From Economic to Political Evolution

Abstract

Schumpeter’s conception of entrepreneurship was closely linked to his evolutionary perspective on economics. As the Appendix describes, such evolutionary notions as the adaptive response had played an important part in his early theory of economic development. Later, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he explicitly used an evolutionary perspective, and in fact Nelson has declared that all later evolutionary theories of economic growth that he knows of have drawn inspiration from this book.¹ The term ‘capitalist evolution’ occurred quite frequently in its economic chapters and clearly had replaced Schumpeter’s earlier concept of economic development. Moreover, all forms of (capitalist) economic change were accommodated within the concept of evolution, whether the change was gradual or revolutionary, was an adaptive response or a spontaneous use of initiative: