48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST any adherents. Paradoxically, or perhaps not really so, Schumpeter is taken more seriously by Marxist economists refuting him than by bourgeois economists espousing him. This state of affairs may appear puzzling at first sight. Schumpeter's was a really ambitious theoretical project. He developed not only a complete theoretical system, but a system which located the origin of profits, the crucial question of political economy, in the objective fact of innovations rather than in questionable subjective phenomena like time-reference. What is more, he went outside the boundaries of conventional bourgeois economics to meet the Marxist challenge by theorising about classes, about imperialism and even about the transition from capitalism to socialism, which he considered inevitable but occurring through a route very different from the one visualised by the Marxists. And he backed up his theoretical work with an enormous body of historical and statistical material. His, in other words, was the most self-conscious and comprehensive attempt at providing a theoretical alternative to Marxism. As Professor Chakravarty rightly remarks, if the epithet "bourgeois Marx55, which Schumpeter used for his teacher Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, is to be applied to anyone, it should be to none other than Schumpeter himself. His isolation nonetheless was quite striking and it is tempting, if only as a digression, to speculate upon the reasons for it. The basic reason, in my view, lies in the fact that Schumpeter was presenting capitalism as a robust economic system at a time when its decay was obvious to most bourgeois economists, and above all to Keynes and his followers. The problem with capitalism, as Schumpeter saw it, arose not from its inner working, but from the external intellectual and ideological opposition which it increasingly encountered.2 The capitalist engine neither had, nor did it develop, any inner faults: it had to move in a terrain which was becoming increasingly more hostile. Keynes's position was radically different; as early as in the Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), a book which drew praise from Lenin himself, Keynes had seen that the period of success of laissez-faire capitalism had come to an end, that if capitalism was to survive it was necessary to undertake major repair-work, a proposition which was given a rigorous theoretical underpinning only in the General Theory of 1936. And by the time the General Theory came to be written, the vast majority of bourgeois economists, at least of the younger generation, had come to share Keynes's perspective; the Great Depression had seen to that. Nothing perhaps illustrates Schumpeter's position better than his explanation of the Great Depression. The severity of the slump he attributed to the fact that the troughs of all the three different types of business cycles, which, according to him, characterised capitalism, had coincidentally synchronised, i e, the Kondratieff 'trough, the Juglar trough and the Kitchin trough had come together; added to this, of course, were some specific historical factors. For the protracted nature