The beat of the economic heart: Joseph Schumpeter and Arthur Spiethoff on business cycles

The paper discusses the silimar, but in some respects different explanations of business cycles by Schumpeter and Arthur Spiethoff, his elderly friend and colleague. Spiethoff brought Schumpeter back into academics after the latter’s not very successful careers as a politician and a banker. Both insisted that cycles are endogenous and cannot possibly be eliminated without eliminating the dynamismof the capitalist economy. They thought that theoretical and historical studies were not mutually exclusive, but complementary. The gulf separating pure theory and historical studies since the so-called Methodenstreit was detrimental to the development of economics. © 2013, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.