Commentary on Political Economy

Thursday 17 July 2014

Creative Destruction: Schumpeter’s Entwicklung and the Marxian Dialectic



As a gesture of gratitude to our loyal friends, I am publishing the latest notes on Schumpeter's notion of "economic development" (Entwicklung) where I seek to trace critically its relation to the Marxian dialectic - specifically the Lukacsian notion of "Totalitat" expounded in History and Class Consciousness, and the Heideggerian notion of "Physis" enucleated in "The Concept and Essence of 'Physis' in Aristotle", now published in Pathmarks.

Please note that these are still "notes" and that updated versions may be published very shortly. Thanks again for indulging me with your attention.


There is however one thing of fundamental importance for the methodology of economics which he [Marx] actually achieved. Economists always have either themselves done work in economic history or else used the historical work of others. But the facts of economic history were assigned to a separate compartment. They entered theory, if at all, merely in the role of illustrations, or possibly of verifications of results. They mixed with it only mechanically. Now Marx’s mixture is a chemical one; that is to say, he introduced them into the very argument that produces the results. He was the first economist of top rank to see and to teach systematically how economic theory may be turned into historical analysis and how the historical narrative may be turned into histoire raisonnee. (CS&D, p.44)

 

Once more, Schumpeter’s con-fusion – that is to say, the fusing together of concepts that are incompatible, just as he did with the Statik and the Dynamik – becomes evident when we reflect thoroughly on this most important passage. The reason why Marx is able “to introduce the facts of economic history into the very argument that produces the results” cannot be due to any “methodology of economics” because there is no such thing as a “methodology of economics” just as there is no “methodology of science”. What leads to “successful” scientific studies is not an identifiable “methodology” but rather a human praxis that first identifies a desirable outcome and then sets about to apply existing knowledge to achieve it and, in the practical process of doing so, may or may not come out with that desirable outcome or other serendipitous outcomes. Each particular scientific experiment is sui generis – it is an “experience” - and there is no way of abstracting from individual experiments to a broader “methodology” for the simple reason that no “method” will ever be capable of being scientifically or logically connected to the predictable (rather than “causal”) relation that is ultimately found between events.

If we define “theory” as a series of abstract rules that connect facts in a predictive or apodictic relation by means of experiments, then it is obvious that no “theory” will ever be able to achieve such a relation by means of a “method” because each experiment is, by definition, a unique “experience” whose outcome cannot be “formalised” in isolation from the actual experience. Furthermore, for what concerns the connection of theory with facts, first, the selection of “facts” is itself arbitrary from a “theoretical” viewpoint in that it is the “theory” that selects the “facts”, which means that the theory itself must be “arbitrary” from an “objective theoretical” or “scientific” viewpoint”! (Cf. Windelband, “Thus, in the scientific sense, ‘fact’ is already a teleological concept,” [History and Natural Science, p.181]). And second, no amount of theorizing will ever be able to establish any “causal links” between “facts” independently of the human interest involved in isolating a particular “chain of causality” among an infinity of other “causal chains” (the point was first established by Nietzsche from as early as Uber Wahrheit und Luge, and then elaborated by Weber [cf. his Objektivitat]). After Nietzsche, we ought to know that there is no ordo et connexio rerum et idearum; after Heidegger, we know that there is no adaequatio rei et intellectus.

 

So it is certainly not because of a superior “methodology of economics” that Marxian social theory presents this “chemical” fusion of fact and theory (or hypothesis) against the “mechanical” incongruence of bourgeois economic theory. But why, then, does Schumpeter believe that when it comes to the analysis of capitalist industry and society “Marx’s mixture [of facts and theory] is a chemical one” whereas that of orthodox bourgeois economics is only “mechanical”? The reason is that when Marx looks at capitalist society he looks at it from the point of view of the relations of production of its members and not from that of the atomistic individual. If we take human beings not as social beings but as isolated individuals and we then ascribe to them “self-interests” that are insatiable and also absolutely incommunicable and incommensurable with one another, and if we then assume that they initially “possess” given “endowments” which they are only able “to exchange” with one another – then it is entirely obvious that we will be able to come up with a “science of exchange” (Hayek’s catallactics) that will be the exact replica of Newtonian mechanics in which there is a unique solution (Walrasian equilibrium) to all the possible “exchange ratios” between all such individuals and their optimal distribution of their original endowments to maximize their individual self-interests.

