Joseph Alois Schumpeter, a renowned Austrian-American Economist and Political Scientist, was born on February 8, 1883, in Triesch, Moravia. His father owned a textile factory and he was an only child. His father passed away when he was young, and his mother remarried to a high-ranking officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. Schumpeter received his early education at the Theresianum in Vienna, where his strong focus was humanities rather than hard sciences. Later, he enrolled in the University of Vienna to study law and economics. There, he attended the lecturers of renowned professors such as of Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Schumpeter received his Ph.D. in 1906, and later in 1908, at the age of 28, he published his most famous contribution to economic literature, Theory of Economic Development.
Joseph Schumpeter began his career in 1909, when he was offered the position of an associate professor at Czernowitz. In 1911, he accepted the post on the chair of political economy at the University of Graz. As Schumpeter’s fame as an accomplished economist spread, he was awarded an honorary degree by Columbia University at the age of 30. In 1919, he served as secretary of state for finance in the new republican Austrian government, for a brief period of seven months. In 1921, he took up the directorship of the Biedermann Bank in Vienna. However, he left the banking world and returned to the field of academia in 1925, when he took up the post of professor of public finance at the University of Bonn in Germany.
Schumpeter’s stay in Bonn lasted till 1932, however, following the deaths of his beloved wife, and shortly afterward of his mother, he became inconsolably mournful and decided to move to the United States. There, he accepted a permanent position at Harvard. He remained there till his retirement in 1949, and even after retiring he continued to be affiliated with the University till his death on January 8, 1950. Schumpeter was among the founding members of the Econometric Society, and also presided over it from 1937 to 1941. In 1948, he was appointed the president of the American Economic Association, the first European to hold such an office.
Joseph Schumpeter’s work was constantly overlooked as all the attention was diverted towards the giant in economic thought, John Maynard Keynes. Schumpeter’s theories on economic health differed from Keynes, he advocated against the repetitive process of recycling the old in to new, and termed it as “creative destruction”. According to him, the economy was like a living organism, and it was constantly growing and adapting to changes. He also opposed the notions of capitalism and government control over economy. Over the years, Schumpeter’s has garnered much attention and world-wide approval, and has helped mankind advance through the economic world.
Schumpeter has made several notable literary contributions to advance the study of Economics. His most celebrated book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, published in 1942, argued that Capitalism will bring its own demise. His book History of Economic Analysis, published in 1954, is a detailed and comprehensive study of the development of analytic methods in economics. Other highly acclaimed publications by Schumpeter include The Theory of Economic Development and Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vol.
Books by Joseph Schumpeter
