Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is a book by Joseph "Creative Destruction" Schumpeter: "one of the most famous, controversial, and important books on social theory, social sciences, and economics" if you can believe wiki. I recommend it. I read it about six months ago and was going to blog it, but realised I really couldn't remember enough detail to do so properly.

Happily, that nice Pierre Lemieux has recently reviewed it. And he focusses, as anyone who cares must, on quite what did JS really mean? Because, contrary to what all who have read Mises or Hayek know full well, his words say that socialism is possible and that capitalism was on the way out. But was he being ironic? My answer is both yes and no: in describing how socialism is possible, he describes a whole series of modifications to "pure" socialism that would be necessary, and never actually says that at the end of all that, he's pretty well re-invented capitalism¹. As to the inevitable end of capitalism, I think there's both an evil influence of Marxist historicism which is, wrong, obvs; quite a bit of poking fun at the worthless "intellectual elite"; and more correctly a recognition of the creeping influence of statist over-regulation, which is correct, alas equally obvs.

Notes

1. Ideally, at this point I'd support this with quotes and such, but I'm afraid you're out of luck there.