Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism

Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism from Jacobin Madazine:

At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of “non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest.” He believed that many — and perhaps most — wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that “psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.”

On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact “atavistic in character” and stemmed from “the living conditions, not of the present but of the past — put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production.” In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of “absolute autocracy.”