Schumpeter the incomplete rhetorician

Schumpeter’s Capitalism Socialism, Democracy was typical of 1942 in being pessimistic about all three terms of its title. Socialism would come, he thought, but without liberalism. His historical evidence was necessarily imperfect in light of later scholarship. But so too is his economics, good in parts, but falling in with the pre-analytic vision of the “imperfections” of something called “capitalism,” neither of which has held up well. The book later became popular because it had his characteristic breadth of scholarship, especially historical, but also his ironic stance on almost all issues. What’s finally missing in Schumpeter’s grim prognoses, largely falsified by events, is an acknowledgment of the power of language. Ideas, words, rhetoric, ideology, language games—indeed the world is governed, said another economist, by little else. Denying it is the paradox of the conflicted materialist writer: while denying rhetoric, he enacts it, for what purpose is unclear.