ABSTRACT
Schumpeter’s Long Economic Waves (LEWs) are revisited and examined as to how far a purely economic history can explain a capitalist process and its crisis, excluding all external factors, such as wars, population growth and governmental policies. It is argued that capitalist business cycles are indefinable only after 1786 in England and the US and after 1871 in Germany. In addition, external factors interacted greatly with Schumpeter’s purely economic innovations in capitalist history. Drawing upon McNeill’s military history, it is suggested that Schumpeter’s exclusion of war-making military dynamics and the dismissal of entrepreneurial opportunities created by “primitive accumulation” distorts capitalist history.
