Max Weber's Influence on Schumpeter

Abstract

During his whole lifetime, Schumpeter shows a deep concern with Max Weber’s methodological writings. In Schumpeter’s first book, Epochen der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte (1908), the Weberian concept of Wertfreiheit (freedom from evaluation) allows Schumpeter to stress the non-normative character of economic science. The subsequent Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1912) is also influenced by Weber. The Kreislauf (circular flow) is an Idealtypus (ideal type) in the Weberian sense. Also apparently taken from Weber are the hedonistic or ‘rational’ motives which animate the Kreislauf. In the inter-war period, while the two sociological essays on imperialism still continue to use Weber’s concepts of Idealtypus and rationality in the Weberian sense, Schumpeter’s subsequent reflections on econometrics and above all his Business cycles (1939) show a sort of uncertainty between an empiricist attitude towards research, not in contradiction with Weber, and an ‘historicist’ and idealist approach to economics. In the History of Economic Analysis (1954) Weber’s lesson is definitively dismissed. Instead of defining economic science through the rationality of economic agents, Schumpeter adopts a broad approach that includes economic history among the techniques of economic ‘analysis’, in apparent agreement with the German Historical School. Similarly, Weber’s Wertfreiheit seems to be abandoned, since Schumpeter argues that ‘vision’ interferes to some extent with ‘analysis’, and it is almost impossibile to keep the former distinct from the latter. This interference, however, may lead to the ‘Ricardian vice’, i.e. the false belief that abstract scientific propositions are immediately suitable for resolving practical problems. This approach, by which economic science is annihilated and turned into political action, was mainly followed by John Maynard Keynes.