SHAWORDS

For Schumpeter, capitalism itself could not possibly make for conquest — Joseph Schumpeter

"For Schumpeter, capitalism itself could not possibly make for conquest and war: its spirit was rational, calculating, and therefore averse to risk-taking on the scale implicit in warmaking and in other heroic antics. Interesting as they were as a counterpoint to the various Marxist theories of imperialism, Schumpeters views evinced less awareness of the knottiness of the problem he was dealing with than those of Adam Ferguson and Tocqueville that have just been recalled. To go back even further: Cardinal de Retz, with his insistence that the passions are not to be counted out in situations where interest-motivated behavior is considered to be the rule, appears to have had the better part of the argument than either Keynes or Schumpeter."
J
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Schumpeter
author40 quotes

Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.

More by Joseph Schumpeter

View all →
Quote
"The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here."
J
Joseph Schumpeter
Quote
"Maybe we expect too much from democracy. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great modern thinkers to address the question, certainly thought so. Eighteenth-century optimists believed that there was such a thing as the common good, that people could determine it for themselves, and that they would then elect representatives to carry out their will. This “classical theory of democracy,” as Schumpeter argued in 1942, was more a quasi-religious expression of hope than an actual description of how democracies worked. There is no such thing as the common good, he delighted in pointing out. And even if there were, ordinary citizens, including the more educated among them, would be too irrational in their desires and too easily fooled to know what it might be. In theory democratic citizens raise and decide issues. In practice, “the issues that shape their fate are normally decided for them.”"
J
Joseph Schumpeter
Quote
"The aristocratic and the modern were inextricably combined in Joseph Schumpeter. The paradoxes of this great economist, who also served as minister of finance in the post- World War I government of Austria, are suggested by the fact that at his first teaching post, he challenged the university librarian to a duel to win freer access to books for the students. Perhaps Schumpeter was attracted to the big issues because he himself witnessed drastic changes in society."
J
Joseph Schumpeter