Joseph A. Schumpeter, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time by Harold J. Laski [Review] (1944)

Schumpeter’s review examines Laski’s restatement of modern radicalism, praising its intellectual level while challenging the economic and sociological grounds for its revolutionary urgency. It moves from an account of Laski’s program to criticism of the “Mature Economy” thesis, the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, the explanation of fascism, and the feasibility of democratic reconstruction. Its central distinction is between the exposition of a political faith and the testing of the factual claims on which that faith depends.

As Schumpeter reconstructs it, Laski’s argument assumes that capitalism has lost the expansive impetus that once sustained it. Its institutions consequently obstruct progress and generate political paralysis, fear, and frustration. Soviet communism supplies the promise of an alternative, although Laski condemns aspects of Stalin’s rule and locates his revolutionary ideal chiefly in Lenin and Trotsky. Laski urges democratic reconstruction before wartime mobilization subsides; the liquidation of imperialism complements the liquidation of capitalism. Schumpeter reads this urgency as revealing distrust of what people might choose once ordinary conditions return.

The review’s decisive turn separates respect for Laski’s convictions from acceptance of their analytical foundations:

Unfortunately, however, our professions of faith, unlike those of other ages, always consist in part of assertions about observable facts. They are essentially centaurs. And the analytic halves of them do call for comment here.

The centaur metaphor identifies the work’s interdependence of commitment and explanation. Schumpeter does not dismiss political ideals simply because they are ideals. Instead, he asks whether the empirical arguments establish the necessity and timing of the transformation they recommend.

The theory of the Mature Economy is clearly an ideology in the Marxist sense; that is to say, it is a doctrine that conforms to, and reflects, the group interest of the modern intellectual.

Schumpeter turns a Marxist category upon a premise of radical intellectual politics. He immediately qualifies the charge: ideological origins do not establish that a doctrine is false. His objection is that the theory circulates as an accepted creed rather than through demonstrated analytical merit. Because Laski supplies no other substantial reason, apart from ethical preferences, for urgently destroying capitalism, the inadequately defended economic premise weakens the whole program.

The discussion of imperialism tests Laski’s sociology against Soviet conduct, particularly toward China and neighboring states. Early revolutionary Russia’s inability to expand cannot establish that socialism eliminates imperialist impulses. Nor should explanations invoking particular circumstances excuse Soviet policies while condemning comparable conduct elsewhere.

But if the Russian attitude toward China as well as toward other border states be accepted as genuinely imperialist, this would suggest that imperialism might have noncapitalist or indeed noneconomic roots and that it might survive in a socialist world.

The conceptual consequence is to detach imperialism from capitalism as its necessary cause. The same resistance to reductive explanation shapes Schumpeter’s treatment of fascism. He credits Laski with questioning the socialist account of fascism as capitalism’s desperate last defense: the German and Italian bourgeoisies were not facing the extremity that this account presupposes. They submitted to mass movements uncongenial to their class interests, while national experiences abroad also mattered. Schumpeter adds similarities between fascism and bolshevism, interpreted against their different material conditions, but refuses to turn these clues into a finished theory.

Fascism, whatever else it may be, is for the analyst as yet a riddle.

The closing discussion returns to democratic action. Schumpeter considers Laski strongest on the difficulties democracy faces when citizens disagree fundamentally, yet finds a tension between his hope for consensual reconstruction under great leadership and his disparagement of the groups capable of supplying it. The review ends in sympathetic skepticism: Laski’s ideals encounter facts that his own analysis partly acknowledges but cannot reconcile with his program. Its enduring relevance lies in this demand that revolutionary diagnosis distinguish ethical aspiration, ideological allegiance, and causal explanation—without pretending that criticism alone supplies a complete alternative.