1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
This is a short, single-author policy essay: Schumpeter’s intervention moves from crisis theory to German fiscal policy, organized around the sections “Preissenkung und Konjunktur,” “Preissenkung und Politik,” and “Finanzpolitik als Schicksal.” Its thesis is that the world crisis must be understood as a cyclical depression intensified by political and fiscal errors, while Germany’s emergency policy of lowering prices and incomes is economically destructive except as a brief currency- and reparations-political maneuver.
This 1932 policy-economic essay, written as “A German View” for Lloyds Bank Monthly Review, interprets Franco-German relations during the world depression. Schumpeter’s central claim is paradoxical: the economic conflict is comparatively soluble, while the political and symbolic conflict makes rational settlement difficult.
This file is a single-author programmatic essay, reprinted from the first issue of Econometrica. Schumpeter writes not a technical contribution but a disciplinary manifesto for the new journal and society. His central claim is that econometrics is not a sectarian method or a repudiation of historical, sociological, or institutional economics; it is the explicit organization of a quantitative dimension already built into economic life.
This file is a short economic-policy essay, reprinted from The Economics of the Recovery Program. Schumpeter’s scope is deliberately historical: he asks what the Depression of the early 1930s can learn from earlier crises without treating history as a mechanical template.
Joseph A. Schumpeter’s “The Nature and Necessity of a Price System” is a short single-author theoretical essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction (1934). Its scope is deliberately compact: it is not a general defense of capitalism, but an intervention in debates over reconstruction that treated prices and profits as removable barriers to abundance. The essay’s three sections move from that polemical setting, to a theory of price as choice under scarcity, to a qualified account of perfect and imperfect competition.
This file is a brief prefatory essay: Schumpeter’s foreword to the German edition of D. H. Robertson’s Das Geld. Its scope is not to expound Robertson chapter by chapter, but to place the book within monetary theory, defend the discipline against the charge of confusion, and recommend Robertson as an unusually reliable guide for students and educated non-specialists.
This file is a single-author economic theory article, reprinted from the Review of Economic Statistics. Its scope is methodological and substantive: Schumpeter proposes an apparatus for studying capitalist fluctuations by coordinating history, statistics, and theory.
Schumpeter’s essay is a single-author work of intellectual history and theoretical appraisal. It is ostensibly about Taussig’s Wages and Capital, but its scope is the development of economic theory from the English classics to Marshall, Walras, Menger, and the modern American scene. Its thesis is that theory changes by cumulative logical refinement, and that Taussig’s book is central because it both ends the wages-fund muddle and redirects attention to capital as a time-structured process.
This file is a single-author journal review: Schumpeter’s 1936 response to Keynes’s General Theory. Its scope is a compact critical appraisal of the book’s claim to be general theory. Schumpeter begins by granting the scale of the event: Keynes has produced a work whose influence is already visible in students, reviewers, and public debate.
Volume II functions as the empirical and statistical continuation of Schumpeter’s theory of capitalist evolution. Its task is not to replace theory with measurement, but to test and discipline the theory through series on prices, output, employment, commodity markets, expenditure, wages, deposits, loans, and interest. Schumpeter’s method is deliberately anti-barometric: economic aggregates do not speak for themselves, and business-cycle statistics become intelligible only when read through the historical process of innovation, credit creation, adjustment, and disturbance. The volume therefore treats data as traces of an evolutionary mechanism rather than as independent indicators from which cycles can simply be inferred.
Joseph A. Schumpeter’s 1940 essay “The Influence of Protective Tariffs on the Industrial Development of the United States” treats American protectionism as a historical institution rather than a merely technical departure from free trade. Its argument is passage-driven and contextual: tariffs must be judged in relation to national independence, continental expansion, industrial maturation, and geopolitical vulnerability.
This source is best read as a commemorative scholarly volume rather than as a single self-contained article. Its contributors gather around the fiftieth anniversary of Marshall’s Principles of Economics to ask what kind of classic it had become: a superseded Victorian treatise, a still-living analytic instrument, or a founding text whose influence survived through later transformations of economics.