 

The peculiarity of this “economic theory” or “economic science” is that it contains no history! No historical facts are needed for this “science” because “history” is the record of metabolic interaction of human beings not merely inter se, between themselves as individuals or groups, but also and above all with their physical environment, which is how they pro-duce their needs and in so doing create and develop new ones, while all the time they transform also their interpersonal relations in the process. In sharp contrast, there is no metabolic interaction between the “atomistic individuals” of orthodox bourgeois economic theory because there is no pro-duction of needs on the part of these atomistic individuals but only the simple pure “exchange” of “given” endowments – an exchange that “exists” only as a logico-mathematical equation and deduction and never involves any historical interaction between these individuals. There is no historical “change” in neoclassical economic “exchange”: there is no history in such pure exchange.

 

“History” is not merely the historia rerum gestarum (the record of personal or institutional actions) but rather it is the record of how human beings interact with one another and with their physical environment: history is the record of human metabolic pro-duction. History is the record of how human beings interact to fulfil and satisfy their changing needs by meta-bolically pro-ducing their physical environment. It is this “metabolic interaction” that forms the content of “history”. History is not just the record of human relations; it is the record of social relations “of pro-duction” because not just the distribution of the product but above all how and what is pro-duced are essential to understanding human “history”! It is this immanentism that we are seeking to expound here by way of a critique of Schumpeter’s work so as to overcome the old antinomic dualism of materialism and idealism.

                                                                                                                                                             

But in this pro-duction of their needs, as a discrete albeit dependent aspect of it, the question arises of how human beings may organize in such a manner that some exploit others in the sense that the living activity of a section or class of human society is subordinated by another section or class. In capitalism the specific form of subordination relates to the “exchange” of dead labour with living labour, and specifically to the reality that such exchange can occur only through political violence because no “exchange” of living with dead labour could take place without such violence. It is over this discrete, distinct reality of conflict and antagonism in the process of human metabolic production of their needs that the dialectical method can be applied to assess the validity of socio-theoretical accounts of this antagonism.

 

Dialectics cannot be used as a positive method to determine or to predict human historical events: it can only be used negatively as a critical tool to assess the historical validity of a given socio-theoretical hypothesis. In a nutshell, the dialectical method may be dissected into three components, as Engels did in Anti-Duhring. The first, which says that quantitative increments lead to qualitative change, is a banality when it is not a tautology (incidentally, Schumpeter uses this approach at pp.220ff of Business Cycles to describe “innovations”, although he too points out the simplicity of this distinction).

 

The second is the principle of “reciprocal action” – which means that when two factors are in opposition, they interact with each other. Hence, it is incorrect to say that “nature” is what conditions “human beings”, or the opposite, because clearly the two must interact – indeed it is not possible to conceive of human beings without “nature” and even vice versa because the concept of “nature” implies a “non-nature” which is clearly human being. Clearly, this principle is analytically valid because it serves to distinguish for analytical purposes between different factors of human reality, but it is historically invalid if it is considered purely from the standpoint of analysis, because then its conceptual framework becomes thoroughly ahistorical and indeed as banal as the first component of the dialectical method! Any historical and socio-theoretical analysis that identifies conflicts that cannot be resolved turns quite evidently into an ahistorical hypostasis; in other words, it turns a problem of human agency into an ontological entity.

 

This is why only the third principle of the Hegelian-Marxian dialectical method, the principle of “the negation of the negation”, is valid both for analytical and historical purposes – because it reminds us that all analyses of antithetical and conflicting historical concepts must include at the very least the possibility of the historical resolution, of the over-coming and the super-session of any antagonism and conflict that may be the object of that historical or socio-theoretical analysis. The problem with interpreting the dialectic in the sequence thesis-antithesis-synthesis is quite simply that here the “syn-thesis” is meant to preserve both the thesis and the anti-thesis. Yet, as Gramsci vehemently argued, the antithesis does not preserve but rather it first negates and then dissolves (Auf-heben) the thesis – which is why Hegel and Marx preferred to speak of “the negation of the negation” (in which no part of the thesis is preserved, precisely because it is “negated” by the anti-thesis) as the supersession of the conflict between thesis and antithesis. Here the moment of antithesis, the antagonism as negation, must contain (hold and refrain at the same time, see Cacciari, Il Potere che Frena on this notion of catechon, “containment”) the moment of supersession of the antagonism – the negation of the negation.

