ABSTRACT
When the Austrian republic was established in 1919, the coalition Catholic-Social Democratic government called upon Joseph A. Schumpeter to take the post of Finance Minister. In 1932 Schumpeter accepted a post at Harvard where he remained for the balance of his life. Schumpeter’s literary output was enormous. And many of his early articles are worth close study. As a theorist, Schumpeter exhibited an unusual generosity. An avowed conservative, he did not hesitate to recognize Karl Marx as a brilliant economist. While Schumpeter did acknowledge mathematics as an important tool in economics, it could never replace, he felt, the exercise of intuitive insight. The root problem of an economic system, said Schumpeter, was the attainment and maintenance of equilibrium. But he rejected the Marshallian partial approach and, true to his heritage, utilized as the major tool for analysis the more general concept advanced by Leon Walras.
