Schumpeter: A Biography.

• Author: Samuels, Warren J.

Ever since Joseph Schumpeter's death in January 1950 it has been remarked that he left no school. By now, however, there is an International Schumpeter Society, encouraging and publishing research in the tradition of Schumpeterian dynamics, and other volumes published independent of the Society. And now, too, there are two biographies, a two-volume work by an economist, Robert Loring Allen |1~, reviewed by Samuels |2~, and a single volume by a sociologist, Richard Swedberg, and a newly translated volume (originally published in 1983 in Vienna) of personal and intellectual biographical essays, by the late Austrian economist Eduard Marz. Allen and Marz were students of Schumpeter's at Harvard.

Swedberg's is more of an intellectual biography than is Allen's, though it too covers all the important details of Schumpeter's career in Europe and the U.S. Both biographies present the same dismal picture of Schumpeter's depression and sense of personal inadequacy, his arrogance and elitism, and his secret private religion centering on his late mother and second wife, treated as private saints. Both tell the same story of Schumpeter the man. Schumpeter loses his magisterial, larger-than-life image, although his enormous intellectual accomplishments remain.

Swedberg presents very sophisticated interpretations of Schumpeter's three "sociological" essays, those on the crisis of the tax state, imperialism, and social classes. Particularly impressive is Swedberg's sympathetic account of what Schumpeter tried to do, and in fact did, in his Business Cycles (1939). Generally, Swedberg shows how Schumpeter's "economic" works look different once one goes beyond interpreting them on the basis of economics defined as pure microeconomic theory. Both Swedberg and Allen stress that Schumpeter sought and to some extent achieved a broadly comprehensive definition of economics, the latter emphasizing Schumpeter's failure to achieve a determinate evolutionary model encompassing economic and social history. Distinctive in Swedberg's interpretation is the role of Gustav Schmoller's work for both Max Weber and Schumpeter.

Swedberg writes that Schumpeter was always "intensely aware that even if there exist several social sciences, there is only one social reality"; thus Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development opens with the statement that "the social process is really one indivisible whole". By the same token, part of Swedberg's interpretation of Schumpeter's case for...