Potential Competition as Process and Structure

Before the development of formal price theory in the early twentieth century, which included the invention of the theory of “perfect” competition, economists held an understanding of competition as active striving, leading to economic growth rather than to “optimality” in any static sense.  In the twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter would be a lonely voice reiterating and amplifying the conception of competition as a dynamic process.  If competition is active and dynamic, the importan