"This book offers the first full-length treatment of Joseph Schumpeter's political thought. Schumpeter's theory of democracy as a competition among elites has influenced several generations of political scientists, but this book is the first to show that Schumpeter also conceived of democracy as a powerful transformative tendency leading toward the establishment of democratic socialism.

Deploring this prospect, he theorized elite-dominated forms of society in which democratic change could be reined in."--BOOK JACKET.