Joseph Alois Schumpeter is generally acknowledged as one of the first-rank economists of the twentieth century. Textbooks of micro- and macroeconomics, however, do not incorporate Schumpeter's thought into the corpus of standard theories. Books on the history of economics, too, rarely assign a chapter to him alone. In most cases, his name can be found only in the index, and that sometimes leads us only to footnotes. If this treatment is valid, it means that Schumpeter did not shape an original paradigm or a school in economics.

On the other hand, monographic studies on Schumpeter display a strong admiration for his work, but he is treated in a way that curiously parallels the one described above. Such accounts emphasize his uniqueness, yet it's a uniqueness that cannot be recorded in the principles and history of economics. Just as biographical analyses that portray the subject as having produced a single brilliant achievement, these studies regard Schumpeter's work as a unique historical event or a work of art that is not reproducible, instead of as a scientific finding that is more or less universal and transposable.

Both the benign neglect and enthusiastic praise of Schumpeter seem to reflect a more basic fact.