based as it was on a sophisticated Continental Catholicism, not only left Robbins cold,
but clearly he paid no attention to it.
In general, Robbins thought that Schumpeter’s bias against classical economics
reflected the feelings of someone outside the ‘true’ Utilitarian tradition. Robbins wrote
that Schumpeter’s perception of the influence of Bentham’s and James Mills’
Utilitarianism was distorted; most English writers were more balanced in their
assumptions of the meaning and consequence of that doctrine.
However, it is when Robbins sets out to demolish Schumpeter’s scaler system of hero
ratings that he scores his truest hits. Robbins’s approach is to attack first the textual
validity of Schumpeter’s assertions (1) of Smith’s place in the scheme of things, (2) of
Ricardo’s influence, (3) of Cournot’s analytical skills, and (4) of Marshall’s writings and
influence, and second to demonstrate that Schumpeter’s treatment of Walras was biased
in the other direction. Schumpeter, according to Robbins, clearly did not apply the same
rigor in assessing Walras as he did elsewhere (Robbins 1955, pp. 4–5).
Clearly what Robbins dismissed was the basic Schumpeterian schema, which
separated what went earlier from the economics of the British classical school-giving to
the former the split between real philosopher/theologians and mere pamphleteers. The
main casualty was Adam Smith’s reputation: put against such philosopher/theologians as
Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, Smith becomes a small potato. Schumpeter’s implication
(never really stated) that Ricardo had a good bit of the pamphleteer in his writings, tended
further to denigrate his opinion of the majesty of the British contribution. But it would be
an error to conclude that the thoughtful Robbins was unimpressed with what Schumpeter
had to say in 400 pages about the classical British tradition.
Robbins lauded Schumpeter’s treatment of economics since 1870, but noted rather
trenchantly that in contrast to Schumpeter’s rule, individual writers, not the schools of
thought, are what is to be judged. It is in this sense that Robbins thought that Schumpeter
clearly underrated Marshall and treated a supposed neglect by Marshall of Jevons, of von
Thünen, and of Cournot and Dupuit with scorn. He thought that Schumpeter’s treatment
of Walras was designed so as to protect both himself and Walras from criticisms that
Edgeworth and Marshall were Walras’s betters both with regard to vision and to technical
detail.

where Schumpeter asserted that in the making of theory, particularly when it dealt with
statistical factual observation, one could strip from the science one’s ideological
commitments, Blaug asserts that the stripping occurs when one sees the results of the true
scientific applications only after testing the constructs under differing conditions. Blaug,
something of a Popperian, is also something of a logician; and between the two, Blaug
fashions his measuring rod. Blaug, like Schumpeter, does not suffer from observable
doubt; nonetheless, in my judgement, he offers, scattered throughout his book, the most
penetrating, detailed analyses of Schumpeter’s treatise.
4.4 Another critical attack came, as one might expect, from the Marxian corner, in the
person of Ronald Meek. Published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in 1957,
Meek’s essay, ‘Is Economics Biased? A Heretical View of a Leading Thesis in
Schumpeter’s History,’ attacks frontally Schumpeter’s problem of separating science and
ideology, and in so doing turns to the thorny issue of whether the filiation of ideas
invariably leads to progress. Meek understands Schumpeter’s fascination with Marxism,
but insists that it was so endowed with a visceral distaste for Marx that Schumpeter was
rendered unreliable in making his judgements. Marx had argued that economics was
making scientific progress until the 1830s and then went off on a bourgeois kick.
Marxians argue, writes Meek, that during the Patristic-Scholastic phase the writings
tended to identify what prices ought to be; during the Neo-Scholastic-Mercantilist phase
the writings tended to explain why things sold at the prices they did, and in the classical
stage the writings tended to identify the competitive equilibrium and the amount of labor
power consumed in the manufacture of goods. Schumpeter, by contrast, thought that the
Patristic-Scholastic writers had developed a theory of utility and scarcity. What emerged
afterwards contained much side-tracking as well as clear error.
Meek’s argument is most clearly appreciated when it comes to consideration of
marginal analysis, something which Schumpeter thought was real science and
ideologically neutral. Meek thinks that marginal analysis reflects the nexus between men
(the producers) and goods, whereas the earlier classical analysis reflected the nexus
between men (the workers) and the owners. Consequently, there was no great advance
with the advent of marginal analysis; if anything, it led to the examination of things other

