to modernize their teaching techniques, are using scenario-building along
with simulation games to help students grasp the dynamics of politics.
Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950) was born and educated in Vienna, later
emigrating to the USA, in 1932, to take up a professorship at Harvard. His
principal academic discipline was as an economist, in which role he gained
great prestige, but his work is probably now most important in political
science. Schumpeter’s great work,Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy(1942)
mainly concerns an analysis, similar to the approach ofWeber, of how the
sheer scale of modern industry is likely to force a convergence between
capitalismandsocialismas modes of production, because of the tendency
towards a bureaucratic form of management in both societies (seeconver-
gence thesis). At the same time he argued that the scale of industrial units
might well require some form ofnationalizationif they were to be controlled
at all.
The part of his theory that is still vitally important to political sociology is his
discussion of democracy, where he developed aspects of the earlier theories of
powere ́litism, and where his arguments form the basis both for later
Americanpluralism, and for the important work of AnthonyDowns,An
Economic Theory of Democracy. As rational choice theory gains ever increasing
strength in the social sciences, Schumpeter’s early efforts to apply economic
thought processes to other topics is seen as foundational. ’Schumpeter’s main
contention was that democracy could only sensibly be seen as a procedure for
government, a decision-making mechanism, and did not entail specific values
in itself, thus setting him apart from the classical tradition of democratic theory
descended fromRousseauand John StuartMill. To Schumpeter democracy
was no more than the periodic elections during which voters chose one or
other of a set of teams of competing leaders, the political parties. That done, he
felt that the ordinary citizen not only could not, but should not, have any
further role in the shaping of policy.
In part this latter aspect flows from his very pessimistic assessment of human
rational capacity, and his belief, borrowed from earlier works on crowd
psychology, that people, in the mass, lost whatever rational capacity they
had and became subject to mass hysteria, and to manipulation by political
demagogues. It is noticeable that Schumpeter’s own life, lived mainly in
Austria and Germany until he was nearly 50, made him acutely conscious of
the dangers of unstable mass democracy. His experience, however brief, in
government (he was minister of finance for the Austrian Republic in 1919)
clearly also contributed to his view of economics and policy-making.
Schumpeter