Schumpeter was a man of many interests as well as talents. Beyond that he had,
certainly as a young man, monumental ambitions. It is not appropriate in this essay to
devote much space to the journey of his life; fortunately there are now available not only
the 1950 insightful memorials by his colleagues, particularly the one by Gottfried
Haberler,1
a massive as well as a magnificent piece of bibliographical scholarship on
what he wrote, who wrote about him, and with whom was he most frequently compared
by Massimo M.Augello (1990),2
but also three recent (1991) and assuredly major
biographies of the man. Schumpeter, A Biography by Richard Swedberg contains a
particularly carefully balanced, scholarly assessment of
*
Thanks are owed to several friends who have read and corrected the manuscript: Professors
A.W.Coats, Warren Samuels, Yuichi Shionoya, Richard Swedberg and Shigeto Tsuro, and Dr
Charles McCann.
1
This essay appeared originally in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It was reprinted in
Seymour Harris's edited volume, Schumpeter, Social Scientist (Harris, 1951) and again in Haberler
(1993). The 1951 volume also contained essays by 16 leading economists, including inter alia
Ragnar Frisch, Arthur Smithies, Paul A.Samuelson, Jan Tinbergen, and Fritz Machlup. 2
Augello cites 260 works (including articles and books translated into languages other than the
original) by Schumpeter and 1916 works on Schumpeter. Augello's own generalizations or findings
are in a comprehensive 93-page essay, replete with valuational (that is, Augello's straightforward
evaluations) notes. I am not aware of a comparable task done recently by any economist on an
economist.
Schumpeter's four or five major efforts as well as an intriguing general account of the
times and environments in which he lived. Swedberg discusses ad seriatim the various
decades of Schumpeter's life and work, and if he attempts to explain the man, he does so
only by inference.
The second biography is different. Opening Doors: The Life and Work of Joseph
Schumpeter by Robert Loring Allen has more of the characteristics of James Boswell's
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. or Samuel Pepys' Diary (1815). Benefitting greatly
from the massive, scholarly, even daunting3
task of deciphering Schumpeter's personal
diaries undertaken by Mrs Erica Mattschnigg Gershenkron,4
Allen interpreted the often
elliptical, if not actually obscure, materials. Unlike Swedberg (a sociologist), Allen (an
economist) was a much-impressed, even overwhelmed, Schumpeter student. Allen
documents much of what Swedberg could do no more than infer.
The third biography, Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher, and Politician by Edward
März, a Viennese Marxian historian, eschews not only discussion of Schumpeter, the
idiosyncratic individual, but virtually all mention of Schumpeter's historico-culturalepistemological interests. März's effort is to fit Schumpeter into the ranks of latter-day
Marxians, an interesting effort but one hardly germane to what we are interested in. For
that reason, what follows is based in large measure on the memorials and the other two
studies.
1.2 I believe that Schumpeter's intellectual efforts centered on five (possibly four and
a half) major projects. I would classify the first burst of effort (including three books) as
at least two major projects, one involving the nature of economic theory and economic
science and the other concentrating on the nature and sources of economic development.
The first surfaced in the 1908 Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen
Nationalökonomie (The Nature and Essence of Theoretical Economics) and to a lesser
degree in the 1914 Der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte (Economic Method and
Doctrine: An Historical Sketch)5
; the second in the 1911 Theorie der wirtschaftlichen
Entwicklung (The Theory of Economic Development).
His next (I would term it the third) major effort involved a book on money (partly
written but never published by him although it did appear in 1970 as Das Wesen des
Geldes6
) and his 1939 two-volume Business Cycles. This generally unsuccessful effort
paralleled Maynard Keynes's 1930 abortive Treatise on Money and his thoroughly
successful 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Schumpeter did not think that his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was a major
effort; indeed he 'often called it a "pot-boiler"' (Allen, 1992, II, p. 133). Others have not
shared that assessment, and it may well be termed Effort 'Three and a Half' or even Four.
3
The task was daunting because much was written, even scribbled, in an archaic German
shorthand.
4
I am indebted to Professor Yuichi Shionoya for this information and other points, too. 5
This book was essentially the basis for the last effort. However, as Schumpeter thought all study
of economic theory involves knowledge of its origins, at the time (pre-World War I) he linked the
two.
