Schumpeter spent the last eighteen years of his life at Harvard University, where he was president of the Econometric Society (in 1942) and the American Economic Association (in 1948). In addition to these academic posts, he worked as a lawyer and a financial speculator - not to mention a brief stint as minister of finance in the new post-Habsburg Austrian republic between March and October 1919 - and spent some time in Britain and the United States. His first publication came in 1906, when he was only twenty-three years of age.įrom 1909 to 1911, Schumpeter was professor of economics at the University of Czernowitz, moving first to the University of Graz (1911–1921) and then to the University of Bonn (1925–1932). Schumpeter went on to spend five years at the University of Vienna between 19, where he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy in addition to economics. He was educated in Vienna at the prestigious Theresianum Academy of Knights of Vienna. His new stepfather was a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, so the young Joseph grew up in a distinctly upper-class environment. Schumpeter’s father, a merchant, had died in 1887, and his mother soon remarried. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 7, 1950.
Schumpeter was born into a prosperous middle-class family in the Moravian town of Triesch on February 8, 1883, a month before the death of Karl Marx. For Schumpeter, the drive toward imperialism and war that was so evident in his own time stemmed from precapitalist social forces that were still at work in European society rather than the logic of capitalism itself. He disagreed with the Marxist view of capitalism’s inner contradictions while believing that the ultimate victory of socialism was inevitable anyway. This experience no doubt encouraged Schumpeter to explore many of the same questions that his Marxist contemporaries had posed, although the answers that he formulated differed sharply from theirs. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schumpeter was a member of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s legendary graduate seminar, along with three leading Austro-Marxists - Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Emil Lederer - and the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises. In politics, Schumpeter was a liberal conservative - or perhaps a conservative liberal - but he was also deeply influenced by his Marxian contemporaries.
A phrase Schumpeter coined to describe the essence of capitalism as he understood it, “creative destruction,” has become one of the most familiar terms in the economic lexicon. He published prolifically in both German and English on questions of economic theory, economic sociology, economic and social policy, and the history of ideas. Joseph Alois Schumpeter was one of the most prominent political economists during the first half of the twentieth century.
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