Joseph A.Schumpeter, Historian of Eeconomics

hi, Dears

On Monday I'm going to present for you "JOSEPH A.SCHUMPETER, HISTORIAN OF ECONOMICS".

A little about book....

Joseph A.Schumpeter was one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century. His History of Economic Analysis is perhaps the greatest contribution to the history of economics, providing a magisterial account of the development of the subject from Ancient Greece to the mid-twentieth century.

Schumpeter’s views on his predecessors have proved to be a constant source of controversy. Here individual chapters examine such disparate questions as Schumpeter’s apparent disregard for the American Institutionalises, his grudging respect for Adam Smith, the perspicacity of his views on Quesnay, and his preference for Walras over Pareto. Four chapters are devoted to the early medieval schools, neglected in all of his writings. Schumpeter’s magnum opus is related to the rest of his economic output, especially his views on money and on methodology.

According to Mark Perlman “The Flaw in Schumpeter’s Vision”:

          Schumpeter rejected the paradigm of individualism utilitarianism (and personal liberty). He did not seriously consider the paradigm of uncertainty. But, in the absence of any other specification, it seems to me he was groping for some paradigm of fundamental social morality. He was easily sidetracked, and spent too much effort decrying ideology (although he never decried theology). 

The “GREAT GAP” thesis revisited 

         In his classic History of Economic Analysis (1954), Joseph A. Schumpeter proposed that economic analysis begins only with the Greeks and was not reestablished until the rise of European scholasticism in the hands of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). This “Great Gap” in economic thought, then, coincides with the Islamic golden age, when various Muslim writers made substantial contributions in various fields of inquiry, including economic matters. The Schumpeterian “Great Gap” thesis has been deeply entrenched as part of the accepted tradition in economics and is reflected in almost all relevant literature in our discipline (Mirakhor; Ghazanfar.) As a result of this thesis, whose prevalence in economics literature dates long before 1954, Western historians of economic thought have ignored the contributions of medieval Islamic scholars, or at least have reduced them to footnotes (Hosseini 1995).