2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.
I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.
Six recent English books, by Baster, Franks, Harrod, Jewkes, Meade, and Robbins, give Schumpeter his occasion to ask whether economists have drawn a serious analytic harvest from Britain's postwar experiment in state management. His first move is to prise apart three questions habitually merged under planning: socialism, meaning central control of production; laborism, meaning labor's political ascendancy within a still-private economy; and the sheer readjustment of exports, saving, and solvency after the war. Nationalizing coal or transport, he insists, proves neither socialism nor its absence; the telling fact is that the wage rate has become a political datum, protected as a matter of course while profits and rents are compressed. Britain's dollar shortage he reads as the outward face of domestic maladjustment, conceding that under laborite constraints direct controls may be forced expedients rather than doctrinal choices.
Nevertheless, there is point in keeping these three topics distinct, if only in order to show how they interact to produce the English problem.
How does bias enter a science whose tools, time series, value theory, marginal productivity analysis, are in principle neutral? Schumpeter locates it not in open advocacy, which may be perfectly honest, but in the pre-scientific act of vision: the moment before proof when the investigator perceives which phenomena connect and matter. Models and statistics can be tested and refuted; vision cannot, and so it becomes the true gateway of ideological bias. He tries the thesis on three economists: Smith, whose natural-law slogans did little harm because his analysis stayed sober; Marx, who discovered ideology yet let his creed of class struggle and increasing misery sterilize his analysis; and Keynes, whose stagnationist vision gained technical armor and then dissolved into professional controversy. Ideology, he concludes, both retards science and supplies the vision without which it might never advance.
And so—though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them.
What survives of the Communist Manifesto once it is read strictly as science, stripped of centenary celebration and debunking alike? Schumpeter answers by treating the 1848 pamphlet as economic sociology, separating that interpretive achievement from its thin technical economics. He ranks Marx's economic interpretation of history beside Darwin's in originality, credits him with hauling the theory of the state down from metaphysics into realistic analysis, and salutes the Manifesto's unrivalled panegyric to bourgeois enterprise as a 'constant revolutionizing of production.' Yet he dismantles the predicted polarization into two classes, the overlooked new middle class, and the doctrine of the withering state. What remains is an ideological document read as analysis, the prelude, Schumpeter says, to the whole of Marx's later work.
it is but steam that rises from the galloping horse.
Economic life, this 1949 conference paper insists, unfolds in historical time and a disturbed environment, so every recorded cycle must first be met as a historical individual before any model lays claim to it. Schumpeter refuses to pit history against theory or statistics: equilibrium analysis, dynamic schemata, and time series stay indispensable, yet they run empty unless tied to actual industrial processes. He separates the cyclical mechanism from the avoidable calamities that made 1929 catastrophic in America, banking epidemics, mortgage disorder, uncontrolled speculation, and argues that such disasters were logically detachable from the underlying process. What business-cycle research most lacks, he contends, is standardized industrial and locational monographs tracking how production functions, firms, and leading personnel actually rise and fall.
Apart from the measurements it yields, a set of time series per se does not so much solve any problem as state in quantitative terms what problem there is to solve.
Twenty-odd centuries of economic reasoning, from Aristotle and the scholastic doctors through Smith, Ricardo, Walras, and Keynes, pass under review in this vast and unfinished history, assembled from Schumpeter's disordered manuscript by his widow Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. Its governing distinction separates economic analysis, the evolving box of scientific tools, from the surrounding economic thought and political creed. Tracing the filiation of ideas, Schumpeter insists that competent analysis rests on three techniques, history, statistics, and theory, and that every theorist first works from a pre-analytic 'vision' colored by ideology. He crowns Walrasian general equilibrium the summit of theoretical economics, weighs the scholastics' neglected contributions against the British classical tradition he distrusts, and reconceives capital, from the standpoint of analysis, as a set of restrictions.
practically and analytically, a credit theory of money is possibly preferable to a monetary theory of credit.
Left with Arthur Spiethoff before Schumpeter sailed for Harvard, then set aside for decades, this posthumous and partly fragmentary manuscript, edited by Fritz Karl Mann, pursues a single question: what money essentially is. The answer inverts orthodoxy. Money is no commodity but a technical instrument of social accounting, and payment is at bottom a matter of crediting and debiting, of clearing claims through a social ledger. From general-equilibrium reasoning Schumpeter extracts a 'critical number' that fixes absolute prices and imposes the Geldligament, the specifically monetary constraint on the economy. He demolishes the 'deposit legend' that banks merely lend out entrusted funds, holds that every bank credit creates a deposit, contests Mises and Weber on socialist calculation, and turns Knapp's state theory of money into a cautionary tale of fruitless doctrine.
