Joseph A. Schumpeter: G. de Molinari, Questions économiques à l’ordre du jour (1909)

Schumpeter’s review assesses Molinari’s eight economic essays through a sustained contrast between admiration for their exposition and reservations about their liberal commitments. Seven had appeared in the Journal des Économistes between 1901 and 1904. Moving from value and labor theory to interest, trade policy, currency, and the concluding moral and polemical essays, Schumpeter asks whether rhetorical conviction can withstand theoretical scrutiny and political circumstances.

The opening essays display Molinari’s exceptional fluency and enduring enthusiasm for economic liberalism. Yet Schumpeter identifies a prescriptive ambition beneath their appeal to natural laws:

Es ist jener aristokratische Liberalismus, der das profanum vulgus verachtet und für den die wirtschaftlichen „Naturgesetze“ Forderungen sind, Forderungen, die sich den Tatsachen nicht unterwerfen, vielmehr diese selbst unterwerfen wollen.

English translation: It is that aristocratic liberalism which despises the profanum vulgus and for which the economic "laws of nature" are demands — demands that do not submit themselves to the facts, but rather seek to subject the facts themselves.

Economic laws here become demands imposed on reality rather than propositions answerable to it. Schumpeter finds the same spirit in the closing essays on morality, political economy, and religion, and in the climactic challenge to utopianism. Their artistic force earns praise, but their capacity to persuade an impartial observer remains doubtful.

The essay on capital interest exposes a more specific analytical weakness. Molinari’s abstinence theory begins by assuming the profit in anticipation of which production occurs, then explains capital formation through the productive use of that profit. For Schumpeter, this risks presupposing what requires explanation:

Dieser Gedankengang dürfte kaum haltbar sein, ja, die Bemerkung, daß Profit der Ertrag selbstverwendeten, Zins der Ertrag ausgeliehenen Kapitals sei, legt in diesem Zusammenhange sogar den Verdacht eines Zirkels nahe.

English translation: This line of thought is hardly likely to be tenable; indeed, the remark that profit is the yield of self-employed capital and interest the yield of loaned capital even suggests, in this connection, the suspicion of a circular argument.

He also finds the definition of capital as consisting of values insufficiently developed. The elegance suitable to popular exposition cannot resolve the difficult theoretical problem of interest.

Trade policy receives the review’s most extended discussion. Schumpeter calls the essay on protectionism a brilliant indictment, but insists that its economic argument omits a decisive political consideration:

Dem Probleme selbst aber kann man nie gerecht werden ohne Berücksichtigung des Momentes des Kampfes ums nationale Dasein, um die nationale Zukunft.

English translation: The problem itself, however, can never be done justice to without taking into account the element of the struggle for national existence, for the national future.

This shifts the discussion from universal liberal principles to competition among national powers. In treating the Brussels Convention and British policy, Schumpeter argues that measures resembling advances toward free trade may serve strategic struggles for world markets. England’s adoption of free trade likewise owed more to immediate advantages than to doctrine. Against Molinari’s attribution of humanitarian motives to Cobden, he suggests the advancement of British commercial power—a purpose he does not regard as negligible or necessarily inferior to universal ideals.

The brief closing notice praises the gold-and-silver-standard essay as instructive while again detecting old-liberal commitments. The review’s significance lies in this consistent distinction between literary achievement, theoretical adequacy, and political judgment: Schumpeter respects Molinari’s intellectual passion without accepting either its explanatory premises or its account of national economic action.