Vision, Revolution, and Classical Situation: Schumpeter’s Theory of Scientific Development

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that the Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter developed a sophisticated theoretical understanding of the process of scientific development in his writings. The existence of this theory of scientific development has been hardly recognised until now because Schumpeter never elaborated it systematically or presented it in a book or essay, so that it can only be derived from a number of statements scattered over his whole work. The main task of this paper is thus to reconstruct this ‘unwritten chapter’ of Schumpeter’s work. It will be seen how Schumpeter developed his basic understanding of the process of scientific development already in his early work and how he elaborated this basic idea into a sophisticated theoretical framework in his later work. As a result, this paper finds astonishing parallels between Schumpeter’s theory of scientific development and twentieth-century philosophy of science – and in particular that of Thomas S. Kuhn.