Abstract Joseph Schumpeter aimed at developing a coherent and unified theoretical system based on the essence and development of capitalism. The core of the system is his theory of innovation and entrepreneurship, and the auxiliary part is his theories of class, imperialism and many others. These features suggest that Schumpeter should be viewed as a social theorist across disciplines rather than merely an economist or sociologist. Schumpeter defined innovation, pioneering entrepreneurs and bank credit as the essential triad of capitalism. According to the changing significance and role of the triad, the whole capitalist history was divided into four phases: Early Capitalism, Mercantilist Capitalism, Intact Capitalism, and Trustified Capitalism. The origin of Western capitalism could go back to ancient Greek and Roman eras, when the credit was created. However, the dominant of society had not begun to transfer from feudal aristocracy class to capitalist class until the end of the 14th Century. Several institutions with capitalist characteristics such as joint-stock company and stock exchange had well developed at least in some commercial centers by the mid-16th Century. Mercantilist Capitalism spanned from the second half of the 16th Century to the end of the 18th Century. In this phase capitalism had still not gained dominance and was restricted by the feudal aristocracy, who usually used capitalism as the weapon for political struggles. Under these conditions, the prevailing economic policy was mercantilism, and the whole picture of capitalism could be summed up as “doing business with sword in hand”. From the end of the 18th Century, capitalism had actually become the shaping force of the whole society, and produced a strikingly different social pattern, the Intact Capitalism. This new pattern prevailed in the whole 19th Century. During this phase, most social development phenomena can be explained purely by the essential internal logic of capitalism, i.e. the process of creative destruction. The most distinctive result of this process is the business cycle. Correspondingly, the main features of policy in this phase were liberalism and pacifism. Hence this phase was also termed Competitive Capitalism. At the end of the 19th Century, capitalism entered the modern phase, Trustified Capitalism. The greatest economic transformation in this phase was the tendency toward industrial concentration and the emergence of large-scale trust. In policy and culture, this phase experienced a revival of protectionism and imperialism, and the reverse of previous positive attitude toward capitalism. In the light of the above transformation, the capitalist economic life would be bureaucratized, the entrepreneurs would be unnecessary, the institutional bases of capitalism would be undermined, and bourgeois families would disintegrate, and so on. All these imply that capitalism would be destroyed by itself and be substituted by socialism. This would be the ultimate destiny of capitalism. Schumpeter’s vision of social change has guided his analyses of capitalist development. Three important aspects of his vision are: the defining characteristic of social change is evolution instead of revolution; the basic dynamics of it is that every social pattern develops internally a tendency toward self-destruction; the basic form is that different spheres of society evolve asynchronously. Schumpeter’s insights and approaches contribute greatly to identifying correctly the current trend of capitalism.
Wang Changgang,Luo Weidong. Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Rise and Decline of Capitalism: Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Social Evolution[J]. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2021, 51(2): 83-94.
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