Joseph Schumpeter's Life And Legacy

摘要

This reviewer recalls a quip made years ago by a noted cultural critic to the effect that biography was always destined to be the lowest form of literature. For the most part, your reviewer must admit to sharing this opinion; finding most modern biography ('scholarly' or otherwise) at best to teeter precariously on that treacherous divide between hagiogra-phy and scandal, or at worst falling into the abyss of post-mortem psycho-analysis. Moreover, for a journal such as this one, there is always a question about the practical value to the policy sciences of knowing about the personal lives of individual intellectuals. So the reader might well wonder why a reviewer with this admitted prejudice would volunteer to review the present volume in a journal that by nature is not overly concerned with personalities.