 

Despite the obvious critical relevance of many of the concepts central to the chiefly German phenomenological tradition from Nietzsche to Heidegger, their usefulness stops right at the point at which human conflict is seen as ontological or ontogenetic, and therefore ineluctable or immutable. This is a critical flaw that affects all of the negatives Denken from Schopenhauer to the entirety of the Austrian School. And here we include Schumpeter’s notion of Entwicklung as “creative destruction” (schopferische Zerstorung). (Perhaps the best, albeit abstruse, exposition of this critique is in T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, esp. Part One, and the shorter Lectures on Negative Dialectics, esp. Lecture 2, pp.13ff.)

 

 

[Adorno’s Lectures on Negative Dialectics]

Indeed, as Adorno has contended, the hypostatisation of dialectical concepts – their “immutability” or “closedness” - is a flaw that afflicts also Hegel’s “phenomenology” or “objective idealism”, despite its undoubtedly revolutionary role in inspiring the later development of the dialectical method as a critical tool by Marx. (Adorno’s introduction to Negative Dialectics superbly describes the need for the dialectical method to embrace “the object”, the physis – in other words, to include that metabolic interaction that is our focus in this work.)

 

[15] This, then, is the model of that positive negativity: the negation of the negation as a new positive that appears in Hegelian philosophy as a new model. Incidentally, it should be pointed out that one of the very striking features of Hegel's philosophy, one whose significance has not been sufficiently appreciated, is its dynamic nature. By this I mean that it does not regard its categories as fixed, but instead thinks of them as having emerged historically and therefore as capable of change. Even so, in reality its conceptual apparatus contains much more that is immutable, incomparably more that is constant, than it lets on. And these constants come to the surface to a certain degree against the intentions of this philosophy….

[16] Now Hegel has rightly shown that the institution represents a critique of abstract critical subjectivity, that is to say, the institution is necessary, necessary also in the sense that the subject needs it in order to sustain itself. Mere being-for-itself, the immediacy of the subject that believes in its own self-sufficiency, is in actual fact pure deception. Human beings are in fact zoon politikon [Adorno should say zoa politika] ‘political animals', in the sense that they can only survive by virtue of society and social institutions to which, as autonomous and critical subjectivity, they stand opposed. And with his criticism of the illusion that what is closest to us, namely our own self and its consciousness, is in fact the first and fundamental reality, Hegel has - and this is something we must emphasize - made a decisive contribution to our understanding of society and the relationship of individual to society. Without this Hegelian insight, a theory of society as we understand it today would not really have been possible. - So what I am saying is that he destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. Furthermore, he inferred from this the necessary fact that in its dealings with abstract subjectivity, the social aspect proves to be the stronger and prevails as such.

However - and this is precisely the point at which criticism of Hegel has to begin if we are to justify the formulation of a negative dialectics - we must ask this question: is this objectivity - which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity - in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with great efforts, with infinite pains? This mechanism of coercion binds subjectivity and thought into the objectivity that stands opposed to it.

In view of this dependency and of what we might call the logic of the facts, a logic that leads to the triumph of objectivity, it is not obvious why an insight into this mechanism should mean that this objectivity must itself be in the right. The situation suggests pangs of conscience imposed from outside. This is something I experienced most tellingly in my dealings with a Hegelian Marxist in my youth, namely with Georg Lukacs….

[17] And this is why I would say in general - I have exemplified this in one instance only - that the thesis that the negation of the negation is positive, an affirmation, cannot be sustained. The negation of the negation does not result in a positive, or not automatically. (Adorno, Lectures pp.15-7)

We emphatically agree with Adorno here except in two important respects: the first is that Adorno fails to stress here – although he certainly does so in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics - that it is not purely in terms of “consciousness” that the individual subject is indeed defined by “society”: much more important is the fact that there is no such thing as an “individual subject” in purely biological terms, let alone phenomenological ones – and that therefore the dialectical method must embrace this “immanentism” by going beyond the transcendentalism of “the ontological need” (the title to chapter 1 of Negative Dialectics)! (This is a point that Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception makes masterfully. See our “The Philosophy of the Flesh” on scribd.com) Without such a distinguo, Adorno’s exposition would be tainted with a certain “idealism”. The second point (a truly academic one) is that it is possible that Hegel never intended “the Absolute Spirit” as “objectivity”, as Adorno suggests here (on this point, we refer to Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel and to Cacciari’s Dialettica del Politico: Saggio su Hegel.)

