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

SCHUMPETER, Joseph A.

$32,500.00

Item Number: 4496

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, 1939.

First edition of the economist’s ground-breaking work. Octavo, 2 volumes, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper of volume one, “To Seymour Harris with kind regards Joseph Schumpeter.” The recipient, Harvard economics professor Seymour Harris, was an editor of the book, Schumpeter as Social Scientist and editor of The New Economics; which Schumpeter was a contributor. In near fine condition with light shelfwear. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Books signed by Schumpeter are rare.

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."