Heertje’s biography of Schumpeter in The New Palgrave.
Reading Schumpeter, one realizes that his lasting significance stems from
historical description and non-mathematical theoretical analysis. His
inability to put his ideas about the development of economic life into a
mathematical form may eventually change our assessment of him. But
whatever the final evaluation of Schumpeter may be, it cannot be denied
that he gave new direction to the development of economic science by
posing some entirely new questions. Schumpeter’s preoccupation with the
dynamics of economic life broke the spell of the static approach to
economic problems.
Throughout his life Schumpeter was an enfant terrible, who was
always ready to take extreme positions for the sake of argument, and often
seized the chance to irritate people. But he was also a giant on whose
shoulders many later scholars contributing to economic science stood. As
an economist he is no longer in the shadow of Keynes, but in the centre of
the economic scene, both in the theoretical and empirical sense.
(Heertje, 1987, at p. 266).
V MY ASSESSMENT OF THE BOOK
5.1 What is outstanding in this work in my estimation is first the scope of Schumpeter’s
vision and secondly the evidence of breadth of execution. I believe that since its
publication, two, perhaps three, other books offering a vision of comparable (but not
necessarily of equal) scope have appeared. They are works by Ben B.Seligman (1962),
Wesley Clair Mitchell (1967, 1969), and Karl Pribram (1983). The latter two were also
published posthumously, but the material they were based upon was more complete than
was the case here.
5.2 The Seligman book studies the history of economics from the standpoint of an
increasing emphasis on analytical (meaning generally geometric and algebraic)
technique. As a study, I think it reflects a dismay (perhaps even a disillusionment) about
the directions that economics has taken, particularly since the dominant influence of Paul
A.Samuelson’s 1947 The Foundations of Economic Analysis. It is a readable book, but its

type of thinking, has sought to harmonize two quite opposing methods, a priorism and
empiricism. Such was the problem faced by Aristotle in contemplating Plato’s essences;
such was the problem faced by the Franciscan, Roger Bacon,
30
in facing the Dominicans
and what later became the Cartesian influence; such was the division between the 19th-
century Kantians and the Hegelians, the division between the Communists and the
Fascists during the 1930s, and such has been the division between the internationalists
(the American post-World War II Free Traders) and the ‘autarkic nationalists’ (meaning
the Keynesian-influenced British).
5.5 What Schumpeter offered in the History of Economic Analysis, again reduced to
something almost approaching triviality, is the view that understanding economic
phenomena, after abstracting what one understood from ideological preferences, depends
in large part on the epistemological methods one employs, but that each of these methods
has its own historico-sociological experience. He came, particularly in his later years, to
the view that one has to appreciate the way that what one borrows affects whatever one
has. As I interpret this point my example is that in employing the calculus, economists
borrowed a method originally designed for physical mechanics, and that the physics
discipline’s fascination with explaining the equilibrium of forces was translated in
economics into a fascination with a static equilibrium, not at all suited for a process
which was essentially biological, organic, and ever-mutating.
31
When Schumpeter wrote
of dynamic general equilibrium he had in mind something quite different from a
‘Newtonian’-Golden Fleece. Pribram, also educated at the University of Vienna (he was
von Wieser’s principal assistant), like Schumpeter expressed the view that British and
American economics was seriously constrained by the influence of Benthamite
utilitarianism.
5.6 I come now to my own principal criticism of what Schumpeter offered us, namely his
vision. Blaug’s careful reading of what Schumpeter promised and what he delivered

