Schumpeter, Joseph Alois

Schumpeter, Joseph Alois

(yō`zĕf ä`lōēs sho͝om`pā'tər), 1883–1950, Austrian-American economist, LL.D. Univ. of Vienna, 1906. He began practicing law but turned to teaching two years later. He was professor of economics at the Univ. of Graz from 1911 to 1914 and at Bonn from 1925 to 1932, when he went to the United States; thereafter he was professor of economics at Harvard. He served (1919–20) as Austrian minister of finance. His major contributions to economics were the theory of the entrepreneur as the dynamic factor in fostering the business cycle and the theory of economic development of capitalism. His most important books are Theory of Economic Development (1911, in German; tr. 1934), Business Cycles (1939), Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942, 3d ed. 1950), and History of Economic Analysis (1954).

Bibliography

See study ed. by S. E. Harris (1951, repr. 1969).

Schumpeter, Joseph Alois

(1883–1950) economist; born in Triesch, Austro-Hungary. One of the greatest 20th-century economists, he was born and educated in Austria and served briefly there as the Minister of Finance. He emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1932, accepting a professorship at Harvard University. His early theorizing replaced Marx's view of greed-driven capitalism with dynamic, innovative entrepreneurship, clearly differentiating the capitalist from the entrepreneur. He published several books, although Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) stands out as his masterpiece. In it, he rejects the Marxist diagnosis of the imminent breakdown of capitalism and at the same time predicts the almost inevitable emergence of socialism due to a betrayal of capitalist values by intellectuals of the western world. His final book, History of Economic Analysis (posthumously published in 1954), is considered a brilliant exposition of the history of economic thought.