2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Public anger over abused custody accounts is justified, Schumpeter concedes, but indignation makes bad law. This 1924 banking intervention asks a narrower and harder question: how can Austrian statute protect a depositor's securities without turning ordinary custody, pledge, and clearing into costly formalism? His answer bends civil-law categories toward economic function. Since a depositor of fungible shares needs only the return of an equivalent quantity, not the very numbered certificates, rules demanding separate storage, serial registers, and rigid individualized ownership would burden Vienna's efficient Giro- und Kassenverein and raise banking conditions for everyone. He prefers selective prohibition, naming the dangerous acts such as repledging encumbered customer securities while sparing established practice. The result is a plea for technically exact regulation that secures the claim without fetishizing the paper.
Aber die Frage, wie das geschehen kann, bleibt dessen ungeachtet schwierig.
English translation: “But the question of how this can be done nonetheless remains a difficult one.”
Wartime and postwar monetary chaos, Schumpeter argues, was unavoidable adaptation to real shocks, not proof that old bank policy had failed. What Keynes's reform program really proposes is neither abandoning gold nor stabilizing prices but transforming the central bank into an instrument for consciously steering the whole economy, with discount policy, open-market operations, reserve rules, and selective credit turned from guardians of parity into levers of employment, industry, and distribution. Against Hawtrey and Keynes he grants that credit moves the price cycle yet denies the Konjunkturzyklus is a monetary disease: prosperity is when entrepreneurs force new combinations on the economy, depression the painful reabsorption. Take away price fluctuation and you disable capitalist development. He defends the gold standard not as a fetish but as impersonal constraint against discretionary planning.
Das ist nicht mehr »management« des Geldwesens, das ist »management« der gesamten Volkswirtschaft, ohne daß man irgendwo eine Grenze ziehen könnte.
English translation: “This is no longer 'management' of the monetary system; it is 'management' of the entire national economy, without any point at which one could draw a boundary.”
Beneath the noisy quarrels over method, Schumpeter contends, the real work of economics advances quietly, and no one exemplifies that subterranean progress better than F. Y. Edgeworth, a master of exact analysis who founded no school. Formally a review of Edgeworth's collected papers, this 1925 essay becomes an assessment of the discipline's whole achievement. Schumpeter reads mathematics not as decoration but as the natural language of interdependent quantities, and insists that Edgeworth and Marshall, for all their classical rhetoric, stand on ground cleared by Walras, Jevons, and Menger. Taxation, where a levy disturbs equilibrium and its incidence shifts through the entire organism, and monopoly, where discrimination can sometimes beat competition, show why modern theory must analyze classes of cases rather than issue universal maxims of free trade or laissez-faire.
Fast unbekümmert um methodische Moden geht sozusagen subkutan die positive Arbeit der Wissenschaft ihren Weg.
English translation: “Almost unconcerned with methodological fashions, the positive work of science proceeds, so to speak, subcutaneously along its way.”
Two men are inseparable in this 1925 portrait: the founder of exact interest theory and the disciplined servant of a vanishing Habsburg state. Böhm-Bawerk, Schumpeter argues, extended Menger's marginal utility through imputation into a full theory of capital whose decisive innovation was to make time internal to equilibrium, with present goods valued above future goods, longer roundabout production yielding more than proportional output, and interest emerging as an agio rather than a legal or social accident. Schumpeter ranks the Positive Theorie des Kapitales beside Marx's system in ambition but free of its political passion. The essay's second half follows the same intelligence into the 1896 direct-tax reform and the finance ministry under Koerber, where Böhm-Bawerk defended budget discipline against parliament and the army, resigning when military claims could no longer be contained.
Die Angelpunkte einer jeden Theorie des Wirtschaftsablaufes sind die Wert- und die Zinslehre.
English translation: “The pivotal points of any theory of the economic process are the theory of value and the theory of interest.”
From the Bank of England's slow evolution, from privileged private bank to bankers' bank to guardian of the currency, Schumpeter draws a lesson against the reformers: central-bank rules grew organically from the needs of capitalist money, not from theory, and discount policy can correct small disturbances but not panic or structural impoverishment. Across four sections this 1925 article defends the return to gold as second-best rather than ideal, warns that Britain's restoration at prewar parity ignored the gap with purchasing-power parity, and rejects the Keynes-Hawtrey claim that the trade cycle is a monetary disease curable by price stabilization. Credit creation, banks making means of payment that did not previously exist, is capitalism's mechanism for financing innovation. Managed credit, he concludes, would turn money into economic governance and quietly prepare the way for socialism.
Und von diesem Standpunkt versteht man dann diese ganze Gedankenrichtung und besonders den Keynesplan als sehr ernstzunehmende Vorarbeit für einen ernstzunehmenden Sozialismus.
English translation: “And from this standpoint one then understands this entire line of thought, and especially the Keynes plan, as very serious preparatory work for a serious socialism.”
Written for the Berliner Börsen-Courier at the close of 1925, this short essay takes up the anti-inflation orthodoxy of post-stabilization Germany, raise taxes and tighten credit, and turns it against itself. Both tools, Schumpeter grants, were necessary to defend the currency, yet excessive taxation and monetary tightening can paralyze production and deepen unemployment; necessity is not success, and the patient's condition is what matters. His conceptual move is to detach credit policy from the narrow role of servant to the exchange rate. Because the value of money and the tempo of development depend on bank-created means of payment rather than on gold stocks and savings alone, credit becomes an instrument of therapy. The program is selective, not loose: channel credit to firms with real futures, expand capacity, and cut unemployment without endangering the currency.
Man kann damit Konjunkturen schaffen und verhindern, Produktionszweige fördern und drosseln, Richtung und Temperatur der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung diktieren.
