ABSTRACT
The monograph, Epochen der Methoden — und Dogmengeschichte, which as a young man Joseph Schumpeter contributed to the Tübingen Grundriss der Sozialokonomik, had at once taken its place as incontestably the best short introduction to its subject; and several attempts had been made to induce its author to consent to an English translation. Eventually, in 1941, when he had finished his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he embarked upon this task, apparently conceiving it as a convenient side line to his main concern of preparing a major work on theory. As a young man he had travelled widely and studied in many other places; he had personal contact with many of the founders of modern economic analysis elsewhere. The vision of streams of fragmentary pieces of economic analysis springing from the treatises of moral philosophers and the ad hoc utterances of administrators and pamphleteers and culminating in the eighteenth century in the discovery of the system in economic life.
