A propos Spiegel's definition of a school as "consisting of a recognized leader" with "a closely knit group of followers to exalt and spread the doctrines of the master", Sumitra Shah wrote: > Can one attribute the lack of a Schumpeterian school or even a nucleus of > it to such semi-biographical factors? I remember Bob Heilbroner, who was > his student at Harvard, saying that Schumpeter never promoted his work > among his students and assiduously refrained from assigning his works as > readings. But I also remember hearing/reading that Schumpeter was unhappy > that he did not leave a 'school' behind. > Walter Salant told me the same thing, and that his students were frustrated that he never told them what he thought, only what others thought. Likewise, Richard Goodwin wrote me that Schumpeter "was a curious man, in some ways vain, but for example, in his lectures he never mentioned his own work... [nor] in his great work on history of theory." Commenting on my account of how Schumpeter's teaching assistant, Lauchlin Currie, despised his reactionary views on the Great Depression, Goodwin told me: "Indeed I thought the faculty at Harvard were a bunch of whited sepulcres; and I still think so. While I was there seven professors published a book about the Great Depression -- a book of concentrated mumbo-jumbo that has been rightly totally forgotten; they were labelled the 7 Wise Men. And it included Schumpeter, whom I admire enormously, but who talked the most unutterable rubbish at the time... My dismissal of Harvard did not include Currie... Fortunately I took Currie's course and it was more or less the only good thing I found in the economics faculty... "About Schumpeter: Currie was wrong, though he had good grounds. As an undergraduate, I was a member of a discussion group and for one meeting we asked the newly arrived Schumpeter to explain Marx to us. He told us that his economics was all wrong, though he had some good ideas. As a youthful radical I was furious with him and returned, some years later, full of hostility to him. After one year's contact I began to soften and ended up being a friend and great admirer. He was a real continental intellectual; he loved discussion and would give any amount of time to anyone who, he thought, had anything to say. He was a snob and a reactionary, but Paul Sweezy and myself were two of his best friends, and he knew we were both hopeless reds. For him, in fact, since we both came from banking families, we simply illustrated how capitalism would end, not the way Marx said." Roger Sandilands