Paul M. Sweezy

Monthly Review, Oct, 2004 by Michael A. Lebowitz

Sweezy recalls arriving in London in 1932 for a graduate year at the London School of Economics with a feeling of "confusion edged with resentment at the irrelevance of what I had spent the last four years trying to learn." There, however, he found graduate students actively debating the issues of the day, a "continuous state of intellectual and political ferment"; and, it was there that he first came into contact with Marxism. He returned to Harvard after that year "a convinced but very ignorant Marxist." (8)

Changes had begun at Harvard as well. Graduate students and younger faculty were beginning to take an interest in Marxism. (Among those with whom Sweezy was to have many discussions about Marxism was Shigeto Tsuru, who later contributed an appendix to The Theory of Capitalist Development comparing the reproduction schemes of Quesnay, Marx, and Keynes. (9)) Perhaps the most significant development for Sweezy, however, was that he met and became a student of Joseph Schumpeter who had joined the Harvard faculty in 1932. The atmosphere around Schumpeter was one certain to stimulate a young economist: he organized informal seminars and discussion groups and attracted economists from around the world. What Sweezy received there, along with others in the "Schumpeter circle," was encouragement and an atmosphere of intellectual clash and excitement. He was to describe this period subsequently as the most stimulating of his life. (10)

As it happens, Sweezy took only one formal course from Schumpeter, a small graduate seminar of four or five people, which included Oscar Lange and to which Wassily Leontief came. Yet, he went on to become Schumpeter's assistant in an introductory graduate course in economic theory and a very close friend. (11) With Schumpeter on his thesis committee, he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1937 on the coal cartel during the English industrial revolution (for which he was awarded the David A. Wells Prize for best essay in economics by the Harvard Economics Department).

During this time, Sweezy worked at becoming "a self-educated Marxist." In this, too, Schumpeter was central. For, despite his own diametrically opposite political perspective, Schumpeter was "a unique figure. He understood the importance of Marxism." A contemporary of Hilferding and Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer, he had architected his own theory of capitalism as a deliberate alternative to Marxism. Thus, "he paid Marxism the compliment of understanding and recognizing that it was the most important intellectual trend of the time." (12)

In 1938, Sweezy became an instructor at Harvard, teaching a course on the economics of socialism (in which he had previously assisted). Attempting to increase the level of treatment of Marxism in the course, he proceeded to teach himself and to absorb the European (especially German) traditions in Marxist thought. The Theory of Capitalist Development was written over these years--"started more or less as an effort in self-clarification." Completed soon after the United States entered World War II, the book was published shortly before he went into the U.S. Army in 1942. (13)