Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science: A Metatheoretical Study. - book reviews

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 1998

Yuichi Shionoya, [1997]. Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science: A Metatheoretical Study. New York: Cambridge University Press. Index. 354 pp. ISBN 0521 43034 8.

This book was originally published in the Japanese language in 1995 under the title Shumpeta-teki shiko. The author's masterful command of both the German and English language and his extensive field work to the Czech Republic to investigate Schumpeter's family origins and the Harvard Archives to check out the original manuscript sources, and so on, makes this one of the most authoritative and significant treatments of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883--1950) to have appeared in this century. The author recounts his lifelong interest in the great economist. As a young economist at the Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Shionoya worked on a revision of the original (1937) Japanese translation of Schumpeter's Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (directly from the German into the Japanese language). The new improved translation appeared in 1977. That is the work in which Schumpeter's famous theory of the entrepreneurial function was presented in a way designed to help make neoclassical economics more dynamic and relevant to the main historical features of the capitalist system. In the course of mastering this project, Shionoya branched out and read all of Schumpeter's writings. In 1986 he joined the international effort initiated by many European and American scholars to establish the International Schumpeter Society. This Society is still flourishing and elected Shionoya to serve as its as president in 1992. With the publication of this book, Shionoya has distinguished himself along with Richard Swedberg, Wolfgang F. Stolper, and Mark Perlman as one of the leading interpreters of Schumpeter.

What is of singular importance here and why this book is of great interest to our readers is that Shionoya makes the most convincing effort yet to link together the entire literary/scientific contribution of. Schumpeter under the theme of a "universal social science." Apparently, Schumpeter tried to introduce a "unique mix of historicism and positivism" (p. 311) and Shionoya puts his finger on the central "organizing principle" of Schumpeter's work. That organizing principle was the simultaneous blending of sociology and economics by way of an instrumentalist methodology (that is, theories valued not for their truth but for their use as instruments for organizing data) and all this tempered with the literary tool of rhetoric. Schumpeter's lifework grew out of the same conditions in Central European social science as did Max Weber's. There was that awful tension between historians and theoreticians. Schumpeter pioneered one way of solving the history-versus-theory split in modern social science and this gave his social science (including his excellent economics) a special and unique quality. Shionoya maps out Schumpeter's game plan (p. 26), and evaluates the logical character of each of his principal essays and books in terms of that game plan. At the same time, with masterful precision, Shionoya situates each theoretical discussion in the context of the leading philosophers and social scientists of his day. Shionoya offers new and lasting insights about the character of the Vienna Austrian School, the German Historical School, Machean Positivism, and the later Keynesian school. Also of interest is Shionoya's discussion of the fledgling efforts of Gustav Schmoller, Max Weber, and others to establish the field of economic sociology. That effort is still underway today and this book is a must read for all those interested in this development.