>Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believed that Schumpeter did not belong to any
particular school, and neither did he found one. In that he was truly
unique.  
  
  
Yes, that's true.  Schumpeter did not belong to any particular school and was   
strangely modest ONLY about his contributions. He was a good teacher because   
he did not encourage slavish disciples.  There is so little of Schumpeter's   
best theoretical ideas even in his History of Economic Analysis (although it was   
unfinished at the time of his passing).  
  
I have argued over the years that many of the important ideas in Schumpeter's writings
were also in von Mises's and other major Austrian writers depending on which writer.  The
influences on Schumpeter were often the major Austrian school founders and esepcially
Boehm and Wieser.  On the theory of entrepreneurial alertness and rivalrous competition
(the dynamic variants of how change and novelty gets integrated into an economic system)
Schumpeter was years AHEAD of Mises. Mises and Schumpeter were both interested in economic
sociology as well and did not want their economic sociologies to be based on Freudian
foundations (that is, on psychology as Mitchell or Talcott Parsons who also studied
individual action --- "voluntarism" as the sociologists tend to call it and saw the future
of economics in psychology). .
  
On public policy issues, such as the thrust toward "anti-trust legislation," Schumpeter
and the major 20th century Austrians were often on the same side of the fence although
Schumpeter did not get whipped up against labor unions as Mises was prone to do. Mises
probably was happy with a total defeat of Nazi Germany -- Schumpeter was not.  Schumpeter
worried about a "slavic" invasion coming from the East without a strong armed Germany in
the middle to save the West.  Mises could not forgive Schumpeter for a number of heretical
beliefs and probably the most important one was Sch. claim that central planning socialism
could work. Another heretical anti-Austrian school claim had to do with the meaning and
economics of money.  Still, Schumpeter tended to flow with the trends and Mises was
refreshingly stubborn and more principled than Schumpeter to the end. During the Chinese
Great Leap Forward it was Mises who got it right
not Schumpeter.   
  
As for MI, I learned my variant from Mises.  He equated explanation with "understanding"
rather than prediction.  The reducton to individual action was ultimately needed before
the human mind could honestly say that they "understood" some social phenomena without
referencing individuals as plan-making animals.  Ironically, even those who deny MI end up
making strange statements such as "the mouse chose the cheese rather than the coca-cola"
suggesting that the human mind needs MI in order to "understand."  Mises thought that
understanding the interactions of human minds by certain categories was hard-wired in the
mind somehow and in some way.  His books have titles such as the "epistemological
foundations of economics" or the "ultimate foundations of economics."  In Mainland China's
case, a little Austrian economics might have saved 30 million lives circa 1960. It's hard
to forget how important economic ideas can be.
  
My commitment to MI is just a principle of explanation I follow something as follows:
first try to explain a social phenomenon in terms of individual action. If that becomes
impossible to do because of a "residual" or something or other that doesn't quite fit,
then go on to "emergent properties" of collective phenomena etc.  If you don't need to
involve the "emeregent properties" then don't bring them in.   If you do need them, these
"features" of collective action, then of course they need to be brought in.
  
I respect those in the profession who dislike  MI (probably because they do not like
individualism as political philosophy and put tribal rights or patriarchial rights above
individual autonomy as a norm worth preserving , but in the social sciences it seems
counter-productive to start with emergent properties of collectives when so much can be
understood in terms of individual action.  The history of economics especially macro is
evidence of how much more can be understood by starting and keeping with individual
action.  Whatever is "progressive" in economics seems to have been linked to the MI
approach--the understanding of money and inflation in terms of the cash balance approach
is my favorite example.  This, in my opinion, is the legacy of MI in economics and
something important that I learned from von Mises's teachings and example.  Schumpeter
named the approach (in 1908) and used it often himself as have some sociologists (Coleman
and Becker).  Becker says MI helps him predict.  Mises would say it helped him understand.
Schumpeter would say either depending on what phase of his life and to whom he might be
speaking.
  
For these reasons its hard to identify Schumpeter with any school of thought although the
conversations clearly originate in Vienna and continue through the most turbulent and
awful part of the 20th century.  It is hard to come down too hard on Schumpeter because
his life was much shorter than either von Mises or von Hayek.
  
Laurence Moss