Abstract
This short research note highlights the similarity between Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction and the work of his contemporary, the German theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930). The note provides a brief overview of Harnack’s concepts and terminology and highlights their similarity to Schumpeterian ideas about routinisation, charismatic entrepreneurial leadership, and creative destruction. While the evidence is far from conclusive it does suggest that the similarity merits closer attention that could potentially lead to changes to the received understanding of the theory of creative destruction. In particular, it suggests a potential need to reassess the position of Schumpeter within a wider Weberian tradition.
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Notes
Schumpeter notes the success of Marx ‘is indeed attributable to the barrelful of white-hot [a Harnackian term of art] phrases…But he was a prophet, and in order to understand the nature of this achievement we must visualize it in the setting of his own time. It was the zenith of bourgeois realization and the nadir of bourgeois civilisation , and a time of mechanistic materialism, of a cultural milieu which had as yet betrayed no sign that a new art and a new mode of life were in its womb, and which rioted in a most repulsive banality.” (5-6)
Qutb’s source on Western secularisation is J. W. Draper’s 1874 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science,a nineteenth century rationalist classic that argued that historical progress was driven by science, and at every step progress was held back by religion (Berman 2004:69). Draper’s history has been criticised as a wilfully misleading, politically-driven mis-representation of the close historical relationship between Christianity, (and religion more generally), and science (Lindberg and Numbers 1986).
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Nightingale, P. Schumpeter’s theological roots? Harnack and the origins of creative destruction.. J Evol Econ 25, 69–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-014-0360-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-014-0360-x