Essays: On Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism

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Transaction Publishers - Business & Economics - 341 pages

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.

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Page 293 - The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Page 104 - It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science.
Page 73 - Capitalism, whilst economically stable, and even gaining in stability, creates, by rationalising the human mind, a mentality and a style of life incompatible with its own fundamental conditions, motives and social institutions, and will be changed, although not by economic necessity and probably even at some sacrifice of economic welfare, into an order of things which it will be merely matter of taste and terminology to call Socialism or not.
Page 224 - Seen in this light, the entrepreneur and his function are not difficult to conceptualize: the defining characteristic is simply the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way...

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