Äußerung zur Frage der Lehrkanzeln und zur Professorenfrage [des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Unterrichtes an der Universität Graz]

This file is a single archival expert memorandum: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s confidential 15 July 1911 opinion to the imperial ministry on economic teaching posts at the University of Graz. Its immediate purpose is administrative, but its intellectual stakes are larger. Böhm-Bawerk answers whether Graz should maintain two economic chairs and which scholars should be considered for appointment. His central claim is that modern economics has become too broad, too specialized, and too consequential for public life to be entrusted to one professor or subordinated to statistics.

He grounds the case in the expansion of economic affairs within state administration, professional training, and public policy. A university must prepare future officials through both general and specialized instruction. The discipline’s growth has made division of labor unavoidable, but for Böhm-Bawerk that does not diminish theory; it makes theoretical economics the organizing foundation for applied fields such as trade policy, banking, money, agrarian questions, colonial policy, and social policy.

Ich halte also den Bestand zweier spezifisch ökonomischer Lehrkanzeln an der Universität in Graz für dringend wünschenswert.

English translation: I therefore consider the existence of two specifically economic chairs at the University of Graz to be urgently desirable.

The institutional proposal is therefore not simply “more teaching,” but a structured pairing. Both professors should be capable of covering the required elements of political economy, yet one chair should cultivate pure theory with particular strength, while the other should command major branches of economic policy. Statistics may be attached only incidentally, if a particular appointee is personally competent; it must not replace a genuinely economic professorship.

The second half turns from institutional design to candidates and becomes a pointed intervention in the politics of the discipline. Böhm-Bawerk disputes the view of the retiring ordinarius, Hildebrand, whose judgments he sees as shaped by an outdated German historical orientation hostile to theory.

Der Schlüssel zur eigenartigen Haltung Hildebrands muss wohl – es ist dies zugleich die wahrscheinlichste und auch die mildeste Auslegung – in seiner eigenen wissenschaftlichen Vergangenheit gesucht werden.

English translation: The key to Hildebrand's peculiar attitude must probably be sought—this being at once the most probable and also the mildest interpretation—in his own scholarly past.

This criticism is methodological as well as personal. Hildebrand’s standards, in Böhm-Bawerk’s reading, belong to an earlier academic world that preferred description and history while distrusting abstract analysis. The memorandum thus continues the afterlife of the Methodenstreit: the question of a Graz appointment becomes a question of what counts as valid economic science.

Hildebrand entstammt einer in seiner Jugend in Deutschland herrschend gewesenen Richtung, welche sich durch extreme Theoriefeindlichkeit und durch einseitige Bevorzugung des rein deskriptiven und historischen Momentes auszeichnete.

English translation: Hildebrand comes out of a school that was dominant in Germany during his youth, one which was marked by extreme hostility to theory and by a one-sided preference for the purely descriptive and historical element.

Böhm-Bawerk’s candidate assessments follow from this standard. Zuckerkandl and Spiethoff appear as solid, theoretically competent scholars; Pohle is talented but not clearly superior; Schachner’s travel-based expertise on Australia does not prove command of fundamentals; Grünberg is capable but too specialized; Gerloff’s claims are limited; Myrbach is judged unfit as a national economist; and Gürtler belongs chiefly to statistics. In each case the decisive issue is not topical productivity alone, but whether the scholar can sustain broad university instruction in economics.

Schumpeter is the central case. Against Hildebrand’s depreciation, Böhm-Bawerk identifies in the young scholar the theoretical force needed for one of the Graz chairs.

Schumpeter ist ein eminent theoretischer Kopf, von glänzender Begabung und enormer Urteilskraft und Produktivität.

English translation: Schumpeter is an eminently theoretical mind, of brilliant talent and enormous judgment and productivity.

He acknowledges youthful excesses, but treats them as secondary to originality, judgment, and promise. The recommendation also has a national dimension: Austria should retain and cultivate such native talent rather than allow it to be lost abroad. Spann, by contrast, is valued as somewhat less brilliant but broadly educated and philosophically trained, especially useful if statistics must be combined with economics. Zwiedeneck appears as a respectable policy-oriented complement to a stronger theorist.

The memorandum’s importance lies in its fusion of university administration, personnel politics, and disciplinary self-definition. Böhm-Bawerk is not merely advocating for Schumpeter; he is defining the modern economic professor as someone grounded in theory, capable of public instruction, and able to connect analytic foundations with applied policy. Graz thus becomes a miniature case for economics as a specialized but theory-centered university science.