The Marginal Revolutionaries by Janek Wasserman

Author:Janek Wasserman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300249170
Publisher: Yale University Press

Schumpeter’s “Literary” Turn

If the early 1940s represented a low point for the popularity of the Austrian economists, then the mid- and late-1940s resurgence was a vindication of Austrian and central European thought styles. The list of impactful titles produced by the Austrians between 1942 and 1945 is staggering: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942); Hayek, Road to Serfdom (1944); Mises, Bureaucracy (1944); John von Neumann and Morgenstern, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). If you include the works of Karl Polanyi and Karl Popper—The Great Transformation (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)—the Austrians may have produced more important texts in social and political theory than any other midcentury group. In light of this dramatic change of fortune, we must explore the factors that helped transform the intellectual fate of this émigré group. In addition to a successful assimilation into Anglophone society, the Austrians’ willingness to escape the bounds of traditional economics opened their work to new audiences. The Austrians showed that they were not only economists. Their wide-ranging philosophical investigations espoused the sanctity and power of “Western” liberal values, anticipating similar trends in the Anglophone world. Several of the Austrians, namely, Mises, Hayek, and Machlup, re-created themselves as the torchbearers of a new ideological movement. Meanwhile Schumpeter and Morgenstern also found new audiences forging paths that led them even further afield from their Austrian origins.26

Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy initiated a change of fortunes for the fifty-nine-year-old Austrian. After Business Cycles, Schumpeter turned his attention to contemporary affairs. He identified socialism as the key concern for this synoptic work: “This volume is the result of . . . almost forty years’ thought, observation and research on the subject of socialism.” Fin-de-siècle Vienna had inculcated in him a deep mistrust for socialism. Like Menger, Böhm, Wieser, and Mises, he objected to it on both scientific and ideological grounds. While he avoided calling Capitalism a “political” text, he admitted it would not offer a “well--balanced treatise.” He examined the possibility that a socialist order of society, supported by a democratic method of government, could emerge out of bourgeois, capitalist society. He concluded that the singularity of purpose demanded by a socialist economic system made it incompatible with democracy and freedom. Written in a lively, ironic tone, Capitalism became one of the most influential social philosophical texts of the post–World War II era.27

Schumpeter built his argument around answering two questions: (1) Can capitalism survive? (2) Can socialism work? A third, related question about the compatibility of socialism and democracy emerged from the first two. His answers were, all things equal, no and yes; however, a huge “but” loomed. Although he stated, “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think that it can,” this was a bit of legerdemain. Schumpeter believed that yes was possible if people changed their ways: “What counts in any attempt at social prognosis is not the Yes or No that sums up the facts and arguments which lead up to it. . . .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.