Schumpeter's Evolution: Emergence and Extension of a Dramatic Theory of Economic and Social Evolution as Reflected in His Major Books

This draft of a book on Schumpeter is distributed for commenting. It is a stylised intellectual biography that focus on the emergence and extension of the Schumpeterian vision and analysis of economic and social evolution. The draft provides novel interpretations of Schumpeter's six major books. He originally developed his evolutionary research programme in Wesen from 1908 by studying the inherent limitations of Neoclassical Economics. He presented core results on economic evolution and sketched an extension evolutionary analysis to all social sciences in Entwicklung from 1912. He made a partial reworking of his basic theory of economic evolution in Development from 1934, and this reworking was continued in Cycles from 1939. Here Schumpeter also tried to handle the statistical and historical evidence on the waveform evolution of the capitalist economy. Capitalism from 1942 modified the model of economic evolution and added evolutionary contributions to other social sciences. History, which was published by his widow, was based on his evolutionary theory of the history of economic analysis. This sequential analysis of Schumpeter's six books demonstrates the progress he within his research programme as well as his lack of satisfactory tools for evolutionary analysis. Therefore, it is not suprising that his planned book on more formalised evolutionary analysis in economics never materialised. The draft ends by considering how his unfulfilled plans might today be partially accomplished.