A Guide to Schumpeter

the century and studied law and economics there. During the early part of his career, he tried his luck both as a businessman (director of a bank) and as a politician (minister of finance) without much success. It is as a writer and social scientist that we remember him today. He became a professor at the University of Bonn in 1925 and later at Harvard University in the USA (1932) where he remained until his death. In a series of writings, Schumpeter developed a highly original approach to the study of long-run economic and social change, focusing in particular on the crucial role played by innovation and the factors influencing it. In so doing, he distanced himself from the (then) emerging neoclassical strand of economics because, in Schumpeter’s own words, it assumed that “economic life is essen-tially passive … so that the theory of a stationary process constitutes reall