The Crisis of the Historical Style of Economic Reasoning: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Paul A. Samuelson

In this chapter, I pay attention to the decline of the historical style of economic reasoning with reference to Joseph A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Paul A. Samuelson. I will present two main claims. The first one argues that Schumpeter’s theory of business cycles stems from a historical understanding of economic crises and, consequently, it can be conceived as an instance of the historical style of economic reasoning. The second point argues that the decline of this historical style of economic reasoning can be linked to the growing success of Keynesianism, to the detriment of Schumpeter’s work. The decline of the historical style clearly revealed an irreconcilable conflict among different economic rationalities during the second half of the twentieth century, and brought into question the epistemological legitimacy of economic history with respect to synchronic analysis.