6
Edited and introduced by F.K.Mann. Göttingen: Vandenhöck & Ruprecht, 1970, pp. xxvii, 341.
His fifth effort involved his interpretation of the filiation of ideas in the development
of economic theory. This effort surfaced initially with his 1914 Epochen der Dogmen—
und Methodengeschichte (translated later as Economic Doctrine and Method: An
Historical Sketch) and was unfinished when he died, but the outline of the corpus
appeared as History of Economic Analysis (1954). I would also include in this fifth effort
another posthumous collection, Ten Great Economists (1954), which contains polished
essays.
1.3 The unfinished History of Economic Analysis (HEA) is the most significant part of
the fifth and last of Schumpeter's great projects. To some, its development represents the
somber reflections of an older scholar, one embittered by personal, career, and character
tragedies. To others, it is the quintessential, if uncompleted, final great professional tour
d'horizon of the leading practiced academic professional economics visionary of the
twentieth century. And for still others it is the wisest compendium of names and titles
ever published in English (and possibly in all other languages) in the long history of the
discipline.
1.4 In the past there have been many treatments of the history of the discipline
employed as explanations of the development of economic theory. Indeed, one way to
explain the emergence of the Smithian and Ricardian virtual hegemony was simply to
recount how Smith had fused earlier writings, rejected some, and made others canon.
Ricardo, referring to Smith's 1776 economics masterpiece,7
offered a tighter type of
reasoning, and thus it seemed classical economics was assembled, if not actually born.8
The official 'registry of birth,' as seen by the British, was undoubtedly John Ramsay
McCulloch's The Literature of Political Economy (1840), just as Jérôme-Adolphe
Blanqui's Histoire de l'économie politique en Europe9
(1838) could be said to have been
an even earlier French claim—of course making McCulloch's either a collateral, if lesser,
relative or simply a Pretender.
There is a German lineage, as well. Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher first brought out
his Geschichte der Englishen Volkswirtshaftslehre (1851) and then later in 1874 his
Geschichte der Nationalökonomie in Deutchsland, and his student, Gyula Kautz,
published in 1860 Die Geschichtliche Entwicklung der Nationalökonomie und Ihrer
Literatur. One could go on, but it suffices to indicate that not only Marx treated the
history of economics in Das Kapital (particularly in Volume One, 1867) but that object
of Marxian scorn, Eugen Karl Dühring, published a positivist Kritische Geschichte der
Nationalökonomie und der Sozialismus in 1871.
From a more 'modern' standpoint, I am tempted first to point to William Stanley
Jevons' decision to commission a translation of Luigi Cossa's Guido allo Studio
dell'Economia Politica (1875) as our 'cornerstone.' Cossa was so pleased with Jevons'
request that he expanded and partially rewrote his first edition for that translation. So it
7
The earlier (1759) masterpiece was the more carefully written, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 8
A more properly systematic approach is to refer to that collector's 'gem of a servant,' The History
of Economic Thought and Analysis (1973) by Emma Fundaburk, to consider the wealth of efforts at
synthesizing the various approaches.
9
This book went through several successive editions. The fifth French edition is dated 1882, and
there was a translation into English of the fourth French edition (1880).
was that the 1876 second edition with a Preface by Jevons (and not published in Italian
until the next year, 1877!) became the template for many of the analytical history of
economics texts which followed.10
Until Schumpeter's 1954 History of Economic Analysis appeared, American (and
presumably British) economics graduate students generally referred to several 'old
standbys:' Eric Roll's strange mixture of pro- and then a-Marxian (to coin a neologism) A
History of Economic Thought (particularly the post-World War II 2nd [1946] and 3rd
[1954] editions) and Charles Gide and Charles Rist A History of Economic Doctrines
from the Time of the Physiocrats until the Present Day (translated into English in 1948
from the several [2nd, 6th, and 7th] French editions). More recently, that is, within the
last 20 years, Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect and The New Palgrave have
been the principal authorities for graduate students. For economics undergraduate
students there was Alexander Gray's excellently composed The Development of
Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey (1931) and Henry W.Spiegel's The Growth
of Economic Thought (1971). More advanced scholars relied on monographs on writers,
schools, periods, and sub-sets of the topic (e.g. monetary theory, etc.). None of the
foregoing, however, is, in my view, magisterial—none attempts to synthesize a vision.
