ABSTRACT
Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of economic development, partially embodied in his so-named volume of 1909, was self-consciously a general theory that attempted to comprehend economic development within a general account of how and why development proceeded and how limits to the process of capitalist development arose out of development itself. 1 While the significance of Schumpeter for post-1945 development aspirations in the colonial and postcolonial world has been questioned, there is little doubt about his presence in the early years of the academic discipline of development economics and the attendant political science and sociology which fostered what came to regarded, by the 1960s, as the orthodoxy of modernisation theory. Ragnar Nurkse, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of development economics would write in 1953 that ‘it is scarcely possible to consider’ the subject of development economics ‘without finding one’s mind turning to Schumpeter’s great work’. 2 To understand why this should be so it is necessary to address the problem of Faustian development and Joseph Schumpeter’s place within it.
