A Vision for a Dynamic World: Reading Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy for Today

John Dalton () and Andrew Logan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper was written for a symposium on "Reconsidering the Classics." Rereading Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (CSD) for today, we argue Schumpeter's vision for a dynamic world remains essential for understanding the world. We begin the paper by briefly describing some background on Schumpeter and the context in which CSD was written. Then, we summarize the book, which Schumpeter divided into five separate parts on Marx, capitalism, socialism, democracy, and a history of socialist parties. Throughout our summary, we highlight the key arguments and touch on many ideas in the book, such as Schumpeter's description of socialism and his theory of democracy. Instead of tackling all these ideas in depth, we discuss the book's usefulness for readers today by focusing on Schumpeter's Big Idea--"creative destruction." We conclude by discussing how influential CSD has been, and continues to be, in the social sciences and then provide suggestions for those interested in reading CSD today.

Keywords: Joseph Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy; Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Creative Destruction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B31 O3 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/95012/1/MPRA_paper_95012.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:95012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().