2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Seventeen members, a war pressing on every schedule, and yet more papers offered than the weekly meetings could hold — such is the wartime seminar Schumpeter describes for 1915/16. The report doubles as a manifesto for institutional differentiation. Only when the planned institute at the Meerschloss opens, he argues, will genuinely professional training, real competition with foreign universities, and service to state economic policy become possible; hence his appeal for a fresh allocation of a thousand Kronen. The semester's coordinated theme was the effect of grain tariffs on the national economy, parceled into linked reports on history, classical theory, incidence, and land prices, supplemented by papers on Vico, Schopenhauer, and the wartime economic process. Beneath the administrative surface stands Schumpeter the institution-builder, already turning toward social classes and economic democracy.
Schon die vor drei Jahren gewährte Subvention von 500 Kronen für Bücheranschaffungen hat auf den ganzen Betrieb belebend gewirkt und den dringendsten momentanen Bedürfnissen abgeholfen.
English translation: “Already the subsidy of 500 Kronen granted three years ago for the acquisition of books has had an invigorating effect on the whole operation and has met the most pressing immediate needs.”
To train officials, lawyers, and politicians worthy of the name, Schumpeter argues in this 1911 memorandum, the University of Graz needs more than its lecture-and-exam regime, which leaves students meeting Nationalökonomie only as examination material and never as a living discipline. He proposes an Institute for Staatsrecht und Nationalökonomie that would join legal and economic instruction through seminars, guided reading, written research, and a working library, advanced together with his colleagues Hauke and Layer. Against the better-funded institutes at Prague and Vienna, he insists that such training is at least as important and far cheaper, and he specifies the sums, some 15,000 Kronen for furniture and books plus annual running costs, warning that any serious reduction would doom the project. Knowledge, for him, is organized practice.
Auf diese Weise gibt es speziell für die Nationalökonomie – der Referent erlaubt sich nicht, über andere staatswissenschaftliche Fächer zu sprechen – schlechthin keine Möglichkeit eines der Idee der Universitäten entsprechenden Studiums.
English translation: “In this way, specifically for political economy — the rapporteur does not permit himself to speak of other political-science subjects — there is simply no possibility of a course of study corresponding to the idea of the universities.”
A hostile notice in the Prenzlauer Zeitung, picking up a foreign source's reading of an article he had written for the Lloyds Review, forced Schumpeter to explain himself to his faculty dean. The letter reconstructs the piece's reluctant, patriotic origin, commissioned through Lloyds Bank and Sir William Dampier and taken up only after an appeal to his national feeling, and restates its transfer-theoretical core: reparations cannot be treated as a bare legal demand when world protectionism, and France's Kontingentierungspolitik in particular, block the German exports through which alone they could be paid. Insistence on the claim, he argues, must be tested against willingness to accept German goods. By authorizing the dean to circulate the letter, he turns a private defense into a document of Weimar intellectual politics.
Wenn das Bestehen auf der Reparationsforderung keine böse Schikane sein soll, so müsste sich die Welt im Allgemeinen vom Protektionismus abwenden und Frankreich im besonderen seine Kontingentierungspolitik aufgeben, was das wahre Kriterium der Annahmewilligkeit und doch nicht unmöglich wäre.
English translation: “If insistence on the reparations claim is not to be sheer malicious harassment, then the world in general would have to turn away from protectionism, and France in particular would have to abandon its quota policy—which would be the true criterion of a willingness to accept payment, and yet would not be impossible.”
Accused by the Prenzlauer Zeitung of denying Germany's capacity to make further tribute payments, Schumpeter answers the newspaper directly, and his grievance is as much logical as political. To prove an impossibility, he explains, one first states the conditions under which the thing would be possible and then shows that they do not obtain; the paper had seized only that first, conditional step and reversed the argument into its opposite. He notes that the editors relied uncritically on a source known to be unfriendly to Germany, that a telephone call would have spared them the error, and that a German teacher was hardly likely to hold the position ascribed to him. Nationalist in tone yet formal in method, the short letter defends argumentative accuracy under the pressure of the reparations crisis.
Reißt ein feindlicher Bericht das erste Glied heraus und lässt er die Bedingungen, deren Unmöglichkeit die Unmöglichkeit des Tributs erweist, weg, so ist das Argument in sein Gegenteil verkehrt.
English translation: “If a hostile report tears out the first link and omits the conditions whose impossibility proves the impossibility of the tribute, then the argument is turned into its opposite.”