Synopses & Reviews
Pan Am, Gimbel's, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. "Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism.
Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most sophisticated conservative" of the twentieth century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Business people ignore this lesson at their peril to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind.
During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the specter of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983 the centennial of the birth of both men Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate.
Prophet of Innovation is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman and admitted to failure only with the horses.
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"[An] insightful and highly readable biography." Library Journal
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"This well-paced and beautifully written book explains not only Schumpeter's work but also the fast-changing phenomenon of modern capitalism." Harold James, Princeton University
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"A welcome book...a truly penetrating biography of the most influential theorist of finance capitalism." Edmund S. Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics
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"A most compelling portrait of a complex man who has had a profound influence on how we think about entrepreneurship." Amar Bhidé, Columbia University
About the Author
Thomas K. McCraw is Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. His book Prophets of Regulation was awarded the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I: L'Enfant Terrible, 1883-1926: Innovation and Economics
Prologue: Who He Was and What He Did
1. Leaving Home
2. Shaping His Character
3. Learning Economics
4. Moving Out
5. Career Takeoff
6. War and Politics
7. Gran Rifiuto
8. Annie
9. Heartbreak
Part II: The Adult, 1926-1939: Capitalism and Society
Prologue: What He Had Learned
10. New Intellectual Directions
11. Policy and Entrepreneurship
12. Between Two Worlds
13. Harvard
14. Suffering and Solace
Part III: The Sage, 1939-1950: Innovation, Capitalism, and History
Prologue: How and Why He Embraced History
15. Business Cycles, Business History
16. Letters from Europe
17. To Leave Harvard?
18. Against the Grain
19. The Courage of Her Convictions
20. Alienation
21. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
22. War and Perplexity
23. Introspection
24. Honors and Resurgence
25. Toward the Mixed Economy
26. History of Economic Analysis
27. A Principle of Indeterminateness
28. L'Envoi
Epilogue: The Legacy
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index