ABSTRACT
During the postwar years, Joseph Schumpeter seemed to become more eccentric, more imbalanced, and more isolated. During his isolated, depressed state in the 1940s, Schumpeter published his most famous work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which he revised twice in his lifetime. Sometimes his phrasing, such as "creative destruction," sounds like a Marxist interpretation of history. Schumpeter wrote eloquently about the dynamics of market capitalism and how the disruptive forces of technology undermined equilibrium conditions. When Harvard University became the center of Keynesian economics, the jealous Schumpeter was appalled by John Maynard Keynes's success. At a cocktail party in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for his fourth term as president, a woman approached Schumpeter and asked whether he would vote for Roosevelt. Schumpeter turned out to have been prematurely pessimistic about the future of capitalism and wildly optimistic about the capabilities of socialism.
