The Entrepreneur in Literature: The Identity of Fiction

This article focuses on an attempt to understand how Western European literary fiction and economic literature of the 16th-early 20th centuries articulated the figure of the entrepreneur and his role, and how economic definitions and doubts concerning the figure of the entrepreneur make it possible to perceive this specific economic actor. In the Marxist tradition, this actor was often confused with capitalist figures of accumulation and monopolization of various kinds of resources. Moreover, literary fiction is not just a simple illustration of different economic concepts of entrepreneurship from Richard Cantillon through Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say to Joseph Schumpeter. The study of how literary fiction perceives the creation of wealth through the figure of the entrepreneur allows one to reconstruct the anthropology of economic action, built around understanding capitalist risks, projections, and the nature of temporality. Significant attention in the article is given to the transformation of the entrepreneur’s role— from images of the Shakespearean early trader-entrepreneur or risk-taking merchant, which dominated over the course of the 16th-18th centuries, to consideration of the “entrepreneur in industry” image that was created in the 19th century. Regardless of the entrepreneur’s degree of success, he inevitably is an unstable and transitional figure according to the corresponding finite space-time novel system. The entrepreneur, overcome by passionate impatience and unstable mobility, clearly differs from the neo-classical rational “manager” who does not play any independent role in the general equilibrium theory. In describing this romantic entrepreneurial figure, literary fiction offers an aesthetic conception of economic activity that combines activity and risk theory and Schumpeter’s conception of creative destruction, transforming it into a certain practical theory

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