A 'conservative Marxist' at Harvard: the influence of Joseph A. Schumpeter on Paolo Sylos Labini

This paper addresses the scholarly influence of Joseph A. Schumpeter on Paolo Sylos Labini and briefly discusses their personal relationship. Although they met at Harvard only one year before Schumpeter died, they had the opportunity to interact frequently and Sylos attended both the graduate courses taught by the Austrian economist during the 1948-49 academic year. They had very different personalities and political attitudes. Nevertheless, Schumpeter’s intellectual influence on Sylos was very significant. Its analysis is structured here along Schumpeter’s three most important contributions to social sciences: an evaluation of past economic theories, a theory of economic development, and a few contributions to a theory of social and institutional change. Even if Sylos had a different conception of economics as a discipline, he caught fire from Schumpeter’s teachings, whose imprint is self-evident in most of his important contributions.