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The best horse in the Viennese stables: Gottfried Haberler and Joseph Schumpeter

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Abstract

Haberler knew Schumpeter as a mentor, colleague and fatherly friend for almost 25 years. His well-known obituary of Schumpeter, besides offering an overview of Schumpeter’s work, brings to light a wealth of biographical information, invaluable spadework for future biographers. The obituary draws attention to various facets of Schumpeter’s multi-layered personality and notes the ironical tone in his writings. Schumpeter draws on irony as a rhetorical strategy when he considers the prospects for capitalism in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The ironical mode as a common ploy for dealing with disaster is ingrained in the Austrian culture of Schumpeter’s youth.

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Notes

  1. As recalled by Gottfried Haberler’s sister Maria in a letter dated November 1994 (?); Gottfried Haberler Papers: box no. 30, Hoover Institution Archives.

  2. Schumpeter had spent the fall term of 1930 at Harvard as a visiting professor; he left Bonn for good to accept a professorship at Harvard from October 1932.

  3. Jan Tinbergen’s Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories (vol. 1 & 2, League of Nations, 1939) formed the second part.

  4. According to Allen (1991:45), Schumpeter and Haberler taught a seminar on business cycles in the spring term of 1937, but no more information is given.

  5. Erich Streissler criticised Haberler (1950: 342–44)—rightly, I believe—for exaggerating Schumpeter’s originality and for downplaying the Austrian influence. Although diverging on several important issues from his teachers, “he took up so many of the ideas then current only in the Austrian tradition that any hypothetical historian of economic thought, not knowing Schumpeter to be an Austrian, could immediately trace him to the school” (Streissler 1983: 358). See also Reinert (2002), who identifies the German tradition as a major influence.

  6. The reference is to Schumpeter (1942: 243). On the charge of “relativism” raised against Berlin and Schumpeter, compare the comments in Rorty (1989: 46f.) On the context of the quoted passage, see the remarks by the editor of Sir Isaiah’s works, Henry Hardy (2010).

  7. A topic dear to Austrian economists; see von Wieser (1919).

  8. See Wolfgang Stolper’s (1994: 204) remarks on the context of Schumpeter’s bon mot.

  9. Samuelson to Haberler (23 August 1994), Gottfried Haberler Papers: box no. 30, Hoover Institution Archives

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Graz, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Stephan Boehm

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Correspondence to Stephan Boehm.

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Boehm, S. The best horse in the Viennese stables: Gottfried Haberler and Joseph Schumpeter. J Evol Econ 25, 107–115 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-015-0391-y

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