A polite acknowledgment that swells into a memorandum on statecraft, this wartime letter to Count Otto Harrach, unpublished until 1992, turns Schumpeter's praise of Harrach's composed detachment into a warning. Neutral initiatives, he argues, are not peripheral gestures but instruments capable of shaping the terms of peace, and no belligerent is so well advised as Austria to cooperate with them. He laments how alien the United States, financially and politically decisive, remains to Austrian diplomatic and finance-ministerial circles, drawing on his own earlier stay in America. The letter darkens toward its close: intensified submarine warfare, he fears, will alienate Washington and stiffen English resolve, and the deeper the gulf between the blocs grows, the more the Monarchy falls subordinate to Berlin, forfeiting the Western sympathies that might have served it at the peace.
Die Zeichen der Zeit sind düster.
English translation: “The signs of the times are gloomy.”
Loyalty to Germany without the appearance of vassalage: that is the knot this January 1916 letter to Count Otto Harrach tries to untie. Composed at Graz and unpublished until 1992, it contends that excessive deference to Prussia has weakened Austria's standing and disorganized its state-idea, alienating the non-German nationalities. The remedy is a program of specifically Austrian war aims that would make the Monarchy visible as an autonomous power and rally public opinion across national lines; Schumpeter treats opinion not as noise but as an instrument of state consolidation. Uninvolved in the Anglo-German antagonism, Austria could even speak a word of reconciliation with real authority. He weighs Habsburg openings in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, urges conciliation rather than punitive centralism in the Bohemian question, and closes by tracing the Monarchy's every setback ultimately to financial causes.
Es kommt die Gefahr hinzu, daß Oesterreich zum Objekt von Compensationen für manche der kriegführenden Mächte werden könnte.
English translation: “There is the added danger that Austria could become an object of compensations for some of the belligerent powers.”
By the same post, two memoranda travel to an aristocratic recipient—copies of documents Schumpeter had written across 1916 and Prince Jaroslav Thun had already circulated among some twelve gentlemen. The covering note of 14 January 1917 is modest in tone but pointed in purpose: private memoranda are offered as a "Substrat" for collective deliberation, a channel through which aristocratic correspondence might harden into coordinated conservative opinion on the Monarchy's external and internal future. Schumpeter sketches the documents' dialogic history—the first written in spring 1916, the second a rejoinder Thun requested once replies and criticisms had arrived—and asks that they be passed to Gesinnungsgenossen. Slight as it is, the letter captures how he imagined political influence: through discreet circulation, aristocratic patronage, criticism and reply, and the slow consolidation of like-minded opinion.
Gratitude, in this short letter of 17 May 1917, is doing political work. Schumpeter thanks an aristocratic correspondent for approving—and criticizing—a memorandum on the wartime situation, explains a delay caused by misdirected forwarding between Graz and Vienna, and accepts an invitation to discuss the document in person. He treats the memorandum less as a finished statement than as a text needing reception and refinement, valuing the critical remarks and suggestions as much as the praise. The most consequential lines concern the Foreign Ministry: the memorandum has been forwarded to Count Czernin, and Schumpeter plans to inquire whether the Minister might grant him an audience. Deferential in posture but purposeful in aim, the note documents the informal infrastructure of wartime governance, in which access and timing weigh as heavily as argument.
Addressed to a noble correspondent in February 1918, this private letter turns political sentiment into a question of institutional design. Schumpeter praises his reader's articles for crystallizing conservative Austrian concerns, then insists that such feeling counts for nothing without a strong, well-organized party, disciplined newspapers, and talent—hence his approval of the acquisition of the Wiener Neueste Nachrichten as strategic infrastructure. The second half sketches a constitutional bargain over Bohemia: concede as much as possible in form while preserving substance. German Bohemia must not fall under Czech domination, yet it might stand nominally under the Wenceslas Crown if full autonomy and language rights are guarded by an imperial court—a symbolic concession bought to secure German as the state language.
Sie drücken mit lapidarer Kürze und unübertrefflicher Präzision aus, was jedem conservativen Oesterreicher am Herzen liegt – und hoffentlich werden sie beherzigt werden.
English translation: “You express with lapidary brevity and unsurpassable precision what lies close to the heart of every conservative Austrian—and it is to be hoped that they will be taken to heart.”