It's All in Schumpeter (Not)

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I recall, after raising objections to what I felt was Murray Rothbard's unneccesarily savage trashing of Adam Smith in his history of economic thought, having some defender of Rothbard's tell me, "Well, Schumpeter reached the same conclusions!"

So, now I'm reading Schumpeter, and I find: "But though the Wealth of Nations contained no really novel ideas and though it cannot rank with Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin of Species, it is a great performance all the same and fully deserved its success."

And what about the charge that Smith was a plagiarist? "...no charge of plagiarism can be made either against Smith or on his behalf against others."

So, not so much in Schumpeter, after all.

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:16 PM

    Didn't Rothbard plagiarized the Adam Smith plagiarizing himself? There are some old Libertarian Journal articles about Adam Smith plagiarizing?

    Anyway; Rothbard was a bit harsh, yes.

    ReplyDelete

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