Schumpeter’s Uniqueness as an Economist and Historian of Economics
The history of economic thought was one of JAS’s favourite subjects which is surprising for someone who claimed that economic research should be pursued as a quasi-natural science.
So why was history important to JAS? First, he develops a specific approach to the historical dimension of the subject: the subject matter of the discipline is economic development, that is, the economic process evolving in historical time. Second, the history of the subject is posing intricate challenges, analogous to the dialectic of modernization at large: on the one hand, the modern development of economic analysis can be regarded as the relatively autonomous development of a scientific tool-box; on the other hand, various historically contingent phenomena are playing a role in the formation of economic theories, including ideologies (cf. Schumpeter 1949a). Their effects are ambivalent: they are sources of distortion and obstacles to progress, but they may frame certain issues and develop “pre-analytic visions” enhancing theoretical developments. In the following, pertinent ambivalences will be discussed, as JAS’s way of dealing with them makes him unique in the history of economic thought.Referring to Karl Marx, JAS (Schumpeter 1942: 3) wrote:
Most of the creations of the intellect or fancy pass away for good after a time that varies between an after-dinner hour and a generation. Some, however, do not. They suffer eclipses, but they come back again, and they come back not as unrecognizable elements of cultural inheritance, but in their individual garb and with their personal scars which people may see and touch. These we may well call the great ones - it is no disadvantage of this definition that it links greatness to vitality.......... But there is an additional advantage to defining greatness by revivals:
it thereby becomes independent of our love or hate.
Given his own definition of greatness, JAS is certainly making the grade. Gaining momentum in the 1980s, a veritable wave of Schumpeter-revivals took place. Schumpeter’s influence is now visible in a great variety of scholarly discourses, including Schumpeterian growth theories (Aghion et al. 2013), evolutionary economics (Andersen 2009, 2011; Witt 2002), entrepreneurship as a subject of management studies and economic history (McCraw 2007), or the broader perspectives of economic dynamism a la Edmund Phelps in his more recent works. Those almost simultaneous but distinct kinds of revivals indicate JAS’s unique place in the history of economic thought. His role is specific in more than one respect, and it is a specific challenge for the history of modern economics: first, there is hardly another theorist who so resolutely motivates and pursues a research agenda in which dynamism and open-ended development assumes centre stage, while at the same time paying genuine and emphatic tribute to the achievements of static equilibrium theory (namely, the theory of the circular flow). Second, there is hardly another economist whose whole oeuvre is abounding with various kinds of explicit and implicit references pertinent to the double nature of economics as a system of knowledge: as a body of knowledge which is evolving (and ought to evolve) not different from modern natural science, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, is so intricately intertwined with a richer array of discourses and sources of knowledge regarding socio-economic live. Apart from his emphasis on economic history (1949b), JAS (1954a: 16) thinks that in economics “one source of information... denied to physics, namely, man’s extensive knowledge of the meanings of economic actions” is available. Hence the vision of economics as a specialized toolbox of social physics is complemented by broader and richer domains of knowledge regarding socio-economic interdependences.
This is reflected in a number of observations and implications to be found throughout JAS’s oeuvre:
1.
Historically, economics needed quite a long time to emancipate itself from other disciplines, notably from theology and philosophy (Schumpeter 1915).2. Schools and paradigms play a more important role than in the natural sciences. That role is in need of clarification (Schumpeter 1908; 1915). In the future, modern economics should leave behind the straightjackets imposed by schools.
3. The evolution of economics is often influenced by political issues, which determine the problem setting (Schumpeter 1954a).
4. Pre-analytic visions or ideologies play a role as a background for formulating questions or endowing them with a sense of importance, but also as a source of distortion or as an obstacle for further development (Schumpeter 1949a; 1954a).
5. In order to identify economics as a discipline separated from others such as sociology, we cannot rely on the distinction between “rational” and “irrational” behaviour.