the absence of any other specification, it seems to me he was groping for some paradigm
of fundamental social morality. He was easily sidetracked, and spent too much effort
decrying ideology (although he never decried theology).
Ronald Meek noted in his Marxian interpretation that prior to the classical tradition,
economics dealt with social (by which I suspect he might have meant stable imperatives)
issues
32
like the relationship between workers and their lords. He went on to say that
during the classical period that paradigmatic interest shifted away from a historically
appropriate discussion about classes, people and social organization to an historically
inappropriate nexus between producers and goods. My suggestion is that the vision that
Schumpeter really sought was one involving something akin to a theological paradigm—
integrating fundamental, non-changing, ethical and social values and the dynamic
workings of an evolutionary economy.
By fundamental human and social values, I mean an absolute, true system which was
exogenous to time and place. It was for this reason that so much of Schumpeter’s interest
focussed on medieval writers and Natural Law, but his own remarriage after his divorce
alienated him from the religion of his ancestors. Loring Allen asserts that while
Schumpeter seemed to believe that conventional religious beliefs were for mortals lesser
than he, he became increasingly mystical as he grew older—to the point of writing to and
talking with his dead mother and his dead second wife (Allen, 1991, I, pp. 223–7; II 58–
9). My own assessment differs from Allen’s, who like many modern scientists offer their
discussions and judgements of concepts of religion and religiosity on narrow, somewhat
formalistic and institutionalized planes. Schumpeter, in my view, had a strong religious
nature, albeit one not categorized among the ‘going-organized’ religions. His second
marriage after a divorce may have put him outside of the Roman Catholic flock, but his
devotion to the souls of his dead mother and second wife are considerable evidence that
something of his earlier religious conditioning remained.
When he was a younger man he had thought of science as furnishing answers covering
all topics. By the time he had gotten to this work, he had less faith in science (note his

Unlike many of the theorists of his time, Schumpeter expressed some,
if limited, respect for what they were trying to do; but, he did not go on to say what
should have been said: (a) that they did not see beyond the Hobbes-Locke individualist-
utilitarian paradigm, and (b) that their ignorance of Pareto’s work on non-rational
systems made their work far more barren theoretically than it should have been.
Perhaps had Schumpeter lived longer, he might have tidied up his presentation. But, as
it was published, it is that incompleteness of his vision, rather than Blaug’s ‘inadequate-
delivery’ criticisms, which is the critical one. Like many Old Testament figures,
Schumpeter was magnificent, but flawed; like them, he had a great vision, but only of
less than perfect proportions. As with Einstein, Schumpeter failed to find his unified
theory, but like Einstein he believed that there must be one somewhere.
I once described the Schumpeter, Mitchell and Pribram treatments thus:
33
This is Perlman’s example, not Schumpeter’s. But, I have found it pedagogically useful when
explaining how Schumpeter’s broader vision as put forth in Part I of the HEA went beyond the
earlier lesser vision found in EDM.
34
Schumpeter’s neglect of the American Institutionalists may have had any number of causes: (1)
His department at Harvard was divided between the ‘mid-westerners’ and the ‘Europeans.’ He was
a principal among the latter, and his Harvard ‘mid-western’ colleagues were, by and large,
Institutionalists. (2) Part of the ‘in-snobbery’ or ‘intellectually-correct’ professional posturing of
that and many other periods was to deprecate sociology and historico-political analysis. (3) He
might have gotten around to this material had he lived longer. (4) Not having read the material in
detail or having had the time to integrate it (the Institutional writers were poor at integration),
Schumpeter concluded (I would say erroneously) that the American Institutional analysis was likely
provincial or perhaps, if one wanted to be generous, pretty much limited to societies embracing the
Utilitarian paradigm.

It is said of Franz Liszt and Arthur Rubenstein, both concert pianists of
the greatest distinction, that ‘they often missed some of the notes.’ Thus,

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