Since the appearance of the History of Economic Analysis two other particularly
authoritative works have appeared: Wesley Clair Mitchell's Types of Economic Theory:
From Mercantilism to Institutionalism as edited by Joseph Dorfman (1967, 1969)11 and
Karl Pribram's A History of Economic Reasoning (1983). Neither attempted to synthesize
a vision, although each sought to present an organizing theme, itself a 'Whiggish'
interpretation (I would not consider such interpretations really to be visions). I shall
compare their major approaches below.
The most important thing about Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis is its
impact on the profession. Unfinished and published with obvious and identified lacunae,
it can not serve as a good reference guide. Yet, reference is regularly made to it. Why?
Although I will expand on this point later, let me say here only that it offers a complex
but not-quite-idiosyncratic vision of economics.
Schumpeter knew Continental sources, with which most British- and American- and
often imaginatively. Most of all, he escaped the usual constraints of having been educated
within the bounds of British Utilitarianism, and even though for much of his life he
apparently had a weakness for the effortless superiority of the English gentleman-scholar,
he was in the important sense an intellectually superbly equipped outsider.
1.5 In sum, then, the importance of the book is that it gives a vision of the
development of the economics discipline, a vision created by an unusually well-read
'outsider' (from the standpoint of most British and American-trained professional
economists) at a time when he shunned most professional company and was driven by a
personal ambition work ethic to complete a monumental effort explaining the relationship
10 The well-known text by Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, was
not published until 1915.
11 The basic manuscript was the result of a student's shorthand notes; in that form it was sold in
1949 by Augustus Kelley, Bookseller (New York) with Mrs Mitchell's permission (extended to a
very limited number of sets) as Lecture Notes on Types of Economic Theory: From Mercantilism to
Institutionalism. Dorfman corrected and greatly expanded the material.
between what he called the economic science and not only other sciences but also
other social studies and philosophical disciplines. Flawed by its incompleteness (due to
the author's sudden death), there is, nonetheless, nothing else like it in the English
language; and even when one turns to other cultures, nothing has appeared which has its
appeal, if not its scope. Most of all, it is the product of an imaginative mind embittered by
a World War in which his adopted country, perhaps misled by an ubiquitñus Anglo-Saxon cultural penumbra (which he came to despise), was seemingly fighting the wrong
enemy. The book stands as a challenge (perhaps if it had been finished it would have
been as a rejection) to the way Anglo-American economists were accustomed to looking
at themselves and their craft.
II THE BOOK'S PART IN SCHUMPETER'S
LIFE
2.1 Just why Schumpeter undertook to write the 1914 Der Dogmen—und
Methodengeschichte seems to me to be less of a mystery than is the slant of its contents.
He was at the time a young man, perceived both by the world and by himself as a
Wunderkind. It was part of his judgement as well, perhaps, of his conceit, that he wanted
to lay out a schema for the understanding of the development of the economics discipline,
both as a science and as practiced as an art. Assertive in tone, it reflects an intellectual
confidence that was as yet essentially untouched by any serious career failures. But, if
Schumpeter was unscarred, he certainly was aware that others had been. Of them,
according to Swedberg (1991, pp. 91–3), he was greatly concerned about the opinions of
Max Weber, whose efforts to combine an overly abstract theoretical science of
economics with a comparably over-detailed history of events and policies had resulted in
a new 'discipline,'—Sozialökonomie.
Opportunity came to please him in the form of a request from Weber, himself, to
prepare a history of the subject of economic theory. Weber was undertaking the
organization and publication of a deliberately important collective handbook, Grundriss
der Sozialökonomie. The other selected authors were two eminent older scholars, Karl
Bücher and Friedrich von Wieser. Their presence, plus his own desire to ingratiate
himself with Weber12, doubtless affected the rhetoric in the book. And while it retains a
nominal tolerance for a kind of historical approach, it seems to me to be clear that this
was a concession to Weber's feelings and was more of a courtesy than a fully sincere
opinion. At that time, Schumpeter was generally putting his chips on abstract theory.
12 It succeeded: Weber became a strong admirer and a supporter when it came to Schumpeter's
applying for chairs. Swedberg reports, however, that the two once avoided coming to blows only by
Weber's stomping out of a coffee house. What caused such violence? Schumpeter was fascinated
by what was going on in the Soviet Union, and seemingly endorsed Leninism, as practiced. Weber,
incensed by Schumpeter's indifference to human cruelty, could not restrain himself (Swedberg,
1991, pp. 92–3).
