This volume is a collection of my essays on Gustav von Schmoller (1838- 1917), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950), published during the past fifteen years. These three intellectual giants are connected with the German Historical School of Economics in different ways. In the history of economics, the German Historical School has been described as a heterodox group of economic researchers who flourished in the Germ- speaking world throughout the nineteenth century. The definition of a "school" is always problematic. Even if the core of a certain idea were identified in the continuous and discontinuous process of the filiation and ramification of thought, it is still possible to trace its predecessors, successors, and sympathizers in different directions, creating an amorphous entity of a school. It is beyond question, however, that Schmoller was the leader of the younger German Historical School, the genuine school with a sociological 1 reality. Schmoller was indeed the towering figure of the Historical School at its zenith.

"This volume brings together 11 articles on Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter. It aims to identify the methodological essence of the German Historical School (GHS) that flourished between the 1840s and the 1930s. Schmoller was a leader of the GHS, and Weber and Schumpeter, while not formally regarded as members of the GHS, are its spiritual successors in that they developed methodologies that helped resolve the controversy in method between history and theory, and in that they each practiced unique economic sociology designed as a synthesis of history and theory.

Rational Reconstruction of the German Historical School: An Overview.- A Methodological Appraisal of Schmoller's Research Program.- Getting Back Max Weber from Sociology to Economics.- Joseph Schumpeter and the German Historical School.- Instrumentalism in Schumpeter's Economic Methodology.- Schumpeter on Schmoller and Weber: A Methodology of Economic Sociology.- The Origin of the Schumpeterian Research Program: A Chapter Omitted from Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development.- The Science and Ideology of Schumpeter.- Schumpeter on the Relationship between Economics and Sociology from the Perspective of Doctrinal History.- Schumpeter's Preface to the Fourth German Edition of The Theory of Economic Development.- The Schumpeter Family in T?eSt'.