Both his intellectual heirs and critics recognize the "extraordinary impact of Joseph Schumpeter on Anglo-American political scientists and theorists during the last half century (Held 1987, 164). There is wide agreement that his treatment of democracy as a form of elite competition influenced some of the foundational postwar texts in political science, helping to originate a school of democratic theory that is variously labeled "contemporary," "equilibrium," "elite," or "empirical" (Ashcraft 1995, 1; Bachrach 1967, 18-22; Held 1987, 164; Macpherson 1977, 77; Pateman 1970, 3-5; Shapiro 1994, 125; Skinner 1973, 287; Swedberg 1991b, 278 n141). Anthony Downs (1957, 29 n11) wrote that Schumpeter's "profound analysis of democracy" provided the "inspiration and foundation" for his "whole thesis," adding that his debt and gratitude to Schumpeter were great indeed. And Downs was not alone in acknowledging a debt. One structuring premise of Lipset's influential article, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy," and of his book, Political Man, was a "definition" of democracy Lipset said he "abstracted" from the work of Schumpeter and Max Weber (Lipset 1959, 71; 1960, 45). Decades later, prominent political scientists continued to "follow in the tradition of Joseph A. Schumpeter" by borrowing a "definition" of democracy from his work (Huntington 1984, 195). Schumpeter's elite conception has even justifiably been cast as the "prototype" for works on democracy whose authors credited him less directly (Berelson et al. 1954, 305; Dahl 1956, 131 n12; Held 1987, 164; Macpherson 1977, 78 n1; Pateman 1970, 8; Skinner 1973, 287).