Portraits of Harvard Figures

When in January the Seven Wise Men of the Economics Department contributed "The Economics of the Recovery Program" to Harvard's already well nourished reputation as a home for die-hard academicians schooled in the embalmed jingo of a dead era, it was not Professor Taussig nor Professors Carver nor Burbank nor any other of the great Civil War school, but a new-comer, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, J.U.D., ex-finance minister of Austria, internationally known economic theorist, and no fool, who showed his hand.

Steered into a professorship in the autumn of 1932 by the Senior members of his department (with one of whom, Professor Taussig he still resides) Professor Schumpeter has since rapidly assumed leadership of the young and enlightened group of reactionary instructors and assistant professor who have pitted themselves so consistently against all the policies of the New Deal.

What Professor Schumpeter has done for the Economics Department has been to lead it forth from the forest of conceptual windmills and scarecrows in which it has been wandering fruitless- ly ever since the turn of the century Now, at least a substantial portion of the department has been made to understand the necessarily realistic implications of the Conservative View by a man who sees them not in the cheap syllogisms of an Economics A, but in the suffering and starvation of a once flourishing empire strangled culturally and economically by the forces of revolution.

Appropriately launched upon his career as the son of an influential Austrian industrialist, Joseph Alois Schumpeter was born in 1883, in an Austria just beginning to feel the effects of its Industrial Revolution already well under way. As a young man, he studied law, receiving the degree of J.U.D., at at the age of twenty-four, and immediately thereafter, more or less on a lark, went to Cairo to plead cases among the Africans in King Edward's newly created civil courts. Interested in the intense opposition put up by the Egyptians to the vigorous reorganization of their political and economic life being affected by the monocled, white-jacketed bureaucracy of the Foreign Office, but at the same time incapacitated by the climate of the country, barrister Schumpeter was forced by tropical fever to remove to London, where, in 1908, he published the first book which made his reputation as an economic theorist, "Der Wesen and der Hauptinhalt der Theoretischen Nationaloekonomic."

In the following year he left England and held the successive positions of lecturer at the University of Vienna and professor at the University of Graz, the latter of which he held until the War.

Meanwhile, in 1912, he published the "Theorle der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung," in which he enunciates the now famous theory of the physical business cycle, the theory that alternate periods of prosperity and depression are caused by new inventions, and that, therefore, the business cycle is inherent in any complex industrial society, regardless of its political organization.

Lured into politics by the excitement of the war and by his conviction, unpopular as it was articulate, that victory held nothing for Austria, Professor Schumpeter was appointed in 1915 to the Commission for the Socialization of industry in Berlin, on which he served until the socialist premier Renner called him to Vienna in 1918 to accept the Finance portfolio in the new coalition government being formed to replace that of the recently abdicated Emperor Charles.

Caught between the two fires of Bolshevist governments in Prague and in Munich, and faced with preserving order and the semblance of a state even before the Treaty of St. German had assigned Austria her new boundaries, the most pressing problem faced by Schumpeter's government was how to preserve the loyalty of the Vienna police. Carrying this and also the task of reorganizing the monetary system of a dismembered country to a successful conclusion, Schumpeter presented early in 1919 a budget designed to prevent the paper currency inflation which subsequently followed; but the legislature rejected it by a narrow vote, and Schumpeter resigned, thereafter steadily losing interest in politics, until, in 1925, he accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn.

Having tried the world of affairs and found it wanting, Professor Schumpeter loves intense academic activity, almost to the exclusion of worldly distractions. Flatly refusing to apply any of the theories which he discusses in his three graduate courses, he informs Harvard and Radcliffe that they will have to explore external reality for themselves.

He lacks, however, none of the graceful qualities of his people, and, his Slavie charm over the tea-cups and the dinner table having at all times kept pace with his Teutonic intensity on the lecturer's platform, he has become socially one of the most popular members of the faculty.

Acknowledging at all times his archreactionary sympathies, ex-Finanzminister Schumpeter makes it a point to distinguish between what is desirable and what is inevitable, and predicts an early triumph for revolutionary forces in the West. And that he is more than happy to await among his colleagues and assistants in the cheerfully efficient little community on the top floor of Holyoke