New Left Review I/205, May-June 1994

George Catephores

The Imperious Austrian: Schumpeter as Bourgeois Marxist

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

This essay aims at presenting Joseph Schumpeter as a ‘bourgeois Marxist’. The term is paradoxical, intentionally so: it aims at drawing attention to a small group of powerful thinkers of our century, who adopted many aspects of Marx’s analytical approach but firmly rejected one thing: his commitment to the working class. They reinterpreted Marx from a bourgeois point of view trying, by this roundabout but very effective means, to confront and confound his great revolutionary challenge. Three contemporary authors strike me as paradigmatic of the species: Schumpeter, Galbraith and Rostow. To these I would add John Maynard Keynes.

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