This earlier book went untranslated into English until after Schumpeter's death, but for
most of the history of economics aficionados of the inter-Wars period, its existence and
(for those who could read German, its contents) assured Schumpeter of an extra degree of
professional standing. Yet, Schumpeter himself seems to have regarded it as evidence of
an unfinished product. Space limitations do not permit much dwelling on its contents (cf.
Perlman, 1982), but at the time he wrote it he was intent upon (1) drawing a distinction
between scientific economics and political economy; (2) showing how British classical
economics was giving way to 'schools of economic thought;' (3) indicating that the
future of economic analysis lay in the tradition of Walrasian general equilibrium analysis,
albeit in a 'dynamic rather than a static form;' and (4) insisting that the filiation of ideas
as well as economic policy rested best in the minds and hands of a disinterested cultural
elite.
2.2 By the 1940s Schumpeter was estranged from many of his Harvard colleagues. It
is popularly believed that this breach came about because of World War II and the
alliance between the Western democracies and Stalin's Soviet Union. More than fifty
years after the event, it is hard to reconstruct the many feelings influencing the situation.
Loring Allen suggests that the alienation may have had an earlier source in Schumpeter's
ambivalence regarding anti-Semitism and the Nazis; but many of Allen's judgements
seem to me to be facile and too easily based on hearsay as well as post hoc, ergo propter
hoc assessments. But, whatever the cause, Schumpeter withdrew from Cambridge and
concentrated on reformulating his ideas about the historical development of the
discipline. When the war ended, Schumpeter reemerged from his cocoon, but he was
never the caterpillar, much less the butterfly, he had been as a young man. He wrote
brilliant essays on Irving Fisher and Maynard Keynes; both of them were published
posthumously in Ten Great Economists (TGE), surpassing his analysis in the HEA. He
served as President of the American Economic Association in 1948 and in that capacity
delivered an address on 'Science and Ideology'. More to our point, he was asked to
deliver, inter alia, a eulogy of Wesley Clair Mitchell just after the latter's death (in 1950).
It was a
strange, idiosyncratic performance but, for the record, the written essay, finished just
before Schumpeter's own death, if effusive is also wise. The History of Economic
Analysis seems to have been largely the product of the bitter years leading to and during
the War. Swedberg relates how Schumpeter proposed the volume to the Oxford
University Press, and from the first it was conceived as a vision, a massive treatment of
the emergence of the scientific discipline. But, like many last great works of artists and
other writers, it seems to have been cursed by an evil star. What was written was done so
by a depressed author. It was unfinished when he died, and his devoted student and third
wife, Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, who had brought out of chaos what order there had
been during the years from around 1938 onwards, sought to polish the manuscript as best
she could and to integrate as much as possible.
The task was extremely difficult. Schumpeter's writing method was disordered. Major
bits and large pieces were to be found in three different studies, and it was not always
clear which had been written first and which later. Much was written in an archaic
German shorthand. However, she persevered.
But the evil star's curse on the project followed her as well. She suffered a malignancy
during the months when she could work on the book, and she died well before it came
out. Several Harvard colleagues did what they could to complete her task, but committees
rarely can do as well as a single individual and, as I have indicated, Elizabeth
Schumpeter's own knowledge of the vision, surely greater than anyone else's, was far
greater than theirs.
Elizabeth Schumpeter also proposed the printing of a collection of his essentially
obituary essays on key economists, essays running from 1914 until no less than a
fortnight before his death. Her selection (TGE) combines a judgement regarding market
taste (which may explain the lengthy essay on Marx coming first) and one reflecting
Schumpeter's regard for the eminence of the ten 'greats' (Marx, Walras, Carl Menger,
Marshall, Pareto, von Böhm Bawerk, Taussig, Fisher, Mitchell, and Keynes) plus three
appended short pieces on Knapp, von Wieser, and von Bortkiewicz.
Ten Great Economists I find is worth noting particularly because of its lengthy
analysis of Pareto's work. It is canon that Schumpeter thought Walras the greatest
economist in the history of the profession. I suggest that a less conventional view is also
worth considering. In the end he admired Pareto as much or more. At the very 'least,'
Pareto was the worldly St Paul to Walras's spiritual Jesus.
