Page "Creative destruction" Paragraph 2

At its most basic, " creative destruction " ( German: schöpferische Zerstörung ) describes the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order, and this is largely the sense implied by the German Marxist sociologist Werner Sombart who has been credited with the first use of these terms in his work Krieg und Kapitalismus (" War and Capitalism ", 1913 ).

In the earlier work of Marx, however, the idea of creative destruction or annihilation ( German: Vernichtung ) implies not only that capitalism destroys and reconfigures previous economic orders, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth ( whether through war, dereliction, or regular and periodic economic crises ) in order to clear the ground for the creation of new wealth.