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The Synthetic Vision of Joseph Schumpeter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Martin Kessler
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Extract

Eleven years after his death, economists (strangely enough, the only ones who seem to care) still ponder the paradoxes of Joseph A. Schumpeter. While the contributions of the late Lord Keynes, not without intriguing paradoxes of their own, are being rapidly assimilated into the “common sense” of statesmen, Schumpeter, the only other truly great economist the twentieth century has produced, exerted no appreciable influence over public policy. Apart from a few misunderstood cliches, such as “creative destruction,” “obsolescence of entrepreneurial function,” and so on, his ideas have generated no “school” among young intellectuals. Indeed, it is doubtful that they ever will, even though Schumpeter is a profound and honest thinker in the tradition of Marx, Weber, and Tawney grappling with one of the crucial problems of our age: the innovating and growth capacities of various social systems under an advanced industrial technology.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , July 1961 , pp. 334 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1961

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References

1 Keynes, J. M., Essays in Persuasion (London, 1932), PrefaceGoogle Scholar.

2 Schumpeter, J. A., “The Explanation of the Business Cycle,” Economica, VII (12, 1927), 286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Keynes, , Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York, 1956), p. 327Google Scholar.

4 The best biographical sketches are A. Smithies, “Memorial: J. A. Schumpeter, 1883–1950” and von Haberler, Gottfried, “J. A. Schumpeter, 1883–1950” in a collection of essays edited by Harris, S. E., Schumpeter, Social Scientist (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 11–23 and 24–47Google Scholar.

5 Cf. his stress on the superior political capacities of the aristocracy.

8 See especially his essay on Walras in Ten Great Economists (New York 1951)Google Scholar and the section on Walras in his History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

7 See the essays cited in note 4.

8 Smithies, ibid., p. 17.

9 Schumpeter, J. A., Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1912)Google Scholar; in English, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, 1934)Google Scholar. His first book was Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalokonomie (Leipzig, 1908)Google Scholar.

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15 Schumpeter's model of “plausible capitalism” does not assume perfect competition.

16 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 82.

17 See Chapter IV, The Theory of Economic Development.

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33 Ibid., p. 139.

34 Ibid.

35 Rathenau, W., Die neue Wirtschaft (Berlin, 1919)Google Scholar, Der neue Staat (Berlin, 1919)Google Scholar, Die neue Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1919)Google Scholar.

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39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 147.