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Schumpeter after Schumpeter. A Conservative Radicalism

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Published Jul 2026

Adelino Zanini

Author: Adelino Zanini
Translator: Clara Pope
Although it is correct to see Joseph A. Schumpeter as a heterodox social scientist, our understanding of this heterodoxy must be radically rethought. To do this we must go beyond simply recognising the strong link between economics and sociology in his work and try instead to understand the paradoxical ‘impolitical’ (not apolitical) nature of this heterodoxy. For in his concept of the autonomy of the economic sciences the presence of the ‘political’ had to be recognised whilst also being circumscribed and held back. As a result, economics as a social science remained an unsolvable puzzle for him. This book maintains that this was the crucial gamble of his entire life’s work, and the starting point for his conservative radicalism.

Biographical Note

Adelino Zanini is a former professor of Political Philosophy and History of Economic Thought at the Polytechnic University of Marche. He is among the main Italian interpreters of Adam Smith and Joseph A. Schumpeter. Among his works: Economic Philosophy (Peter Lang, 2008) and Ordoliberalismo (Il Mulino, 2022).

Readership

This book is for academic institutions, libraries, specialists, and graduate students in the following fields: political philosophy, the history of economic thought, and heterodox economic theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction: From Vienna to Harvard
1 Foreword
2 A Young Heterodox
3 The Sacred Decade
4 The Period of ‘Gran Rifiuto’
5 The World’s First Hothouse of Economics
6 A Lifelong Conviction
7 This Book
8 Translator’s Note

1 The Logos of Economic Theory
1 Introduction
2 A Functional Gnoseology
3 Statics and Dynamics
4 Schumpeter as Political?

2 On the Genesis of the Social Sciences (1910–1915)
1 Opening Doors
2 How Does One Study Social Science?
3 Arguments for a Sociology of Knowledge

3 Variations on the Entrepreneur
1 The ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism
2 The ‘Concept’ of the Entrepreneur: A First Approximation
3 The Entrepreneur in the First Edition of Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1911)
4 The 1926 Revision
5 Final Changes

4 Imperialisms, Social Classes
1 Historiographical Issues in Brief
2 A Legacy of the Princely State
3 The Crisis of the Bourgeois Zeitgeist

5 A ‘German’ Perspective on the Future of Capitalism
1 Unrelieved Pessimism
2 Crumbling Walls
3 A Labourist Capitalism

6 The Process of Filiation of Scientific Ideas: Rationality and Ideology
1 Criteria of Rationality
2 A Significant Indeterminacy
3 Vision and Ideology
4 The Conflict between ‘Schools’ of Thought

References
Index