The two most influential economists of the 20th century must surely be Keynes and Schumpeter. Influential, at any rate, in the English-speaking world, where Keynes fine-tuned his rhetoric with a good ear for what would carry with his different audiences (though he sometimes lapsed in appearing to patronise Americans, from President Roosevelt down). It was, too, primarily among anglophones that the thinking of the polyglot polymath Schumpeter eventually made such an impression, especially when his posthumous History of Economic Analysis, weighing in at 800,000 words, deployed scholarship in a dozen languages, with his own English prose now as well honed as his native German. But when we consider the popular reception of their ideas, a rather obvious point is often overlooked: an intellectual version of Gresham's law often operates, debasing the currency in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process.

LRB 19 July 2007 | PDF Download