ABSTRACT
SCHUMPETER'S PERSPECTIVE Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis (I954) is written from a distinctive perspective, oudined in Book I. 1 There is great emphasis on economics being a science, where science involves going beyond everyday explanations of economic phenomena. Many of the phrases Schumpeter uses to describe science reflect the influence of logical positivism, then developing into the dominant approach to the philosophy of science. Thus Schumpeter writes that the rules of "'modern' or 'empirical' or 'positive' science .. , reduce the facts we are invited to accept on scientific grounds to the narrower category of 'facts verifiable by observation or experiment'; and they reduce the range of admissible methods to 'logical inference from verifiable facts'" (8). Such philosophy of science now seems somewhat dated. So too does Schumpeter's historiography. According to Schumpeter:
Economic analysis has not been shaped at any time by the philosophical opinions that economists happened to have . . . even those economists who held very definite philosophical views, such as Locke, Hume, Quesnay, and above all Marx, were as a matter of fact not influenced by them when doing their work of analysis.
