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Imperialism and Social Classes

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As Bert Hoselitz states in his excellent introduction, for Schumpeter the carrier of economic development is the innovation entrepreneur. Schumpeter distinguishes a capitalistic elite - a group of peaceful businessmen (bourgeois) whose main exploits are profit-making innovations - from an imperialistic elite - an aristocracy whose chief reason for existence is the ever-renewed unleashing of aggressive wars.

For Schumpeter, `imperialism is the disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.' It may or it may not have economic-structural influences (Marxism).
Imperialism is objectless (it has no adequate object beyond itself). The aristocracy or the military create their own wars to justify their existence (avoid extinction): `Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.'

But for Schumpeter, imperialism's character is atavistic. More, he states that a purely capitalist world can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses.
Imperialism is far from atavistic and imperial impulses are a very fertile soil for defense industries, which is actually a huge and highly profitable market.
Schumpeter's vision of the future is also way beyond the mark: `Society is bound to grow beyond capitalism, but this will be because the achievements of capitalism are likely to make it superfluous, not because its internal contradictions are likely to make its continuance impossible.'

The second part of the book is rather an outdated sociological study of classes, written in the German tradition (see R. Aron - La sociologie allemande contemporaine )
It treats very superficially, the nature of class (its function in society), class cohesion, class formation, concrete causes and conditions of a given class structure, the rise and fall of families within a class, movements across class lines and the rise and fall of classes.
For Schumpeter, individual (personal) differences in aptitude (natural or acquired) are the ultimate foundation of the class phenomenon.

This book has mainly only historical value.