Joseph Alois Schumpeter Quotes & Sayings

Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

The public mind has by now so thoroughly grown out of humor with it as to make condemnation of capitalism and all its works a foregone conclusion
almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ... — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation - the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest - why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Wherever autocratic power vanished at an early date - as in the Netherlands and later in England - and the protective interest receded into the background, they swiftly discovered that trade must be free - free to the nethermost recesses of hell. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

However, whether favorable or unfavorable, value judgments about capitalist performance are of little interest. For mankind is not free to choose. This is not only because the mass of people are not in a position to compare alternatives rationally and always accept what they are being told. There is a much deeper reason for it. Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do - not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

If we limit ourselves to painting as an example, both for brevity's sake and because in that field my ignorance is slightly less complete than it is in others, and if (wrongly, as I think) we agree to start an epoch with Giotto's Arena frescoes and then follow the line (nothing short of damnable though such "linear" arguments are) Giotto - Masaccio - Vinci - Michelangelo - Greco, no amount of emphasis on mystical ardors in the case of Greco can obliterate my point for anyone who has eyes that see. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Capitalism does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; or that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce: it means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization - the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important "parameters of action" - wages, prices, interest - are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was. In any case, that democracy will not mean increased personal freedom. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Capitalism Survive? - I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

The reduced sense of responsibility and the absence of effective volition in turn explain the ordinary citizen's ignorance and lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy which are if anything more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life than it is with uneducated people in humble stations. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Socialist endeavour of the Fabian type would not have amounted to anything at any other time. But it did amount to much during the three decades preceding 1914, because things and souls were ready for that kind of message and neither for a less nor for a more radical one. Formulation and organization of existing opinion were all that was needed in order to turn possibilities into articulate policy, and this "organizing formulation" the Fabians provided in a most workmanlike manner. They were reformers. The spirit of the times made socialists of them. They were genuine socialists because they aimed at helping in a fundamental reconstruction of society which in the end was to make economic care a public affair. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

This may have something to do with a tendency to discount the cost or quality advantages of quasi-monopolist combination that is at present as pronounced as was the exaggeration of them in the typical prospectus or announcement of sponsors of such combinations.] — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

To begin with, convinced socialists will derive satisfaction from the mere fact of living in a socialist society.4 Socialist bread may well taste sweeter to them than capitalist bread simply because it is socialist bread, and it would do so even if they found mice in it. — Joseph Alois Schumpeter