 

Bobbio on Marxian dialectics:

 

Di fronte a due enti in contrasto, il metodo della com-[256]

penetrazione degli opposti, o meglio dell'azione reciproca,
conduce a mantenere entrambi i termini del contrasto e a
considerarli come condizionantisi a vicenda; al contrario, il
metodo della negazione della negazione conduce a considerare
il primo eliminato in un primo tempo dal secondo, e il
secondo eliminato in un secondo momento da un terzo termine.
Il primo metodo viene applicato a eventi simultanei, il
secondo, a eventi che si dispiegano nel tempo: perciò quest'ultimo
è un metodo per la comprensione della storia (vuoi della

storia della natura, vuoi della storia dell'uomo), (pp.255-6)

Lo strumento di questa comprensione unitaria era la [261]

dialettica come rilevazione delle opposizioni e loro risoluzione.
Solo che la unità concreta nello studio dello svolgimento
storico gli era apparsa come il risultato della sintesi
degli opposti (negazione della negazione), donde la categoria
del corso storico dell'umanità è il divenire; nello studio
scientifico della realtà, l'unità concreta gli apparve come il
risultato di una interrelazione degli enti che l'intelletto
astratto ha erroneamente isolati gli uni dagli altri ( azione
reciproca ) , donde la categoria unitaria della totalità organica.
Come il divenire è composto di diversi momenti in opposizione,
così la totalità organica è composta di diversi enti
in opposizione. La dialettica, come metodo di risoluzione
delle opposizioni, si presenta là come sintesi degli opposti,
qua come azione reciproca. Il divenire, in altre parole, è il
risultato di successive negazioni, o se si vuole di un continuo
superamento ( il terzo termine ) ; la totalità organica è il
risultato di un intrecciarsi delle reciproche relazioni degli
enti, o, se si vuole, di una integrazione ( che non risolve i

due termini in un terzo ), (Da Hobbes a Marx, pp.260-1).

 

Notice how in the quotation above Bobbio makes two mis-statements. The first is when he says that the negation of the negation contains two moments whereby in the first moment the negation eliminates the thesis, and in the second moment the negation of the negation eliminates the negation. This is entirely misleading because “the negation of the negation” is, yes, a separate moment from the negation, and the negation is in turn a distinct moment of the thesis. But these “moments” are separate and distinct only as “dialectical moments”, only as “aspects” of the antagonism, certainly not as “chronological moments”! This means that the negation of the negation is a necessary dia-logical moment of the negation and the negation is a moment of the thesis: – but these are not chrono-logical moments that are separate in time! What is chrono-logical is only the necessary extrinsication of the antagonism contained in the thesis in historical time. But the thesis, its negation and the negation of the negation are dialectical aspects of the one antagonism whose “resolution” (as Bobbio calls it; we prefer supersession) must take place historically if the antagonism in question is indeed historical and not “ontological”: they are not “moments” in a chrono-logical sense as Bobbio’s explication would lead us to believe.

 

The second error is that whereby Bobbio confuses “the synthesis of opposites” with “the negation of the negation”. As we saw above, and as Bobbio himself noted in a later review of Gramsci’s use of the dialectic (cf. “Nota sulla dialettica in Gramsci”, in Gramsci e la Concezione della Societa’ Civile) with the analytical acuity that was always his great attribute as a thinker, this identification of synthesis and negation of the negation is quite incorrect because, although both involve a form of historical becoming (Italian, divenire), only the latter – the negation of the negation – specifies that the thesis is not preserved by the antithesis but that both are entirely superseded! The notion of “syn-thesis” instead, as the very name suggests, involves the preservation of the thesis in the antithesis as “syn-chronic” and therefore ahistorical or “ana-lytical” moments. This is a point to which Gramsci held fast (cf. the Quaderni on “Il Materialismo Storico”) – and it is in relation to Gramsci’s interpretation of the dialectical method that Bobbio finally hits the mark where earlier (in Da Hobbes a Marx) he had failed to do so.

