The discourse about the term capitalism and its subsequent evolution into an acknowledged historical and analytical description of an era were shaped by the works of W. Sombart and J. Schumpeter. Starting from their encyclopaedia articles on capitalism, this paper follows the inception and reception of their parallel contributions about the genesis and development of capitalism: Sombart’s reasoning on the role of Jews and Schumpeter’s metaphor on “creative destruction” as the driving force. Sombart’s attempt to show that the Jews, their otherness, and their moneylending activities played a crucial role in the rise of modern capitalism was met with a mixed and controversial reception—from applause to sharp rebuttal as unscientific nonsense—by conservative German professors and religious scholars alike. Schumpeter’s metaphor, on the other hand, became a byword. Rather than searching for an external factor responsible for the emergence of the capitalist spirit, Schumpeter described the development of capitalism as an endogenous growth process of entrepreneurial innovation. Despite some similar features of their outlook and ideas, Sombart’s manifold, unsystematic and contradictory, and in some respect politically biased, oeuvre is largely forgotten by now, while Schumpeter’s legacy continues to attract adherents in evolutionary economics.

Anglo-American and Hungarian economic historians follow different semantic patterns describing the same subjects. While the authors writing in English use three distinct terms to distinguish business history, entrepreneurship and the theory of the firm, the corresponding Hungarian words share a common root. This paper reviews the debates among the founding fathers of the discipline about the definition of the agenda and research methods of these topics both before and after World War II. The emergence of business history at Harvard Business School under the leadership of N. Gras mainly followed the German tradition of narrative historical economics. He denied any dominant role of formal economic theory and urged business historians to use several other disciplines, such as psychology and politics, too. A. Cole, the founder of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, based the approach of his research group on the Schumpeterian concept of creative entrepreneur as the key figure in explaining the different issues of economic change and development. Faced with the problem of how to define entrepreneurship, the center failed to formulate a theory of economic change based on entrepreneurial activity and behaviour. In the meantime the character of the creative entrepreneur has been played down within organization and firm and was replaced by the entrepreneur co-ordinator who directs production (R. Coase) and by the middle-manager (A. Chandler). Both business history using a structuralistfunctionalist sociological approach in discussing large scale enterprises and the theory of firm based on transactions costs and economic analysis of law remain outside of the mainstream of history and economics. What they had in common was a sense of affinity for empirical data instead of pure theory. More than affinity even, it was a desire to get an insight into the “real world”.

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