Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
In 1942 Joseph A. Schumpeter published his grand synthesis of political economy, Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. He demonstrated with impeccable logic that socialism would inevitably evolve out of capitalism, not because of the latter system's failures à la Marx, but because of its successes à la Schumpeter. With a literary shrug of the shoulders, he pointed out that the economic system he loved, the entrepreneurial brand of high capitalism, was gradually giving way to democratic socialism. Surprisingly, he predicted that the new state-controlled economy could continue to be efficient and could even perform the vital entrepreneurial function needed to provide greater wealth and income for the population. He concluded “that socialization means a stride beyond big business on the way that has been chalked out by it or, what amounts to the same thing, that socialist management may conceivably prove as superior to big-business capitalism as big-business capitalism has proved to be to the kind of competitive capitalism of which the English industry a hundred years ago was the prototype” (Schumpeter 1942, 195–6). He had serious reservations about bureaucratic authority, and he issued other “warnings.” But asking, rhetorically, “Can socialism work?” he said, with typical assurance, “Of course it can.”
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