Josef Schumpeter was a child of fin-de-siècle Vienna who came of age intellectually in the first few years of the new century. No matter where he went or what he did, the aura of Franz Joseph’s Vienna was always with him. For the rest of his life, he carried with him the baggage of that time and place, including its superficial gaiety coupled with its depression and impending sense of doom. A part of his intellectual inheritance came from the University of Vienna, which in his time was one of the half-dozen great universities of the world.