Blackwell Reference Online

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Joseph Alois Schumpeter is generally acknowledged as one of the first-rank economists of the twentieth century, along with John Maynard Keynes. Schumpeter was born in Třešt, a small Moravian town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (The town, once called by the Germans Triesch, today belongs to the Czech Republic.) His father, a textile manufacturer, died when Schumpeter was 4 years old. Blessed with opportunities owing to his mother's remarriage to a high-ranking army officer, Schumpeter was able to enter the high society of the empire and was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna and at the University of Vienna. Although Schumpeter's principal teachers were Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, the major figures of the Austrian School of Economics, he was not accepted among the Austrian School because he was critical of its essentialism and psychologism. In his early academic years, he taught at a number of provincial universities (Czernowitz, Graz, and Bonn), and for a short period after World War I he held the posts of finance minister under the Austrian socialist government and of president of a private bank in Vienna. In 1932 Schumpeter moved to Harvard University, and stayed there until his death in 1950. His outstanding distinction was his broad erudition, his wide-ranging and large-scale work, combining economic theory with history and sociology, and his grand vision ... log in or subscribe to read full text