Interest in the scholarship of Joseph Schumpeter has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the past two decades, both in the academic and popular spheres. With the advent of the information revolution, Schumpeter's elevation of the entrepreneur to the prime mover in the process of capitalist growth has gained great public notice. His pioneering focus on "business strategy" has given rise to a whole new discipline within management schools. His emphasis on great innovations and the disruptive dynamics following in their trail has been given new life in the recent scholarly literature on general-purpose technologies (Bresnahan-Trajtenberg). His insights into the linkages between banking and economic growth have inspired the burgeoning literature on the role of financial development (Levine). His notions of creative destruction are now formalized in models of endogenous growth, specifically growth arising from R&D investments leading to leapfrogging in product quality (Aghion-Howitt and Grossman-Helpman). And his speculations about the relative strengths of small and large business firms as generators of new technologies remain a subject of vigorous debate.

Schumpeter is enormously influential for an economist whose last work was published over fifty years ago. But truth be told, his name is now invoked far more often than his books are read. Given all this, Thomas K. McCraw's masterful biography, Prophet of Innovation, offers a welcome opportunity to explore more fully the life and thoughts of this preeminent mid-twentieth-century scholar. McCraw is Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning Prophets of Regulation (1984), and the ideal academic to undertake this endeavor.

His graceful new book guides the reader through Schumpeter's turbulent personal life, his troubled and short political career, his rapid ascent through the universities of Europe and then America, and, most importantly, the long and twisting course of his intellectual development. Schumpeter's personal saga, involving a dominating mother and an array of lovers and wives, dispels any notion of scholar-priest locked in an ivory tower. As he wrote in his diary: "OK, I have a gift for women." Of interest to economic historians is that Schumpeter entered into a lasting if unequal partnership with Elizabeth Boody, the pioneering scholar of Japanese economic development.

Perhaps as a result of this union, Joseph Schumpeter famously stated in his comparison of the places of history, statistics, and theory in the economics disciple: "Of these fundamental fields, economic history…is by far the most important. I wish to state right now that, if starting my work in economics afresh, I were told that I could study only one of the three but have my choice, it would be economic history…the subject matter of economics is essentially a unique process in historic time. Nobody can hope to understand the economic phenomena of any, including the present, epoch who has not an adequate command of historical facts and an adequate amount of historical sense or of what may be described as historical experience."

One surprise Prophet of Innovation reveals on the academic side was how well integrated Schumpeter was with the movement taking economics in a mathematic-theoretical direction. Schumpeter was, with Irving Fisher, a major force behind the founding of the Econometric Society in 1932 and the author of the lead article in the inaugural issue of Econometrica. And he was teacher, mentor, and friend of Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, Wassily Leontief, as well as Paul Sweezy and many others. Another surprise was that this advocate for capitalism and opponent of the postwar mixed economy "much esteemed Britain's well-trained and apolitical civil service" (p. 34). Similar fresh insights abound in McCraw's rich narrative.

For me, a special delight of Prophet of Innovation is McCraw's careful explication of Schumpeter's major works and their placement in his evolving scholarly career and relationships to contemporaries and rivals, especially to John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek. McGraw provides thoughtful précis of Schumpeter's pathbreaking early work, Theory of Economic Development (1911), his influential 1928 essays on "Social Classes" and "The Instability of Capitalism," the two volumes on Business Cycles (1939), his more speculative and ironic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), and the posthumous published History of Economic Analysis (1954). In addition to these classics, Schumpeter spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s working another big book, one on money, which he had the courage to abandon as "a thoroughly bad performance." How each of these works relates to the turbulent first half of the twentieth century—with its periods of economic prosperity, depression, war, and social conflict—comes into clearer focus. To a twenty-first century audience again intrigued by Schumpeter's ideas, Prophet of Innovation both makes more accessible and provides a greater sense of coherence to his lifetime of scholarship. This biography is a first-rate contribution and a joy to read.