Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Man and the Economist

Lieber Hans, We both go back a long way, and of all the celebrants present I have probably known you the longest, your wife excepted. Our friendship goes back to 1931 when I came to Bonn, and we two are, I believe, the last survivors of Schumpeter’s Bonn seminar, a seminar of whose members many were to lead distinguished lives. Günther Harkort retired as Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and we both met him also in our professional capacity, you as an international civil servant, I — who essentially remained an academic throughout my life — on loan first to the Nigerian, then to the American Government. There was August Lösch, whose Räumliche Ordnung became a famous and influential book, and whose memory we both joined to honor in Heidenheim. There was Herbert Zassenhaus who, like you became a distinguished international civil servant. There was also Martin Wiebel who retired as the Rome correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. There was Sudhir Sen who, attracted by Schumpeter, chose to study in Bonn rather than the then for an Indian more usual London School of Economics. He later became a member of Gandhi’s inner circle and a director of the Damodar Valley Authority and he ended his active life like you at the United Nations. There was Hiroshi Furuutchi, then a lowly Third Secretary of the Japanese Embassy assigned to study in Bonn with Schumpeter, and whose last position, I have been told, was Japanese Ambassador to Pakistan.