ABSTRACT
It is a great honour for me to have been invited this year (2005) to deliver the lectures in memory of Josef Schumpeter. This distinguished series of lectures, which the Schumpeter Society organizes every year in Graz, is a testimony to the lasting intellectual legacy of Schumpeter. He is undoubtedly one of the most infl uential economists of our time. His powerful vision of capitalism, especially of capitalistic growth and fl uctuations driven largely by innovations, has left a permanent mark on the history of economic thought. There is also no other place more suitable than Graz to honour the memory of this great economist. Graz was an important milestone in Schumpeter’s intellectual journey as a professional economist. Nevertheless, the ideas he propagated soon went far beyond the confi nes of any particular place or time. They bear the mark of greatness, precisely because of their universalism; their lasting appeal goes beyond any particular theoretical model or set of arguments he might have used to elaborate his vision of capitalism. In the preface to the English edition of his Theory of Economic Development (Schumpeter, 1961; original in 1911 in German), which soon made him famous far beyond the German-speaking world, Schumpeter writes that the origin of many of his ideas of development goes back to 1907. Almost a century later, we are here today, celebrating the lasting power of those ideas.