 

 

[Colletti on “unity” of Marxian method.] But alas these are flaws that have afflicted theoretical Marxism as well. As an illustration, we can allude to Lucio Colletti’s remarks in Ideologia e Societa’ (at p.16ff) where he discusses Schumpeter’s quotation above concerning Marx’s ability to combine economic facts and theory in one indissolubly unified synthesis. At first, Colletti agrees with us that this “chemical mixture” is due precisely to the strict connection in Marxian economic theory between the interpersonal human side and the relation of human beings as a species to their physical environment, in such a way that economics is never seen as a question of mere (universal, eternal) “exchange” but is indeed treated as a theorisation of the satisfaction and creation of physiological human needs in which “pro-duction” – not “exchange”! – is the essential aspect. It is from the perspective of the production of human needs that any distinction between “theory” and “fact”, between “economics” and “sociology”, “nature” and “history” and – most important for Marxist theory – “structure” and “superstructure” becomes illusory. Colletti perceives the essential role of production, of metabolic interaction, to the theorisation of capitalism. But then he immediately falls victim to the confusion of dialectical “synthesis” – that is to say, the interpretation of Marxian dialectics as the synthesis of thesis and antithesis, instead of as “the negation of the negation” - with the notion of “organic totality”, of “unity”, of “the whole” – which is a trap into which much of what we call theoretical Marxism has fallen in the past.

 

Si comprende …. come questa unita’ di economia e sociologia, di natura e storia in Marx non significhi identita’ dei due termini; come essa cioe’ non comporti ne’ una riduzione della societa’ alla natura ne’ una riduzione della natura alla societa’: non una riduzione della societa’ umana al formicaio, ne’ una riduzione della vita umana a quella filosofica. Ma si comprende anche per converso come l’elusione di queste due antitesi unilaterali avvenga proprio in forza della loro composizione organica, da parte di Marx, e, quindi della loro riunificazione in un “tutto” che e’, si’, totalita’, ma de-[18]terminata; che e’ si’ sintesi ma di distinti; che e’ si’ unita’, ma di eterogenei. Dove e’ facile vedere… cio’ che Marx deve a Hegel e come, d’altra parte, egli ne stia al tempo stesso lontano, (IeS, pp.17-8).

 

Here Colletti confuses both the notion of “negation”, which he wrongly substitutes with “synthesis”; and he confuses also the last two aspects of Marxian dialectics, one valid and the other invalid, which, as we emphasised above, must be kept separate: he is quite correct in insisting on the primacy of the process of pro-duction in the sense of metabolic interaction that we have outlined in this work as the locus of political antagonism in capitalism. This is essential to the notion of metabolic interaction or production as a “becoming” (Bobbio’s divenire), that is, as a historical process of human objectification that can be accompanied by historical forms of antagonism.

 

But then, as we are arguing, Colletti hypostatises this historical antagonism by insisting on the separate antithetical analytical categories or “entities” of “nature” and “history” and their “reunification” or “synthesis” only from the theoretical perspective of an “organic totality” or “whole” – just like Schumpeter’s vision of “the social process as one individible whole” or Lukacs’s notion of “totality”. The problem with this notion of “totality”, as Bobbio splendidly explains, is that it is a static antithetical opposition that “does not resolve the two [opposing] terms [thesis and antithesis] into a third”, that is, into “the negation of the negation”. Consequently, any theory that represents social reality as an “organic totality” is not “dialectical” in that it does not allow for the supersession (Hegel’s Aufhebung) of the social antagonism it seeks to theorise.

 

Colletti relies on Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, who also stresses the limitation of neoclassical theory to the sphere of exchange. Unlike Colletti, however, Dobb does not see the metabolic side of capitalist production, and refers instead to the emargination by bourgeois theory of all “institutional and historical factors” – that is, its restriction of economic theory to “inter-personal relations” and not to “political elements” or “superstructural” ones. Because Dobb was a firm believer in the labour theory of value, to his mind the central antagonism of capitalism lies in the unequal distribution of income which is due to “superstructural” institutional factors. It is obvious how the labour theory of value, by insisting on the existence of a Law of Value that determines prices “scientifically” removes the focus from the sphere of metabolic production – whence is derived its artificial separation of what it sees as the superstructural aspects of capitalism from its presumably strictly economic or structural aspects. The same applies to Lenin’s remarks [Philos.Notebooks] about “skeleton” and “flesh-and-blood” analysis.

