The temporary discomfort of recessions, or even generations of hardship, were for him the conditions of material plenty. His response was familiar: we must stand stoically before the slaughter-bench. Like Hegel, Schumpeter saw all progress as determinate negation, a destruction that is itself creative. His former student James Tobin spoke of Schumpeter as the economist who turned Marxism upside down, which seems more fitting-provided we add that this operation can only be expected to give us Hegel once again. Given the ‘creative destruction’ with which his name is associated, some have called Schumpeter a Nietzschean but many critical thinkers have celebrated the negation of the existing order.
His intellectual independence sets him apart among economists, who find it difficult to categorize his achievements. The strangeness of Joseph Alois Schumpeter goes beyond his complex personality: publicly a charming aristocrat pretender, privately a tortured melancholic who built a solitary cult around his lost loves. The tone of the conversation escalated and the value-neutral sociologist soon walked out, leaving his strange Austrian counterpart behind. ‘Every anatomy room is the same thing’, Schumpeter replied. Weber countered: it would be a laboratory filled with corpses, since the Bolsheviks were performing the experiment. What were they to make of the October Revolution, and what of the Bolsheviks? Schumpeter suggested that Marxism could now be given a proper laboratory test. In 1918, in a coffeehouse opposite the University of Vienna, Max Weber sat down with his friends Felix Somary and Joseph Schumpeter to discuss current affairs.
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