ABSTRACT
It is difficult to describe the works of Schumpeter (1883-1950). Business Cycles is the work of an economist, both theorist and historian. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy belongs to political science, and also to economics and sociology. As for the monumental History of Economic Analysis, it is a whole where the virtuosity of the historian, the philosopher, and the economist are all equally displayed. There is no author more truly interdisciplinary than Schumpeter. Fortunately, he understands interdisciplinarity very differently from those who claim to be its champions. Interdisciplinarity is not the confusion of all disciplines into a moderated syncretism; nor is it their subordination to one discipline (sociology, history) which would pretend to ensure their ‘integration’. The ‘interdisciplinarity’ in Schumpeter’s style organizes the recourse to specific ‘hypotheses’ to deal with problems not necessarily solvable by the disciplines which set them or in the terms in which they were constituted.
