Schumpeter's 'Vision' as Filter for his
Evaluation of other Economists' Visions
Working Paper No. 00-W17
Andrea Maneschi
ABSTRACT [article]
In his History of Economic Analysis, Schumpeter stated that although
the subject of his book is a history of economic analysis, "analytic effort is of
necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for
the analytic effort. In this book, this preanalytic cognitive act will be called Vision"
(p. 41). Scattered through it are various examples of Schumpeter's "vision", applied to
either economists or areas investigated by schools of economic thought. These examples
are revealing with regard to economists or schools described as having vision or, in
a few cases, lacking it, and to the economists with whom this term is associated neither
positively nor negatively.
In this article, I analyze the economists and schools of thought that according to
Schumpeter were marked by vision, and to assess the common denominator (if any)
characterizing them. To place an economist's vision (or lack of it) in perspective,
I first analyze Schumpeter's own vision of the economic process, and view it as a filter
through which he appraised the visions of other economists. The fact that Schumpeter
could couple the term vision with "all the errors that go with it" (p. 570) shows that
he did not necessarily grant his approval to someone's vision.
The economists and schools of thought whose vision Schumpeter analyzed include the early
classical economist James Anderson, the national system economists List and Carey,
the classical conception of economic development, the neoclassical economists' conception
of the economic process, Marx, Jevons, Walras, his fellow Austrians Böhm-Bawerk and
Wieser, and Keynes. Keynes's stagnationist vision is contrasted with Schumpeter's own
very different view of the capitalist process, whose dynamics are entrusted to an
innovative entrepreneurial class. In the concluding section I investigate the role of
vision in the history of economic thought in light of Schumpeter's elaboration of this
concept.