Joseph Alois Schumpeter · 2020
This archival memorandum is not a theoretical treatise but an institutional argument for founding an Institute for Staatsrecht und Nationalökonomie at the University of Graz. Schumpeter’s central claim is that the existing lecture-and-exam regime cannot produce either scientific competence or practically useful public servants. University teaching in political economy and state science requires a durable setting: books, journals, rooms, seminar work, collaboration among professors, and sustained supervision of advanced students.
The diagnosis is severe. Without an institute, students encounter subjects such as Nationalökonomie only externally, as examination material rather than as living disciplines. Schumpeter presents this not as a local inconvenience but as a contradiction of the university idea itself.
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.
The pedagogical failure has public consequences. Future lawyers, administrators, and participants in public life remain without the specialized knowledge needed for their tasks. The memorandum therefore links academic reform with the quality of state service and political culture.
Die Studenten bleiben völlige Laien und verfehlen es ausnahmslos, jene speziellen Kenntnisse zu erwerben, die sie für die schwierigen Aufgaben der Beamtenlaufbahn oder des öffentlichen Lebens brauchbar machen würden.
English translation: The students remain complete laymen and without exception fail to acquire those special skills that would make them useful for the difficult tasks of a civil service career or of public life.
The proposed institute is meant to remedy this by joining legal and economic instruction in a seminar-based form. Its importance lies not only in producing research but in educating juristically trained students in the broader Staatswissenschaften. Schumpeter’s institutional imagination is practical: lectures must be supplemented by guided reading, exercises, discussion, written work, and access to current scholarship.
Ein Wandel in diesen Zuständen, der die juristisch Gebildeten auch staatswissenschaftlich erziehen würde, wäre deshalb von der größten Bedeutung, auch ganz abgesehen von der rein wissenschaftlichen Seite der Sache.
English translation: A change in these conditions, which would also give those trained in law an education in the political sciences, would therefore be of the greatest importance, even quite apart from the purely scholarly side of the matter.
The memorandum also emphasizes sacrifice and administrative realism. The participating professors would assume additional collective work—seminars, lecture courses, and advanced instruction—without treating the institute as a source of personal remuneration. What they ask from the state is not honor but infrastructure: the material preconditions without which university teaching collapses into mere preparation for examinations.
Die Genannten sind sich bewusst, damit eine große Arbeitslast zu übernehmen: gemeinsame Seminarübungen, gemeinsame Vorlesungskurse und gemeinsame Unterweisung Fortgeschrittener muss sehr viel Zeit und Kraft in Anspruch nehmen.
English translation: Those named are aware that in doing so they are taking on a great burden of work: joint seminar exercises, joint lecture courses, and joint instruction of advanced students must claim a great deal of time and energy.
Schumpeter’s broader significance in this document lies in his conception of knowledge as organized practice. Scientific life depends on institutions that make continuous research, disciplinary exchange, and student formation possible. The institute is therefore presented as both a scholarly necessity and a public utility: a modest administrative foundation for transforming passive hearers into trained students and potential researchers.
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