Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) is one of the most celebrated authors on the economics and sociology of the twentieth century. Richard Swedberg's new biography provides an engaging and vivid account of Schumpeter's varied life, including his ventures into politics and private banking as well as his academic career. As a backdrop to these, Swedberg also discusses Schumpeter's tragic personal life. This book provides a thorough overview of Schumpeter's writings, and also introduces previously unpublished material based on his letters and interviews. Swedberg emphasizes that Schumpeter saw economics as a form of social investigation, consisting of four fields: economic theory, economic sociology, economic history and statistics. The author describes and analyses Schumpeter's theory of social classes and modern states as well as his more famous theory of the entrepreneur.

This book is the outcome of a bibliographical research and historical analysis of the evolution of the international literature on J.A. Schumpeter. The research has been carried out in the last few years with the organizational support of the "International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society" and through the establishment of connections with libraries, universities and research institutes throughout the world. Schumpeter's papers at the Harvard University archives have also been scrutinized. The volume includes a historical and critical assessment of the literature on the Austrian economist - according to the most important and specific Schumpeterian "categories": biography, methodology, development, money, cycle, sociology, politics, and history. The book is characterized by the completeness and richness of its information and by the homogeneous treatment of all the possible sources which could have provided news on Schumpeter. Besides Europe and the US, the research has been extended to the USSR, Latin America, Eastern Europe and, above all, to Japan where the Schumpeterian tradition is very deep-rooted.

"The author puts this book in the best possible context by referring to the ""magisterial and paradoxical Dr. Schumpeter"". A figure in a rare class with John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, and Alfred Marshall, the work of Joseph Schumpeter is equalled only in monumental significance by his personal trials and tribulations. The work is divided into two volumes - the first covering his career in Europe and the second his life and achievements in America.Walt Rostow, in his Foreword, sums up Robert Loring Allen's achievement in biography and intellectual history thus: ""In dealing with Schumpeter's life, Allen exhibits a rare consciousness of the extraordinary complexity and only limited penetrability of the human personality Schumpeter's closely interwoven personal and professional life unfolds, Allen develops without dogmatism a pattern of linkages for the reader to contemplate. In a splendid final passage, he provides a memorable summation.""What makes this enormous effort so successful is the linkage of the personal and the professional, the biographical with the intellectual. Indeed, it is Schumpeter's single-minded determination to explain within a single, formal theory, the dynamics of capitalism that bridges the gap in space, time, and personality. To his books The Theory of Economic Development, and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, both published by Transaction, is now added the specific contexts in which these and his other works were written.The author of this biography, like the subject himself, is a masterful student of the craft of economics, and its place within the larger social science contexts that Schumpeter worked. In this work, we are introduced into the main current of European and American social science alike. The title of the book, Opening Doors, derives from Schumpeter's life long aim to appeal to inquiring minds to move through such doors in an effort to create the social science of the"

In addition to the major themes of his life--the place of the entrepreneur in economic development, the risks and rewards of innovation, business cycles and why they occur, and the evolution of capitalism in Europe and America--the essays contain statements on how Schumpeter viewed his own development. They discuss how he looked at Marxism, and how he feared that economics was in danger of becoming too ideological. Several of the essays are classics. In this new edition, Schumpeter's Essays can finally be read with the enjoyment and enlightenment they deserve. The volume is alive to the basic issues of our time.

"The author puts this book in the best possible context by referring to the ""magisterial and paradoxical Dr. Schumpeter"". A figure in a rare class with John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, and Alfred Marshall, the work of Joseph Schumpeter is equalled only in monumental significance by his personal trials and tribulations. The work is divided into two volumes - the first covering his career in Europe and the second his life and achievements in America.Walt Rostow, in his Foreword, sums up Robert Loring Allen's achievement in biography and intellectual history thus: ""In dealing with Schumpeter's life, Allen exhibits a rare consciousness of the extraordinary complexity and only limited penetrability of the human personality Schumpeter's closely interwoven personal and professional life unfolds, Allen develops without dogmatism a pattern of linkages for the reader to contemplate. In a splendid final passage, he provides a memorable summation.""What makes this enormous effort so successful is the linkage of the personal and the professional, the biographical with the intellectual. Indeed, it is Schumpeter's single-minded determination to explain within a single, formal theory, the dynamics of capitalism that bridges the gap in space, time, and personality. To his books The Theory of Economic Development, and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, both published by Transaction, is now added the specific contexts in which these and his other works were written.The author of this biography, like the subject himself, is a masterful student of the craft of economics, and its place within the larger social science contexts that Schumpeter worked. In this work, we are introduced into the main current of European and American social science alike. The title of the book, Opening Doors, derives from Schumpeter's life long aim to appeal to inquiring minds to move through such doors in an effort to create the social science of the"

Ordinarily, the word essays is invoked at great risk by authors and publishers alike. But in the case of this special collection by Joseph A. Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist who finally settled at Harvard, the scholarly world knows this particular volume as his Essays. For a less pious younger generation, a subtitle has been added describing what these essays are about.In addition to the major themes of Schumpeter's life: the place of the entrepreneur in economic development, the risks and rewards of innovation, business cycles and why they occur, and the evolution of capitalism in Europe and America, the Essays contain statements on how Schumpeter viewed his own development; they discuss how he looked at Marxism, and how he feared that economics was in danger of becoming too ideological.Several of the Essays are classics. This is the case for "The Creative Response in Economic History" in which Schumpeter makes a plea for the close cooperation between economic theory and economic history. Another is "Science and Ideology," which constitutes Schumpeter's presidential address before the American Economic Association. Finally, there is the intriguing preface to the Japanese translation of Theory of Economic Development, in which Schumpeter names Walras and Marx as his two great predecessors.Even those who treasure the original publication were irritated by the remarkably poor quality of much of the book, which reproduced everything from typewriter script to nearly unreadable, reduced double columns. These lapses have been corrected in this new edition. Here Schumpeter's Essays can finally be read with the enjoyment, no lesS than enlightenment, they deserve. The volume is alive to the basic issues of our time. The reader can look forward to intellectual insight and stimuli of the highest order.

Schumpeter proclaims in this classical analysis of capitalist society first published in 1911 that economics is a natural self-regulating mechanism when undisturbed by "social and other meddlers." In his preface he argues that despite weaknesses, theories are based on logic and provide structure for understanding fact. Of those who argue against him, Schumpeter asks a fundamental question: "Is it really artificial to keep separate the phenomena incidental to running a firm and the phenomena incidental to creating a new one?" In his answers, Schumpeter offers guidance to Third World politicians no less than First World businessman. In his substantial new introduction John E. Elliott discusses the salient ideas of The Theory of Economic Development against the historical background of three great periods of economic thought in the last two decades.