Science and Ideology

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) was born in Trietsch, Austria, and studied law and economics at the University of Vienna. He taught in Austria and Germany before coming to Harvard in the 1930s. The essay reprinted here was Schumpeter's presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1948. Schumpeter made major contributions to the understanding of economic growth and crises, and his History of Economic Analysis is perhaps the greatest work ever written on the history of economics. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is also a major contribution to economics and political theory. A hundred years ago economists were much more pleased with their performance than they are today. But I submit that, if complacency can ever be justified, there is much more reason for being complacent today than there was then or even a quarter of a century ago. As regards command of facts, both statistical and historical, this is so obviously true that I need not insist. And if it be true of our command of facts, it must be true also for all the applied fields that for their advance mainly depend upon fact finding. I must insist, however, on the proposition that our powers of analysis have grown in step with our stock of facts. A new organon of statistical methods has emerged, to some extent by our own efforts, that is bound to mean as much to us as it does to all the sciences, such as biology or experimental psychology, the phenomena of which are given in terms of frequency distributions.

Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies