I'm rereading George Steiner's 1980 'The Cleric of Treason' in conjunction with Thomas McCraw's Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Belknap Press, 2007) and Joachim Radkau's Max Weber: A Biography (Polity Press, 2009).
Of the three I'm most impressed by the Steiner piece on Anthony Blunt, reprinted at 13-46 in the new George Steiner At The New Yorker (New Directions, 2009) edited by Robert Boyars. The same volume features reviews of the Moldenhauer biography of Webern, a piece on Louis-Ferdinand Celine, one on Beckett, a demolition of Cioran (his "ominous facility" leads to "the question not so much whether the emperor has any clothes as whether there is an emperor" ... post-Steiner we're sans clothes and emperor), and a moving homage to Scholem & Benjamin.
What's striking about the three subject is their shared psychological distress (the "ecstatic fury"), visible underneath a surface of austere rationality and profound scholarship, arguably driving each intellectual's achievement but at what cost to themselves and to their associates. McCraw's account of 'being Joseph Schumpeter' (cue John Malkovich!) or 'being' each of the several Joseph Schumpeters - lover, fin-de-siecle Hapsburg aristocrat, minister, financier, academic, scholar, Middle-European-at-Harvard - is reminiscent of Julia de Beausobre's Lewis Namier (Oxford University Press, 1971). Ironically, a subsequent publication by Namier's widow was Creative Suffering, on the life offered up to God rather than consecrated by the market through innovation. Lots of creative destruction in the lives of Namier, Schumpeter, Blunt and Weber; with an ecstatic state that only other intellectuals of that excellence can experience.
Prophet of Innovation is worth browsing just for the photos of Schumpeter, who looks decidedly like a well-fed Max Schreck in Malkovich's 2000 Shadow of a Vampire. Schreck in spats. If there's room for a mashup such as Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! perhaps we can look forward to Schumpeter The Vampire, the bloodsucking fiend who gives a new meaning to the meme 'creative destruction'. Just like Wall Street or Macquarie Bank he's undead, uninhibited by conventional morality and oh so very very hungry.
