Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process

New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1939. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This substantial, two-volume set is the 1939 first edition, first printing of Schumpeter’s ambitious Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. The work “was intended as a sequel to his highly acclaimed The Theory of Economic Development”.

The volumes are each bound in dark red cloth double blind-rule bordered front covers and spines featuring gilt rules and print and black title and author panels. “First Edition” is helpfully printed on each title page below the volume number. This set is noteworthy not only for very good plus condition, but for retaining some of the original dust jackets. The front face of each jacket is tipped onto the front pastedown of each volume, and the front flap of the Volume I jacket, featuring an explanatory summary and encapsulation of “Special Features”, is tipped onto the Volume I rear pastedown.

Both bindings are square, clean, bright, and tight, with sharp corners, light shelf wear primarily confined to extremities, and no discernible color shift between the covers and spines. The contents remain clean, only mildly age-toned with trivial spotting primarily confined to the endpapers. The sole previous ownership marks are intriguing; a red ink stamp featuring what are presumably Japanese characters at the center of each title page; this set came to us from Japan.

Joseph Alois Julius Schumpeter (1883-1950) has been ranked “one of the greatest economists and social theorists of all time… Moreover, his contributions transcend the traditional borders of economics and are admired by sociologists, political scientists, and historians.”

Born in what is now the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schumpeter attended the University of Vienna, publishing his first major paper the year he graduated and swiftly becoming, by turns, the youngest non-salaried lecturer in Austria, the youngest economist to be awarded an associate professorship, and the youngest Austrian to be made a full professor of political economy. His early Austrian career of professorship and authorship was interrupted by brief stints in government and banking. But in the 1920s, Schumpeter divorced his first wife, then experienced financial devastation when Austria was hit by a severe economic crisis. He remarried, but subsequently lost his mother, wife, and child all within one year.

Renewal came in 1932, when Schumpeter left Austria, never to return, accepting a position at Harvard University – an irony given that Harvard would become “a hotbed of Keynesian economics” and Schumpeter was a foremost critic of Keynes’s General Theory. At Harvard, Schumpeter completed Business Cycles. “The monumental nature of this study, which included extensive theoretical, historical, and statistical work, placed it well beyond the full comprehension of most economists.” According to the front flap of this first edition’s dust jacket, the modest aims of the work included embracing “practically all the economic problems of capitalism” and “showing fully the way in which theory, statistics, and history ought to cooperate in economic analysis.” The work’s reception was dampened at the time by both its length and “the rising tide of Keynesian economics”.

“There is no explicit Schumpeterian school of economics…” Rather, his contributions transcend the traditional borders of economics and are admired by sociologists, political scientists, and historians.” Moreover, as noted by his Nobel laureate student Paul Samuelson, “Schumpeter taught a host of students who would later become leaders of American economics.” (ANB)