colleagues in the field would probably subscribe.

The foreword’s final movement concerns the political chapters on postwar currency and banking controversies. Schumpeter values Robertson precisely because he does not convert theory into advocacy. Science, for Schumpeter here, cannot choose the reader’s policy preference; it can only prevent that preference from being nonsense.

Es bleibt dem Leser überlassen, die Entscheidung zu treffen, die ihm gefällt. Er bekommt bloß das Werkzeug in die Hand, das ihn davor schützen soll, daß diese Entscheidung Unsinn sei. Mehr als das kann keine Wissenschaft bieten.

English translation: It is left to the reader to make the decision that suits him. He is merely given the tool that is meant to protect him from making that decision a nonsensical one. No science can offer more than that.

The foreword is thus both an endorsement and a compact statement of Schumpeter’s view of economic science. Monetary theory has a common ground wider than its polemics suggest; its task is disciplined orientation, not political command. Robertson’s achievement is to make that ground accessible without flattening its intellectual level.