ABSTRACT
For anyone wishing to understand Schumpeter as an historian of economic thought, the first port of call is his History of Economic Analysis (HEA). Writing such a history involves three successive steps: the definition of a research subject, the adoption of a research method and the retrospective evaluation – or the reconstruction – of past thought. It is along these lines that we will discuss the main features of Schumpeter’s research programme in the first section of this chapter. This will allow us to gain a better understanding of Schumpeter’s methodological approach to historical analysis, which has been well captured in Blaug’s tongue-in-cheek expression of ‘anthropomorphic sin’, referring to the tendency among historians of analytical thought to judge ‘older writers [exclusively] by the canons of modern theory’ (Blaug 1962 [1997]: 1).