English translation: “By this means one can create and prevent booms, promote and throttle branches of production, dictate the direction and temperature of economic development.”
Austria's monetary history from 1892 to 1924 becomes, in this English-language report, a case study in how stability depends on more than a loan. Schumpeter traces the late-Habsburg gold-exchange crown, its destruction by wartime finance through discounted treasury bills and bank advances, the monetary dismemberment that followed imperial collapse, and the 1922 Geneva protocols that brought League of Nations control. The achievement, he insists, was not restoring the old crown but stabilizing at the fallen parity, 14,400 paper crowns to one gold crown, once note issue for the treasury had stopped and an independent National Bank could defend the exchange. His verdict stays guarded: inflation had wrecked saving, imports outran exports, and Vienna's financial role remained uncertain. A gold-exchange standard holds only when fiscal discipline, banking, and productive recovery sustain the promise.
The program of reconstruction was essentially a program of economic liberalism.
The occasion is commemorative but the target is contemporary: Schumpeter reads the empirical, statistical, institutional economics coming out of America, above all Wesley Clair Mitchell, as a latent revival of the old German Methodenstreit that once swirled around Schmoller. Rather than embalm Schmoller as a monument, this 1926 essay treats him as an unresolved problem. Schumpeter accepts the doctrine of Wertfreiheit, that science cannot prove ultimate ends, yet refuses the conclusion that all policy is mere class ideology; emergencies, interdependence, and shared necessities create a concrete field where analysis can distinguish feasible compromise from fantasy. He defends Schmoller against the caricature of the mere fact-collector, arguing for reciprocity between theory and historical research, and closes by pairing him with Marshall as one who pushed economics beyond simplified competitive abstraction.
Gelegentlich hören und lesen wir aus Amerika Symptome von etwas, das man nur als latenten Methodenstreit bezeichnen kann.
English translation: “Occasionally we hear and read from America symptoms of something that can only be described as a latent Methodenstreit.”
Keep two things apart, Schumpeter insists, the businessman's forecasting and the scientist's theory of crises, and the whole field of Konjunkturforschung comes into focus. Prompted by the new German Institute for Business Cycle Research and by American barometer work at Harvard and Babson, this 1926 essay refuses both extremes: abstract crisis theory without data, and curve-reading without a theory of causal sequence. Collecting and charting series, he warns, is not yet prediction; indicators earn forecasting power only when arranged by their place in the wave. From Juglar's discovery that crises are phases of a recurrent cycle to Spiethoff's schema of upswing and depression, Schumpeter puts capital investment, with iron consumption as its best measurable expression, at the causal center, treating prices as mostly derivative. Better forecasting cannot abolish the cycle without harming development.
Wissenschaft dieser Art ist Praxis der Zukunft.
English translation: “Science of this kind is the practice of the future.”
Against the textbook picture of banks as mere intermediaries of prior savings, Schumpeter insists that they create purchasing power outright, and that this single fact reorganizes the theory of prices, cycles, and crises. Delivered as Bonn-period lectures after the war and peace inflations, the 1926 argument defends the return to gold less as doctrine than as an institutional brake on arbitrary monetary expansion, then treats credit-financed innovation as the engine of the boom and its self-liquidating reversal. Deliberate Kreditinflation and deflation become therapeutic tools, precise but perilous. The attached 1928 wage lecture extends the same anti-voluntarist reasoning: durable gains in workers' living standards rest on productivity and capital formation, not nominal wage pressure, which makes Germany's wage question inseparable from taxation.
Mit der Waffe bewußter, planmäßiger Kreditinflation und -deflation kann man offenbar den Pulsschlag des Wirtschaftslebens wirksam beeinflussen.
English translation: “With the weapon of conscious, planned credit inflation and deflation one can evidently influence the pulse of economic life effectively.”
What can a people be made to pay without destroying the conditions that make future payment possible? Amid Weimar fiscal strain and the reparations debate, Schumpeter recasts tax capacity as a problem of national time rather than an accounting residue, and rejects the seductive arithmetic that takes national income, subtracts a subsistence minimum, and hands the remainder to the state. Fiscal extraction is not a neutral transfer of purchasing power; it changes conduct, and reparations cost more than their nominal sum by worsening export terms. His decisive distinction is between short emergencies, which citizens endure without changing their habits, and permanent high taxation, which reshapes savings, ambition, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. Protect saving, he urges, and load the burden onto consumption; a society cannot demand capitalist performance while suppressing capitalist motives.
Die unmittelbaren Wirkungen einer Politik oder einer bestimmten Maßregel springen in die Augen.
English translation: “The immediate effects of a policy or of a particular measure leap to the eye.”
Bankrupt firms and idle workers are political facts no government can ignore, yet Schumpeter refuses to treat postwar business stagnation as one uniform European disease, insisting that depression, inflationary aftermath, war damage, and each nation's fiscal position combine differently across Germany, Austria, England, and France. His sharpest objection to general subsidy is that a state funding relief out of the very income stream already sustaining private demand creates no new purchasing power but merely reroutes what exists. The essay's original turn takes up Alfred Mond's proposal to convert unemployment relief into employment subsidies, which Schumpeter reads not as demand stimulus but as a cheapening of labor costs that permits lower prices and greater output. He grants the risks of propping up weak firms, yet concludes the policy is no logical absurdity.
Subventionen müssen ja aus Quellen stammen, die ohnehin den Strom der Wirtschaft speisen, und wer der Wirtschaft damit aufhelfen will, erhält infolgedessen eine fatale Aehnlichkeit mit Münchhausen, der sich an seinem eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpfe zog.
English translation: “Subsidies, after all, must come from sources that already feed the stream of the economy, and whoever wishes to help the economy in this way therefore acquires a fatal resemblance to Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”