Josef Schumpeter, „Ist der Untergang des Handwerker- und Bauernstandes dem Staate nützlich?“ (1916) — Summary

The supplied file is an edited reprint of a single short newspaper reply: Schumpeter answers Leopold Stocker’s open letter about his wartime popular lectures on the economy “im Kriege und nachher.” Its scope is deliberately narrow and polemical: postwar reconstruction, the fate of crafts and peasant agriculture, tariffs, military-industrial capacity, and emigration. Schumpeter’s main thesis is that the state must not spend scarce national energies preserving obsolete forms of production when large-scale industry can use the same labor more productively.

Allein es handelt sich da um eine unerbittliche, sowohl unbestrittene, wie unbestreitbare Tatsache: Um die Tatsache, daß dieselben Leute, die sich heute mit geringem Erfolg im Handwerk mühen, innerhalb der Großindustrie mehr – nicht etwa bloß mehr „Profit“, sondern mehr Güter im Verhältnis zur Arbeitsleistung – erzeugen und die Wirtschaft unseres Volkes viel schneller wieder herstellen würden.

English translation: But we are dealing here with an inexorable fact, both undisputed and indisputable: the fact that the very same people who today toil with meagre success in handicraft would within large-scale industry produce more — not merely more "profit", but more goods in relation to labour input — and would restore the economy of our people far more quickly.

The decisive conceptual move is the shift from “Profit” to “Güter im Verhältnis zur Arbeitsleistung”: Schumpeter frames industrialization not as capitalist greed but as a productivity problem. His target is “Mittelstandspolitik” when it artificially protects declining forms and thereby weakens national recovery. Yet he carefully distinguishes this from a wish to abolish social groups as such.

Von einem Wunsche, daß der Handwerker- oder der Bauernstand verschwinde, kann sicher keine Rede sein.

English translation: There can certainly be no question of any wish that the artisan or peasant class should disappear.

This qualification structures the reply. Crafts that survive “aus eigener Kraft” fall outside his criticism; what he rejects is subsidy for inefficiency. The same logic governs his remarks on agriculture. Against Stocker, Schumpeter doubts that high protective tariffs have brought satisfactory agrarian progress, denies that their chief beneficiary is necessarily the peasant, and notes that self-consumption limits the tariff advantage for small farmers while marketed surplus favors large landowners. He compresses rather than exhausts the agrarian question, but the principle remains: policy must ask where productive effects actually occur, not where sentiment locates virtue.

The argument then widens from reconstruction to state power. Schumpeter denies that he ranks machines above human qualities, but insists that future military strength presupposes industrial capacity.

Damit wollte ich keineswegs die Bedeutung der technischen Ausrüstung über die persönliche Leistung erhöhen. Aber vorhanden muss diese technische Ausrüstung sein, sonst nützen die höchsten persönlichen Eigenschaften nichts.

English translation: By this I did not in any way mean to elevate the importance of technical equipment above personal performance. But this technical equipment must be present; otherwise the highest personal qualities are of no use.

Industrial development is therefore not merely economic modernization; it is the material basis of defense, demographic growth, and healthier mass living conditions. In this sense the “state” in the title is not an abstract treasury but a national organism whose strength depends on the productive deployment of labor.

Schumpeter applies the same causal reasoning to emigration. The problem is not solved by suppressing agents; people leave because domestic conditions are inadequate.

Aber Maßregeln gegen diese heilen das Übel nicht, dessen Wurzeln in den ungünstigen Lebensbedingungen liegen.

English translation: But measures directed against these do not cure the evil, whose roots lie in unfavourable conditions of life.

The proposed remedy is incorporation into a more productive industrial order, where former land laborers, peasants, and craftsmen would find the living standards whose absence drives them abroad. The relevance of the piece lies in this early, public version of Schumpeter’s later themes: structural transformation, the reallocation of labor, and the refusal to let social nostalgia override productive facts. Its final gesture is not dogmatic closure but a claim to provoke judgment.

Was ich deshalb in meinen Vorträgen wollte, war nicht mehr als denkende Zuhörer, wie Sie einer sind, Anregungen und Tatsachen zu bieten (und gerade solche, die bei uns leicht übersehen oder gering geschätzt werden), aufgrund derer dann ein jeder selbst entscheiden muss, was er vertreten und was er bekämpfen will.

English translation: What I therefore aimed at in my lectures was no more than to offer thoughtful listeners, such as yourself, stimuli and facts (and precisely those which among us are easily overlooked or undervalued), on the basis of which each must then decide for himself what he wishes to defend and what to combat.