On Mark Perlman and Joseph Schumpeter: Their Respective Approaches to Evolutionary Economics and the History of Economic Theory (2004)

Abstract

To Joseph Schumpeter’s Ten Great Economists (1952), reissued in 1997 with a typically learned and absorbing introduction by Mark Perlman, whose eightieth birthday is a most appropriate reason for this special issue, I would wish to add Mark and Schumpeter himself. Both had (have) encyclopaedic knowledge of our discipline and of the personalities who made it, both were (are) fascinated by evolutionary processes as they apply to our understanding of the motion over time of economies; both were exemplary teachers, as inspiring as they were demanding of high standards from their pupils and supervisees. Both were conservative in their politics, though Mark is more willing to use our discipline as a backdrop to the making of policy than was Schumpeter who, at least in later life, thought that analysis and scholarship were sufficient ends in themselves. Mark is much more sceptical than Schumpeter was concerning the role of mathematics as the language of our subject. Schumpeter was bedazzled by mathematics and its role, partly because, I suspect, he was not a naturally gifted mathematician, though he worked hard at making himself so. Mark, like Keynes, recognised that mathematics is but one of several languages that have appropriate roles to play in economic theory, analysis and applied work.

Originally published in Journal of Evolutionary Economics, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 127–30.