The Politics of the Term "Entrepreneur"

The rather tongue-twisting four-syllable term "entrepreneur" denotes a person who launches a business venture.

Annoying as its pronunciation may be the term is essentially unproblematic as a descriptor. However, it has become much more than a functional descriptor in recent decades, instead become a word to conjure with this no accident, ultra-right economists and their epigones having gone to great lengths to make it so.

Consider the "entrepreneur"-centric vision of the economy they propound ceaselessly, virtually without challenge in the mainstream. The proponents of that vision endlessly direct our attention to the shiny new "startup" (for them, another word to conjure with), and those who launch them in acts of visionary risk-taking so important that they can say that "never have so many owed everything to so few" as they exalt them as the only makers in a world of unappreciative and generally worthless takers. Hyperbolic as this may sound, all this is in fact quite explicitly stated in the work of George Gilder. The Sexual Revolution-and-"women's-lib"-hating kulturkampfer-turned-Reagan-White House-court-intellectual-and-ultimately-would-be-prophet of "tech," "Silicon valley" and the "information age" who did so much to make the current American cult of the entrepreneur with books like his "theology of capitalism" Wealth and Poverty and The Spirit of Enterprise, in the latter hailing entrepreneurs as "the heroes of economic life," declared them the ones who "know the rules of the world and the laws of God," who "sustain the world," and expressed the hope that "the entitled children around the world" would "come to see and follow their example and earn their redemption and their happiness, reconciled with the world of work and risk"--such that when he fuses religion and capitalism that way one scarcely does any mental work at all drawing an analogy between how, just as Hegel made the state "God on Earth," Gilder and those who follow him make the entrepreneur into that.

As one might guess from such extreme and blatantly irrational (I suspect many would say, utterly unhinged) rhetoric the view I discuss here is not a very good guide to reality. Those fixated on startups give us an image of the economy bearing nearly no relation whatsoever to a scene dominated by long-established corporate giants--all as their "technostructures" are what make those companies and the economic world generally go round, as the startup scene, where it exists at all, so often amounts to nothing, and frequently less (as seen in the fraud that was "genius" Elizabeth Holmes' once ballyhooed Theranos). On those rare occasions when companies are launched in the fashion now associated with the startup, and actually develop into something of consequence, one often finds that those who did the launching relied, even at that stage and at the highest level, on the skills of other less celebrated persons, and frequently many of them--because the job is a big one that only a superhuman would really be able to do by themselves, and because even by ordinary human standards the "entrepreneur" who ends up with all the credit so often brings rather less in the way of technical and organizational skills, business sense, personal effort, than they are given credit for (as John Kenneth Galbraith showed in busting the myth of Henry Ford as such a superman). And all that is before one even considers how even then nothing would have happened without all the rest of their workers down to the plant floor, the intricately developed system of societal and global market relations that even in the eighteenth century had Adam Smith remarking how at a certain level the thousand people who might be involved in the making of a single coat, the equally societal and global machinery of scientific and technological progress (how often do the "entrepreneurs" actually have any inventions to their credit?), and the government which furnishes innumerable public goods and often much more than that to the successful "enterprise" in a way that makes ridiculous Gilder-like claims for entrepreneurial "visionary risk-taking" rather than "optimizing calculation." Empirical examination of how business operates (and plain and simple logic, too) makes it very clearly that risky visions are something businesspersons flee from in real life, as instead their "risk-taking" consists mainly of asset-trafficking as they rent-seek and speculate in a global economy turned casino, placing their bets on stock and real estate and other such assets, then unfailingly scream for bailout by governments which fill their coffers by taxing everyone but them--all while the record where "bringing good things to life" is concerned makes it very clear that government had to bring much to the table to encourage the "entrepreneurs" (an industrial economy doesn't happen without industrial policy), sometimes strong-armed them into getting lines of business (sometimes, very gangster-style indeed in its choice of method), and frequently just did the job itself (with America's extraordinary World War II defense production happening specifically because government did not wait for the "entrepreneurs" to get their act together, but went out and built the plant itself, leased it to business to produce what was needed, and then sold it off to the private sector at a deep discount), with all that means for just who was really the maker, who the taker.

Indeed, it is exemplary of the dissonances between the "Cult of the Entrepreneur" and lived reality that, desperate for anything in it that would seem to correspond to their image of the world at all, the propagandists pay such disproportionate attention to Silicon Valley relative to the rest of the economy--and at the same time provide such a wildly distorted image of the development, contributions, standing of American tech. (Cutting government and established business out of the picture they present the computer age as having all come out of Bay Area garages, exaggerate both the impact of their goods and their macroeconomic contribution to the economy in such areas as employment or the trade deficit, constantly overhype their work to produce hyperbolic images of the rate of progress they are making as they uncritically pass on the sector's stupid hucksterism, and sell fantasies of its supposedly matchless prowess punctured again and again by the competition--most recently, by DeepSeek.)

In this context the word "entrepreneur" and its derivatives (like entrepreneurship) have been one-word summations of this market fundamentalist dogma, and their utterance repetition and affirmation of that dogma--all as anyone attentive to the discourse of the times well knows, respectful utterance of the words ceaseless, making of a fashionable buzzword a holy chant of the market fundamentalist. ("Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship . . . entrepreneur, entrepreneur, entrepreneur.") But few are those who point this out, the utterances of the truth, unlikely to get much attention because of how much they are shut out of the mainstream, and those few occasions when they can get any sort of hearing for the truth buried again and again under an avalanche of Conventional Foolishness, which as with so much Conventional Foolishness endures because it is so flattering to and convenient for those in power. Thus are businessmen who on close inspection were not just profoundly lucky Josiah Bounderbys but deeply venal incompetents deified--as at the same time we see not only exploding inequality, but technological stagnation and deindustrialization, with all they have meant for our world.