Schumpeter’s brief German review examines Haret’s application of mechanics to sociology. Its central distinction separates empty physical analogies from mathematical treatments of economic problems, which Schumpeter explicitly exempts from his criticism. Haret presents elementary mechanics and then supplies its concepts with sociological content, without investigating social facts. The objection concerns the absence of substantive results, not simply incorrect conclusions.
Solange »soziale Kräfte« und »soziale Bewegungen« qualitativ problematisch sind, hat es keinen Zweck, formale Resultate über sie abzuleiten.
English translation: So long as "social forces" and "social movements" are qualitatively problematic, there is no point in deriving formal results about them.
This sentence states the review’s methodological criterion: formal deduction cannot substitute for establishing what the objects of analysis actually are. Moving from a physical body to a “social body” does not establish that mechanical propositions explain society. Schumpeter’s example makes the resulting emptiness concrete:
Gewiß kann ich z. B. sagen, daß ich, wenn alle auf meine Tätigkeit einwirkenden Ursachen einander das Gleichgewicht halten, eben nichts tue. Aber davon habe ich wenig.
English translation: Certainly I can say, for example, that if all the causes acting upon my activity hold one another in equilibrium, I simply do nothing. But I gain little from that.
The review moves from classification through diagnosis and illustration to a judgment about scientific practice. Haret’s procedure, Schumpeter argues, discredits efforts to achieve precision in social science. The closing comparison with contemporary authors who mistake the word “energy” for an explanatory result only ironically softens the verdict. The review’s relevance lies in its defense of exactness against an imitation of scientific rigor: importing terminology and formal relations yields no knowledge unless their social content has first been established.
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