ABSTRACT
In 1908, in Egypt, Schumpeter completed the writing of Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationaloekonomie and had it published in Germany the same year. It combined what he had learned at the University of Vienna with what he had picked up in England, and especially what he had learned on his own from the works of Léon Walras. In this purely theoretical book, Schumpeter laid out the skeleton of static economic analysis, combining marginal utility with general-equilibrium analysis. Although the book contained only a modest forward scientific movement, its presentation, wordy but sparkling, called attention to the analysis and to its author. Among some, it made him a master of economics when he was but twenty-six years old. Shortly after he finished the book, he then returned to Vienna to habilitate in economics in 1909, a testing procedure that made him eligible to become a professor. Later that year, he took up his first post—a temporary professorship at the University of Czernowitz.
