Joseph A. Schumpeter’s obituary, originally published in The Economic Journal in June 1932 and supplied here as a reprint of undocumented date, assesses Bortkiewicz’s achievements through the tension between exceptional scientific ability and restricted professional recognition. Its organizing claim is that criticism was not merely Bortkiewicz’s preferred scholarly activity but the defining form of his intellectual creativity. Moving from biography and academic isolation through economics to statistical method, Schumpeter asks how adequately a scholar’s publications and institutional standing express his powers. The closing discussion of probability and radioactivity leaves that question open: Bortkiewicz’s realized achievements were considerable, yet his capacities may have exceeded what he published.
The opening establishes the discrepancy between scientific distinction and academic position. Schumpeter calls Bortkiewicz the most eminent German statistician since Lexis, while explaining his Polish family background, upbringing and education in St. Petersburg, and subsequent German appointments. After becoming a Privatdozent at Strassburg in 1895, he received an extraordinary professorship at Berlin in 1901. Full professorial rank arrived only in 1920 through a general reform, rather than individual recognition of his accomplishments, and did not end his isolation. Schumpeter attributes this marginality partly to foreignness, partly to unsuccessful lecturing, and partly to colleagues’ inability to understand his contributions. Intellectual authority could itself become a social obstacle:
His critical acumen made people fear him, but it hardly contributed to making them love him.
This judgment makes the obituary more than a catalogue of achievements. Bortkiewicz’s conscientiousness and analytical severity explain both the quality of his work and the difficulty of securing affection or institutional support. Schumpeter depicts his reserve as dignified, without treating isolation as proof of embitterment. He also acknowledges the limits of an obituary by referring readers to Oscar Anderson’s bibliography. The accompanying correction of a bibliographical misprint—Bortkiewicz had criticized an “ultra-liberal,” not an “ultra-radical,” policy—briefly reproduces the exacting attention to error that Schumpeter identifies with his subject.
The transition to economics converts this personal portrait into an account of scholarly method:
Nature—it is not often that the goddess makes up her mind so decidedly—had made him a critic, so much so that even his original contributions assumed the form of criticisms, and that critique became his very breath.
Criticism here is productive rather than merely destructive: examining another theorist’s system could yield an original contribution. Nevertheless, Schumpeter distinguishes this achievement from originating a theoretical framework. He judges that Bortkiewicz narrowly missed greatness as an economist because he did not fully employ the mathematical resources that might have brought him standing comparable to Edgeworth or Barone. The obituary consequently combines admiration with a counterfactual assessment of unrealized possibilities. Its praise is strongest where criticism exposes fundamental weaknesses, and more qualified where it concentrates on secondary errors in otherwise sound theories.
Bortkiewicz’s historical significance also depended on the intellectual environment in which he worked:
But he upheld the flag of economic theory—professing the Marshallian creed—at an epoch and in a country in which hardly anyone would hear of it, and he cleared the ground of many battlefields by his powerful sword.
Schumpeter thus presents rigorous criticism as a defense of economic theory under unfavorable conditions. He singles out Bortkiewicz’s analysis of the Marxian theoretical framework as his greatest economic achievement, praising its treatment of Marx and of Marx’s other critics. The study of Rodbertus’s and Marx’s rent theories receives similarly high praise. By contrast, critiques of Walras, Pareto, and Böhm-Bawerk display the critic less advantageously because, in Schumpeter’s judgment, their underlying principles remained sound. The distinction identifies the standard governing his appraisal: finding mistakes matters most when it changes the assessment of a system’s foundations.
The discussion then broadens to monetary theory and policy, crediting Bortkiewicz’s work on the gold standard, banking credit, and velocity of circulation. Schumpeter gives special prominence to his treatment of index numbers, where a review of Irving Fisher became an original contribution concerning tests. This example substantiates the central claim that critical examination could itself generate knowledge.
In statistical method, Schumpeter’s judgment is more unequivocal. The law of small numbers and Bortkiewicz’s leadership of the Lexian school secure his international importance. His probability book, Die Iterationen (1917), merits admiration even from readers who do not share its underlying conception of probability. Yet reluctance to publish also cost him claims to originality. The earlier discrepancy between ability and recognition therefore reappears within scientific production itself.
Selecting contributions particularly relevant to economists, Schumpeter emphasizes income distribution:
No one has done more to clear up the important subject of the measures of inequality of incomes (nineteenth session of the Institut International de Statistique).
He situates this achievement alongside studies of empirical curves, statistical homogeneity and stability, Gaussian variability, laws of error, chance events over time, mortality, and insurance. These references establish the range of Bortkiewicz’s methodological work without attempting a technical exposition. The final turn to his 1913 pamphlet on radioactivity extends that range beyond economics. For Schumpeter, this apparently peripheral study reveals capacities that the economic writings alone cannot measure. The obituary’s enduring relevance lies in its account of criticism as scientific creation, coupled with its caution against equating academic rank, publication volume, or disciplinary boundaries with the full extent of intellectual accomplishment.
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