III How THE BOOK is ORGANIZED
3.1 In the HEA Schumpeter sets out to explain how the discipline should be perceived.
Part I (3.7 percent of the pages) as it appears seems to me to be the most important. In his
1914 study, Der Dogmen—und Methodengeschichte, which was long on self-conscious
organization,13 Schumpeter's themes involve a distinction between 'science' (e.g.
scientific economics) and econo-political programs (political economy), and contrast the
roles played by disinterested 'consultant administrators' as distinct from venal
pamphleteers (cf. Perlman, 1983). The older Schumpeter set out in the HEA to do
something far more sophisticated. He sought to explain economics in terms of the
dynamics of the sociology of knowledge rather than under the more usual rubric, classical
epistemology. I feel that his exposition would possibly have been pedagogically easier
had he chosen to tie his thoughts to Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia Generale, with its
distinction between rational and non-rational systems. But their goals involving theory as
a means to understanding human meanings were similar and Schumpeter, in explaining
ultimately what shaped economics (and by economics he clearly meant economic
theorizing), stated quite flatly that first one had to know
13 Jacob Viner observed that this book was along the lines of the Cossa study (1954, p. 898).
economic history14 and statistical display and analysis.15 Given that background, one was
then ready to study theory. Schumpeter took pains to explain that much writing passing
for theory was irrelevant and even jejune; theorists poisoned their own well by making
foolish condemnations of empirical details and extravagant claims relating to their own
progress and prowess. Many theorists were intentionally ignorant of the fact that the best
theorists (like Newton) were skeptical (with reason) of being classified by theorists as
theorists.
Nonetheless, Schumpeter's rule of thumb was that abstract rules were to be derived
from and then tested against observed data. Although he refers to Marshall as a leader in
the practice of 'scientific economics' (1954, p. 21), it is also even more true that
Schumpeter abhorred the tendency of Marshall and the Marshallians to bend their
analysis in the name of ideologies such as free trade, utilitarianism, and so forth.
In a significant sense, Part I of the History of Economic Analysis seems to have been
laid out as a major contribution. However, as it was unfinished, it suffers seriously from
omissions. What Schumpeter had to say about his bugaboo—ideology—and his Golden
Fleece—a scientific economics—can be inferred from the written version of his 1948
Presidential Address. But what he had meant to say about his coming to grips with the
meaning of Weber's Sozialökonomie is not adequately specified, and in his conscious
eschewing of Pareto's sociological system (as we will note below, his long essay on
Pareto was written during the last months of his life) his views are left for me, at least—
up in the air.
3.2 Part II reflects Schumpeter's greatest relative strengths. It involves about a quarter
of the book's pages, and it takes up ad seriatim first the contrasting seminal contributions
of Plato and Aristotle and the amazing lack of analytical material associated with
Republican and Imperial Rome before turning to a splendid survey of the Christian and
Natural Law writers. The third chapter of this part is a reprise of his 1914 theme of the
consultant administrators and the pamphleteers—the former groped for a vision, the latter
for reward. His treatment of Smith is insightful but, nonetheless, harsh. Praise, such as he
gave it in this chapter to the English, was reserved for Josiah Child.
The fourth chapter is more generous in tone; in it Schumpeter's identification of the
qualities of the hero becomes apparent. What impressed him most was the hero's ability
to build an original system rather than merely to introduce a mechanism of thought.
Taking up William Petty and his associates, Boisguillebert, Cantillon, Quesnay and his
14 Swedberg notes the influence of Max Weber (Swedberg 1991, p. 184). 15 Schumpeter's view was similar to Lord Kelvin's; science involved measurement, even if it was
not measurement, itself. Schumpeter, alert to Hayek's disparagement of scientism, was amenable to
every discipline developing its own ordering of knowledge (not learning), and specifically physics
(Schumpeter 1954, pp. 16–18).
associates, and Turgot, Schumpeter, the first President of the Econometric16 Society,
eventually added (in pencil) Turgot's name to one chapter's original title, The
Econometricians.
There follow three chapters focussed on specific topics and subtopics; suffice it here to
list only the topics: (5) Population, Returns, Wages, and Employment; (6) Value and
Money, and (7) The 'Mercantilist' Literature. They contain much informative
information—names, titles, dates, and, most of all, the tracing of the filiation of ideas, but
they are mostly descriptive. Schumpeter, quite naturally, 'graded' the names—among
those getting 'firsts' or 'very high seconds' were Botero, Serra and Misselden, Steuart,
and perhaps Hume. For many, the most useful thing about this part is the integration of
Continental names (with what is for many readers limited to English) the British names.
