Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: Third Edition by Schumpeter, Joseph A.

“Can capitalism survive No. I do not think it can,” Joseph Schumpeter writes at the beginning of Part II of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Cited daily in the national media as key to understanding the recent economic events, Schumpeter’s analysis is considered by many to be the finest dissection of capitalism ever written. Now, Harper Perennial publishes this famous section of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as a stand alone book for the first time.

In these pages Schumpeter introduced to the world the concept of “Creative Destruction.” This famous theory states that in capitalist economies new innovations, when first introduced, erode the position of established firms, while providing new and previously unforeseen avenues of economic growth. For example, think of the music industry in our lifetime: Mp3s (by extension, iPods) have replaced CDs, which in turn replaced cassettes and records in the 1980s. Schumpeter also controversially argued that capitalist societies hold the seeds of their own destruction in their very foundations. Representing the core of Schumpeter’s innovative thought, Can Capitalism Survive is a key text from “the most influential economist of the 20th century.” (Peter Drucker, Fortune)