Joseph A. Schumpeter · 1913
Schumpeter’s German review assesses Bonar’s five lectures, delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1910 and published in 1911. Its governing judgment is appreciative disappointment: Bonar offers attractive reading, but his combination of broad knowledge and economic training promised a more searching investigation of the prejudices, slogans, and unexamined inferences that obstruct social science.
Sie leiden nur unter einem Umstand: daß man von Bonar noch viel mehr erwarten konnte.
English translation: They suffer from only one circumstance: that one could have expected a great deal more from Bonar.
The review proceeds lecture by lecture, repeatedly distinguishing discussion of a familiar expression from analysis of how that expression distorts economic reasoning. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” could have exposed the ways popular slogans enter scholars’ working assumptions and generate otherwise inexplicable judgments. Instead, Bonar turns toward the slogan’s content and role. Likewise, the lecture on Hume’s proposition that government rests on opinion fails to explain the intellectual consequences of invoking government and public opinion without adequately understanding their relationship. Schumpeter’s criterion is thus methodological: the lectures should uncover mechanisms of error, not simply offer reflections on influential words.
He considers the third lecture, on the supposed opposition between theory and practice, the strongest.
Arme Sozialökonomie, daß sie noch immer einer Verteidigung auf Grund dieses Textes bedarf!
English translation: Poor social economics, that it still stands in need of a defence on the basis of this text!
The exclamation conveys both frustration with the persistence of this objection and recognition that Bonar’s response remains necessary. Schumpeter particularly values his resistance to explaining every theoretical mistake as estrangement from reality. Yet that defense must itself meet technical standards: Bonar’s presentation of the wage-fund theory, Schumpeter objects, makes its historical endurance unintelligible.
The fourth lecture examines the use and misuse of analogies, including the organism analogy. Schumpeter recognizes the pressures that encourage them—imperfect terminology and the need to explain difficult ideas briefly to reluctant audiences—but finds Bonar’s treatment unfinished. The final lecture, on “in the long run,” again allows ingenious observations to displace its central task. Distinguishing propositions valid over long periods from those valid over short ones is, for Schumpeter, indispensable to economics and particularly difficult for beginners and even trained colleagues.
The review’s significance lies in these compact methodological demands: trace the effects of slogans, defend theory without excusing technical misrepresentation, scrutinize explanatory analogies, and specify the temporal reach of economic claims. Its closing recommendation preserves the distinction between an incompletely realized project and an unrewarding book.
Aber diese Bemerkungen sollen nicht sagen, daß das Buch nicht sehr schätzenswert und interessant wäre. Und besonders in Deutschland möchte ich ihm recht viele Leser wünschen.
English translation: But these remarks are not meant to say that the book is not highly estimable and interesting. And in Germany especially I should wish it a great many readers.
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