3.3 Part III covers economics between 1790 and 1870. The initial three chapters cover
the plan of the analysis, a bird's-eye view of the economic history of the period, and a
marvelous survey of the dominant idea-sets of that era. Again, Schumpeter 'reviews the
troops' (his phrase), and identifies his heroes, including Longfield and von Thünen,
Cournot, J.S.Mill, Say, and Sismondi. Schumpeter then devotes most of a chapter (5) to
J.S.Mill. In chapter 6 Schumpeter synthesizes British Classical Economics, using
Senior's four postulates (rational maximization, the Malthusian Law, diminishing returns
in agriculture, and increasing returns in industry) as a convenient reference point or point
of intellectual departure. From there he continues in the integration of Ricardian and
Marxian thinking, Say's Law of Markets, and the concern with production and
distribution. Both chapter 6 and its sequel (7), 'Money, Credit, and Cycles' are Englishexperience oriented.
Schumpeter's treatment of British Utilitarianism is worth specific mention. He accepts
its centrality in the development of the Brtish classical system, but he does not accept its
validity. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that neither Mandeville17 nor
Bentham has a tablet, much less a memorial, in his Pantheon.
3.4 Whereas it took three chapters of about 84 pages in Part III to introduce the
intellectual background (the sociology of ideas) for the period 1790 to 1870, it took four
chapters but fewer pages (about 74) to introduce the intellectual background for the
period 'From 1870 to 1914 and later' in Part IV. Even so, this Part is the one giving full
geographical sweep. Taking up developments in theory in Britain (he concentrates far
more on Marshall than on Jevons or Edgeworth), France, Germany and Austria, Italy, the
Netherlands and Scandinavia, the United States, and finally in 'Marxism' (if not a land,
certainly a 'cloud' of its own), he sets the stage for what he really wants to discuss.
Chapter 6 is on the Marshallian system; chapter 7 is on the evolution of equilibrium
analysis (partial equilibrium being seen as the product of Cournot and Marshall; general
equilibrium, albeit static, as principally the product of Walras). Chapter 8 takes up
applications as seen in the treatment of Money, Credit, and Cycles.
16 Schumpeter thought the word, Econometrics, philologically ignorant, '…it ought to be either
Ecometrics or Economometrics' (Schumpeter 1954, p. 209). 17 Hardly mentioned (two slim references). Hayek, by way of contrast, makes Mandeville's role
seminal in the development of individualism, utilitarianism, and even in the self-regulating market.
(See Hayek, 1967, Perlman, 1990, and 5.6 below.)
Schumpeter mentions with enthusiasm his colleague Haberler, and with less
enthusiasm his contemporary, Maynard Keynes.18 Bates Clark and Wesley Clair
Mitchell19 get short shrift.20 Irving Fisher (on balance) is treated with qualified
enthusiasm and at some, if limited, length.21 Instead, he sets out to glorify Walras, and as
I have mentioned earlier and will mention again below, he eschewed most but not all
lengthy discussion of Pareto. As Schumpeter was a man hardly consumed with modesty,
false or otherwise, it is puzzling why he did not mention any of his own contributions;
perhaps that was to be left to the last.
In my judgement, Part 4—because it was to lay the foundations for an understanding
of the meaning of dynamic general equilibrium analysis—needed much more work. My
guess is that, given the time, Schumpeter could have greatly expanded and improved its
exposition. But, I also believe that given the state of mathematics during the period
before 1960 and his own reluctance to get involved in further studies in mathematics, this
section was bound to have been limited.
3.5 Part V was to be 'A Sketch of Modern Developments.' As the manuscript was left,
it had a truncated statement of his plan, a comparison of the Marshallian-Wicksellian (an
essentially partial equilibrium analysis) approach, a discussion of 'totalitarian economics'
(Germany, Italy, and Russia), some thoughts about dynamics and business-cycle
research, and a slightly polished assessment of Keynes's impact on the profession.22 This
Part, clearly intended to be ultimately no more than a 'sketch', is too unfinished to be of
concern to anyone but those interested only in very preliminary drawings.