Can Capitalism Survive?

'Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.' Thus opens Schumpeter's prologue to a section of his 1947 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. One might think, on the basis of the quote, that Schumpeter was a Marxist. But the analysis that led Schumpeter to his conclusion differed totally from Karl Marx's. Marx believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its enemies (the proletariat), whom capitalism had purportedly exploited, and he relished the prospect. Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes, that it would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class's existence. And unlike Marx, Schumpeter did not relish the destruction of capitalism. 'If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently,' he wrote, 'this does not mean that he desires it.'-Print ed.'A highly sophisticated interpretation of entrepreneur capitalism, one that is filled with challenges for those who believe that monopolistic practices constitute a long-run sabotage of the functioning of the system, or that we have entered a new period of permanently depressed rates of private capital formation...Schumpeter's work constitutes, as a whole, a bold attempt to integrate economic theory with economic history in a synthesis in terms of which the mechanics of the capitalistic process may be outlined with reference to historical time....There can be no question of its fundamental importance in throwing a clearer light upon the operations of an enterprise economy, and in setting up numerous objectives for future empirical research.'-The American Economic Review'If Nobel Prizes were posthumously awarded, Joseph Alois Schumpeter would certainly merit the honor, preferably with an oak leaf cluster. More than a generation after his death in 1950, he is universally esteemed a great economist.'-Robert Lekachman.