The destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter, who made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world’s greatest economist, lover, and horseman—and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Joseph Schumpeter (1883 - 1950) was one of the foremost economic thinkers of the twentieth century. Today Schumpeter is most well-known for his idea of 'creative destruction'. This is the notion that a market economy is simultaneously creative and destructive and therein lies the process of renewal that is central to the endurance and also the unpopularity of capitalism. Schumpeter's work also contains one of the most important conservative critiques of mass democracy. Schumpeter argued that mass democracy had totalitarian tendencies and was likely to degenerate into the tyranny of the popular.

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 This book provides a thorough overview of Schumpeter's writings, and also introduces previously unpublished material based on his letters and interviews.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.

"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"

Joseph Alois Schumpeter is arguably the most important economist of the 20th century. Most readers are familiar with his Theory of Economic Development and his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Less well-known are his seminal works published before he left Europe for the United States in 1942. In particular for the first time the missing Chapter Seven of his Theory of Economic Development has been published in this volume. It tries to put Economic Development into the broader context of culture, law and policy. Many of his earlier writings display a similar integrative approach and are therefore often treated as sociological writings. As Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy shows, he did not dissociate the different social sciences in his own mind but rather strove to keep the unity of the social sciences. Entrepreneurship, style and vision are the unifying concepts of his work.

"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"

"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"

This collection constitutes an examination of Schumpeter's legacy that is wider than any yet attempted. As one of the key economists of the twentieth century, Schumpeter's economics is viewed in the context of its relation to purer Austrian theories of the free market, Keynesian macroeconomics, the early neoclassicism of Marshall and Walras, and a persuasive argument made for its centrality to the discipline as a whole.

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.