Beyond the Business Cycle and Socialism: The Late Schumpeter's Corporatist View

Abstract

The paper discusses the late endorsement by J. Schumpeter of the corporatist theory. The corporatist view was definitely enunciated by him during a well known conference held in Montreal on November 19th 1945, but this was probably the end of more antique process, the consequence of a cultural network, to which Schumpeter attended since the beginning of his American experience. The aim of the paper is first of all to draw the characteristics of this group of scholars - from Montreal, St Louis (Mo) and The Loyola University - based on Jesuit fathers, scholars of medieval economic history and economists - as Bernard W. Dempsey, Emile Bouvier, Leo Cyril Brown, Raymond de Roover, Joseph Solterer etc. Issues and questions typical of the scholastic tradition which interested very much Schumpeter during his life, but which especially during the 30s and the 40s became a serious effort to give economics a strong moral basis, involving several and different economists, from Pesch to Knight and many others. In a certain view, the aim of the paper is also to demonstrate that, while Schumpeter apparently was firstly engaged in technical issues related with business cycle, really he was always much more interested in irrational and moral view of economics, which he ultimately showed with the endorsement of the corporatist theory.