Economist of the Empire

Most biographies of professors, and perhaps particularly professors of the dismal science, struggle to find grains of excitement in the sedentary lives of their subjects. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thomas McCraw's protagonist in "Prophet of Innovation" (Harvard University Press, 506 pages, $35), does not pose that problem. The author unapologetically admits in his preface that this biography will not be focused on "Schumpeter's economic thinking, narrowly construed," but rather his "turbulent" range of experiences and "yeasty" amalgam of ideas. Indeed, Mr. McCraw's history of Schumpeter's life at times reads more like an eminent Victorian's than that of an economist. This was a man who once dueled a university librarian whom he found too parsimonious with his students' books, and who frequently remarked that he aspired to be the greatest horseman, lover, and economist in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was not going well, he would admit, with the horses.)

As with many such stories, Schumpeter's begins with a rapid ascent. Born into a bourgeois family that had resided in the Moravian hamlet of Triesch for four centuries, he gained entrance — via his mother's remarriage to a much older three-star general — into Viennese society and the most prestigious schools in the empire. His precocious academic abilities led him through the two great centers of economic thought in continental Europe: the University of Vienna, home to the great second generation of the Austrian School; and Berlin, the academic center of the Austrians' bitter rivals, Gustav von Schmoller and the German historical economists. Through a combination of work and fortune, he became the youngest tenured professor of political economy in the empire at age 28, secretary of state for finance in Austria's First Republic at 36, and a prosperous bank chairman four years later.

Schumpeter remained a mess of contradictions, however, and his personal triumphs were quickly matched by stunning reversals. Soon after receiving tenure, his harsh classroom discipline inspired a crushing, and largely unprecedented, student boycott of his lectures. He lost his fortune in the Viennese stock market crash of 1924, and spent the next decade laboring to repay the ensuing debt. And in a forever devastating setback, he lost his beloved second wife and son in childbirth just two years later. Following his financial and familial ruin, Schumpeter structured his remaining life around two competing sentiments: a retrospective pessimism that gradually permeated his worldview and a relentless desire to produce academic works worthy of his youthful ambitions. The Schumpeter who arrived at Harvard in 1927, where he would serve as a central influence for a generation of graduate students, was at once intensely passionate and socially removed. His subsequent works, from the seminal popular work "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942) to his encyclopedic and still unparalleled "History of Economic Analysis" (1954), remain suspended between cool objectivity and moments of fiery, often cynical, judgment.

Those who write about Schumpeter rarely resist the temptation to compare his abundant charisma — both intellectual and interpersonal — to the force of a rushing wind, but it remains a challenge to write a narrative worthy of the metaphor. Mr. McCraw's prose successfully captures the heroic energy of his subject's life and thought. He does so by embracing, rather than attempting to tame or conceal, the relentlessly paradoxical quality of Schumpeter's ideas.

Like his contemporary Frank Knight at the University of Chicago, the other great center of American economic thought in the decades following World War I, Schumpeter abhorred the dogmatism of economic "schools" and the corresponding pretension that simple solutions could be found for the economic problems of the modern world. His thought, like his life, remained suspended between apparently contradictory poles.

Schumpeter championed the innovation, productivity, and material abundance engendered by capitalist economies, but remained deeply pessimistic about the instability, moral skepticism, and insatiable desires they inspired. He extolled the rough-edged entrepreneur who generated new ideas and applied unyielding energy in the pursuit of their adoption, while at the same time admiring (and imitating) the aristocratic mien and noble disinterest of the disappearing European elite. Schumpeter's students recall that he would take over an hour to assemble his exquisitely tailored outfits each morning before his lectures on the benefits of capitalism's creative destruction. He admired the modern world's spectacular pace of change even as he mourned the very qualities these changes destroyed.

Perhaps John Kenneth Galbraith had this paradox in mind when he called Schumpeter "the most sophisticated conservative of this century." Schumpeter harnessed the two central concepts of modern conservatism — embracement of the dynamic change enabled by the free market economy, and suspicion of its cultural effects — in a social analysis that did not disguise or pervert its ironical nature. That he did so while transcending a range of disciplines with a mix of massive erudition and academic daring makes his achievement all the more striking, and inimitable, today.

At the conclusion of "Prophet of Innovation" Mr. McCraw notes, as have many others, Schumpeter's return to fashion in recent years. His focus on entrepreneurial innovation as the driver of the capitalist economy provided a scholarly touchstone for modern academics and intellectuals who sought to understand the new economic paradigms of the Internet age. As one of the earliest economists to emphasize the utility of venture capital and entrenched monopoly's potential for sudden obsolescence, Schumpeter anticipated the generative unpredictability of global postindustrial capitalism. His recent supplanting of Keynes in academic citation counts further testifies to both his initial failures and his newfound relevance.

Mr. McCraw is right to identify this triumph in muted tones, as economists' appropriations of certain Schumpeterian ideas have not been accompanied by a revival of Schumpeterian scholarship. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary scholar with as broad a range of personal and disciplinary interests, as deep a fascination with and command of the history of his subject, and as nuanced a public philosophy. Schumpeter was among the last of the great political economists in a field that has turned increasingly, for better and for worse, to the specific application of technical knowledge. By returning our attention to Schumpeter's ideas and methodologies, Mr. McCraw manifests much of his subject's respect for the rich intellectual history of his discipline, and reminds us that some of the finest economic achievements lay in the acknowledgment of dynamic problems rather than the presentation of ostensible solutions.

Mr. Burgin, a graduate student in the history department at Harvard University, is writing a dissertation on the intellectual development of American conservative thought.