 

 

This is the essential problem with Schumpeter’s notion of Entwicklung and of entrepreneurial Innovation as its “source of energy” acting “from within” the capitalist economic system. It is true, as we have seen particularly in relation to his analogy of capitalism with the evolution of an animal species (dogs), that Schumpeter rightly perceives how any notion of Dynamik and Entwicklung must treat the economic system as a living organism, instead of as merely a “dead” organism that can be autopsied (described, classified, categorised) anatomically and analytically. But then he fails to examine how this social living organism or living organic community meta-bolizes with its physical environment – in other words, how indeed this living organism cannot be an “organic totality” or form a “whole” that can be theorized in isolation from its “physis” because the relations and interactions of its “members” or components between themselves and with their physical environment will trans-form or mutate  or meta-morphose this organic community in a manner that super-sedes its present distribution of social roles and power - the status quo, the established order - by dis-solving it.

 

Seen as an “organic totality”, Schumpeter’s “pure economic theory of economic change” becomes an eschatology  – that is to say, an insuperable and indeed “eternal” tautological analytical framework made up of simple anti-theses (Statik/Dynamik, equilibrium/innovation, interest/profit, entrepreneur/capitalist, individuality/bureaucratic State). This is why Schumpeter’s famous notion of “creative destruction” is not and cannot be “dialectical” in the proper Hegelian-Marxian sense – because it is an ahistorical, purely logical antithesis of opposites that are impervious to mediation and super-session. This is what we call an “aporetic” theory – it cannot “breathe” because there is no “osmosis” with any reality or “physis” that allows it to change, to mutate. [Cf. on this point the sublime summation Heidegger makes {Pathmarks, p.197} of what he sees as humanity’s absurd attempt to dominate physis through techne’ – when in fact this attempt is the expression of capitalist relations of production.]

 

The notion of “organism” as an “organic totality” that may have a “telos” [a purpose, as in Lukacs] but is not “living” and is therefore deprived of “physis” and its theory is thereby reduced to an eschatology [cf.Bobbio on Marx] is in Heidegger’s Pathmarks, p.195. By contrast, the insistence on this fact is what characterizes Nietzsche’s approach to social theory. The limit of Nietzsche’s naturalism is that, like Heidegger’s, it is entirely ontogenetic – it does not consider human beings phylogenetically, as a species, but only as “individuals”. Heidegger does even worse than Nietzsche in that whereas the latter lays stress on the physio-logical, Heidegger always gave priority to the physio-logical as an aspect of ontology (and often of theo-ontology! On Heidegger’s description of physis as “emergence” and proximity to Entwicklung, see Pathmarks, p.199.

 

 

The reason why Schumpeter cannot see the need for tackling theoretically the meta-bolic evolution of the organic community – one that is living, one that is capable of endogenous change or mutation – is that he hypostatizes social conflict into a “totality” of aporetic concepts, of individual polar oppositions (entrepreneur/capitalist, innovation/stagnation, profit/ interest, individuality/State bureaucracy). Seen as a “totality” or as “one indivisible whole”, what Schumpeter calls “the social process” cannot but be analyzed in static polar terms, in a dyadic system that oscillates like a pendulum between simple abstract “opposites”, but one that cannot even envisage to resolve or over-come or super-sede its internal conflict because this conflict is an insuperable, irresoluble definitional element of its theoretical foundations!

Indeed what we are arguing throughout our study of Schumpeter is that whether consciously or not the Austrian economist himself recognized the impossibility of bridging this particular hiatus irrationale because, for one, he believed that social reality is irreconcilably and immutably conflictual so that no “theory” can ever correspond with “history”, and, consequently, any attempt or claim to such integration would mean that the “reason” in “history” was not just “instrumental” but “teleological”, giving rise therefore to a “prophetic rationalism” that Schumpeter, like Weber, always imputed to and against Marx’s own theory of capitalism and of history (cf. “Marx the Prophet” in CS&D).

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