Joseph Schumpeter – Business Cycles. A Theoretical Historical and Statistic Analysis of the Capitalist Process

Description

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

Schumpeter, Joseph

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1942.

First edition, third impression. (As stated on title page. Printed during WWII with war shortages. Not a later reprint.) 1095 p. Crimson cloth with gilt lettering. Two volumes. Very Good or better condition. Sturdy bindings, bright gilt. Not ex-library. A single underline erased. Owner’s stamp on endpapers and occasionally in margins; name written on paste downs. Rare early printing of a landmark economics text in unusually nice condition. Item #150330005

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1939. First edition of the economist’s groundbreaking work. Octavo, 2 volumes. Original cloth. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper of volume one, “To Seymour Harris with kind regards Joseph Schumpeter.” Some light rubbing to the bottom of the cloth, a near fine set of this landmark work. The recipient Harvard economics professor Seymour Harris, who was editor of the book Schumpeter as Social Scientist and editor of The New Economics; which Schumpeter was a contributor. Books signed by Schumpeter are extremely rare and virtually unobtainable. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

Schumpeter’s theory of business cycles puts its emphasis on industrial innovations rather than banking. Schumpeter starts his account of business cycles at the top rather than the bottom of the cycle. “The reader needs only to make the experiment. If he comes to survey industrial history from, say, 1760 onwards, he will discover two things; he will find that very many booms are unmistakably characterized by revolutionary changes in some branch of industry which, in consequence, leads the boom, railways, for instance in the forties, or steel in the eighties, or electricity in the nineties.”