Joseph A. Schumpeter revisited : projections for the twenty-first century

A loyal subject of the Dual Monarchy by birth, a man of noble if not outright aristocratic inclinations by upbringing, a permanent exile, and a latter day professor at the ivory tower par excellence of disinterested scholarship, namely Harvard University, Joseph A. Schumpeter was well endowed to develop a critical attitude towards the times he lived through. Throughout the many stages of his career, he remained persistently an insider yet outsider to his immediate surroundings. His moral and ideological commitments to the bygone past provided him with a sense of objectivity when it came to passing a judgement on his own times. It is hence no surprise that Schumpeter could at the same time give a positive verdict on the economic performance of capitalism yet argue that it could possibly not survive because of its very own self-destructive thrust. This was indeed a singular attitude at a time when advocates of capitalism tended to argue for its invincibility, whereas its loud critiques maintained that it was bound to collapse because of its failure on economic grounds. Irrespectively of on which side of the debate the scholars were placed, their individual preferences over the success/failure of capitalism happily coincided with their theoretical inferences from their supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Among them all, Schumpeter formed the sole exception. While he would have preferred capitalism to survive, as he was impressed by its economic dynamism and creativity, he concluded that it could not (Schumpeter, 1942: 61). This must have had something to do with the fact that his greatest value commitment was not to capitalism as such, but to the aristocratic era that preceded it. In fact, it is precisely because he was more dedicated to all that capitalism had uprooted and displaced, he could pass a relatively objective assessment on the balance-sheet of capitalism, economic and otherwise