8 - A methodology of economic sociology

Summary

Schumpeter may have drawn on Walras and Marx for the ideology on which he based his vision (see chapter 4), but he paid as much attention to Gustav von Schmoller, the leader of the younger German Historical School of economics. Whereas Schumpeter owed to Marx his vision of the development of society as a whole, he was more associated with Schmoller with regard to the practical method of research in historical perspective.

Thus Schumpeter appraised the research program of Schmoller as a prototype of economic sociology and characterized its goal as a “unified sociology or social science as the mentally (‘theoretically’) worked out universal history” (1926b, 382). He remarked that Schmoller was the only practitioner in the history of economics who not only proposed such a research program but also conscientiously carried it out (1926b, 354). Schmoller did this work not only individually but also by displaying leadership strong enough to form a school. Later, when Schumpeter surveyed the entire spectrum of the whole areas of economics in the History of Economic Analysis, he regarded economic sociology as one of the tools in economics, defining it as “a sort of generalized or typified or stylized economic history” (1954a, 20). As a simplified expression, he used “a reasoned (= conceptually clarified) history” (1939, 1, 220).