On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:43:11 +1100 Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com>
writes:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 11:30 AM, andie nachgeborenen <
>
> As for Schumpeter, definitely, well worth reading; as Joan Robinson
> put it,
> Marx with the adjectives changed.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike Beggs
Schumpeter was the teacher of Paul Samuelson, JK Galbraith, plus his favorite student, Paul Sweezy, who became the dean of American Marxist economists. Forty years ago, Paul Samuelson in his Newsweek column wrote a glowing tribute to both Schumpeter and Sweezy: --------------------------------------------
In fact many years later Samuelson wrote a rather glowing tribute to Sweezy & Schumpeter in his Newsweek column. ------------------------------------------------ When Diaghilev revived his ballet company he had the original Bakst sets redone in even more vivid colors, explaining, "so they would be as brilliant as people remember them." Recent. events on college campuses have recalled to my inward eye one of the great happenings of my own lifetime.
It took place at Harvard back in the days when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard.
Joseph Schumpeter, Harvard's brilliant economist and social prophet, was to debate with Paul Sweezy on "The Future of Capitalism." Wassily Leontief was in the chair as moderator, and the Littauer Auditrium could not accommodate the packed house.
Let me set the stage. Schumpeter was a scion of the aristocracy of Franz Josef's Austria. It was Schumpeter who had confessed to three wishes in life: to be the greatest lover in Vienna, the best horseman in Europe, and the greatest economist in the world. "But unfortunately," as he used to say modestly, "the seat I inherited was never of the topmost caliber."
Half mountebank, half sage, Schumpeter had been the enfant terrible of the Austrian school of economists. Steward to an Egyptian princess, owner of a stable of race horses, onetime Finance Minister of Austria, Schumpeter could look at the prospects for bourgeois society with the objectivity of one whose feudal world had come to an end in 1914. His message and vision can be read in his classical work of a quarter-century ago, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Whom the Gods Envy
Opposed to the foxy Merlin was young Sir Galahad. Son of an executive of J.P. Morgan's bank, Paul Sweezy was the best that Exeter and Harvard can produce ... [and] had early established himself as among the most promising economists of his generation. But tiring of the conventional wisdom of his age, and spurred on by the events of the Great Depression, Sweezy became one of America's few Marxists. (As he used to say, you could count the noses of U.S. academic economists who were Marxists on the thumbs of your two hands: the late Paul Baran of Stanford; and, in an occasional summer school of unwonted tolerance, Paul Sweezy.)
Unfairly, the gods had given Paul Sweezy, along with a brilliant mind, a beautiful face and wit. With what William Buckley would desperately wish to see in the mirror, Sweezy laced the world. If lightning had struck him that night, people would truly have said that he had incurred the envy of the gods.
So much for the cast. I would have to be William Hazlitt to recall for you the interchange of wit, the neat parrying and thrust, and all made more pleasurable by the obvious affection that the two men had for each other despite the polar opposition of their views.
>From Paul Samuelson, ?Memories,? Newsweek, June 2, 1969,
as quoted in "Remarks On Paul Sweezy On The Occasion Of
His Receipt Of The Veblen-Commons Award"
Monthly Review , Sept, 1999 by John Bellamy Foster
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