Joseph Schumpeter made lasting contributions to multiple disciplines, yet has few adherents today who would call themselves Schumpeterians. Part of this no doubt stems from the idiosyncratic nature of Schumpeter's ideas. But part, too, stems from the fact that Schumpeter's influence, even when sizeable, has tended to take the form of appropriations that emphasize a particular and discrete element of his work, rather than embrace a larger, more comprehensive Schumpeterian system. Economists and students of business, for example, know Schumpeter for his definition of capitalism in terms of “creative destruction,” his critique of equilibrium economics, his distinction between the businessman and the entrepreneur, and his prediction that capitalism would ultimately give way to socialism. And virtually all students of democracy relate to Schumpeter's model of “competitive elitism” in some way, usually either in support of Schumpeter for paving the way for a value-free, descriptive account of democracy or in protest of his unduly minimized rendering of democracy's meaning. While Schumpeter's relevance to economics and political science is clear, John Medearis is surely right when he observes that the tendency of most today is to engage Schumpeter with a “scalpel” (p. 105), taking what one wants and discarding the rest.

It is the virtue of Medearis's book that it moves on both fronts, reviewing with depth and sophistication the principal discrete ideas that have made Schumpeter famous, but also endeavoring to comprehend the entirety of Schumpeter's work as a single organic structure. In this latter regard, the book presents Schumpeter as a conservative thinker, albeit one whose conservatism, as Medearis nicely demonstrates, departs in significant ways from dominant strands of conservative thinking today. For example, even if Schumpeter preferred capitalism to socialist alternatives, he did not profess the market utopianism espoused by many economic libertarians. Unlike Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Schumpeter “did not believe that free markets and free enterprise were embodiments or expressions of individual liberty for most participants,” since Schumpeter interpreted consumer behavior less as “a free expression of uncoerced, spontaneous desires” than as something “often tradition-bound … and manipulated by marketing and advertising” (pp. 138–39). Likewise, while Schumpeter had Catholic sympathies, Medearis persuasively argues that he was not a religious conservative in a way “likely to be serviceable to contemporary conservatives of that description” (p. 140). Further, in contrast to the neoconservative confidence that liberal capitalist democracies should exert military force in defense of their interests, Schumpeter decoupled capitalism from imperialism, arguing in his 1918 essay, “The Sociology of Imperialisms,” that imperialism ought to be understood as the disposition to fight wars without rational basis, that most wars in human history arguably had been waged without sufficient cause, and that the irrational will to expansion was an atavistic remnant from earlier epochs of human history that was likely to die out. In these respects, Schumpeter's account of imperialism seemed to have more in common with Melville's quip that “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys” (“The March into Virginia,” 1861) than with neoconservative militarism of today.

What conservatism meant for Schumpeter was not preserving some well-established set of values (free markets, religious truth, global dominance) but rather what Medearis calls the “rearguard” project (pp. 13, 94, 130, 141–42) of attenuating and moderating inevitable change. Or, as Schumpeter himself put it, “[T]he bringing about of transitions from your social structure to other social structures with a minimal loss of human values, that is how I should define conservatism” (quoted on p. 141). Medearis effectively shows that Schumpeter's insistence on the underlying dynamism of social processes was reflected, too, in Schumpeter's critique of equilibrium economics, especially the neoclassical theories of Carl Menger, Léon Walras, and William Stanley Jevons, for focusing too much on microeconomic behavior and its effect on prices and production, rather than the socio-historical trajectory through which economic identities and institutions were created and would continue to be transformed in the future.

But if politics and economics are both in perpetual motion, what could a coherent conservative project entail beyond slowing the pace of change and repeatedly warning against overestimations of individual rationality? Medearis does not face the potential thinness of Schumpeter's conservative vision and, instead, reiterates the central thesis of his earlier book on Schumpeter (Joseph Schumpeter's Two Theories of Democracy, 2001): that Schumpeter favored “Tory Democracy,” a symbiosis of bourgeoisie and nobility, in which aristocratic elites oversee capitalistic innovation and expansion, much as occurred in nineteenth-century England and the Habsburg Empire a youthful Schumpeter had hoped to see preserved. The precise extent of Schumpeter's endorsement of Tory Democracy remains unclear, as Medearis himself seems to acknowledge that Schumpeter's explicit embrace of the ideal was confined to the period surrounding World War I. But even if we follow Medearis's suggestion that Tory Democracy, with its “appreciation of semifedual political leadership” (p. 131), is a unifying commitment informing the Schumpeterian corpus, there are numerous questions about the content of this ideal: how it can encompass the formally aristocratic societies of nineteenth-century England and Austro-Hungary as well as the democratic United States of the 1940s, just how semifeudal leadership serves to protect capitalism in ways that other types of leadership do not, and how the commitment to what appears to be a lost nineteenth-century ideal does not contradict Schumpeter's other claims about ineluctable social transformation. That Medearis does not fully answer these questions is less a criticism of his scholarship than of Schumpeter, who simply does not seem to have worked out a comprehensive social vision and, for this reason, may perhaps deserve the scalpel treatment he usually receives.

The book's examination of that part of Schumpeter most known to political scientists—his theory of competitive elitism—is informative and insightful. It traces the influence of this theory on successive social scientists who found in it the roots of their own descriptive, social choice, and economic models of democracy. It also recognizes, unlike many other treatments, that Schumpeter's skepticism about not just the rationality but the existence of clear and meaningful political volitions among sizeable portions of the electorate on many issues makes Schumpeter as much a critic of economic approaches to democracy like Anthony Downs's “median voter theorem” as the inspiration Downs thought he was. What is not included, however, is examination of progressive, left-leaning appropriations of Schumpeter. While it is true that most on the left reject Schumpeter (something that itself might have been treated in more detail), in recent years, there have been attempts (e.g., see Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory, 2003) to appeal to Schumpeter's notion of competitive elitism as a critical, moral standard for reforming democratic politics (making parties more competitive and leaders more subject to risk), as opposed to its more usual enlistment in the endorsement of the status quo. Including such perspectives may have disturbed Medearis's classification of Schumpeter as a conservative, but further validated what must be his larger ambition: to demonstrate the importance of Schumpeter as a political thinker.

Nonetheless, the book provides a very good introduction to Schumpeter's life, his ideas, and their influence on and relevance to contemporary debates about capitalism and democracy. Together with his previous book on Schumpeter, the work here should establish Medearis as the leading scholar of Schumpeter for political scientists.