The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is a hot topic in academic, managerial, and policy circles. Yet researchers and policymakers tend to define entrepreneurship narrowly as business startups, and entrepreneurs as young dreamers with a particular personality.
In fact, as Peter G. Klein argues, entrepreneurship is a far broader, pervasive, and more important phenomenon in the market and in the free society.
Klein is one of the stars of the Austrian School today, with a specialization in an area in which the Austrians make a unique contribution — the entrepreneur's role in society as the driving force of the market. The last major work on this topic appeared in 1973 with Israel Kirzner's own book on entrepreneurship. Klein's book, as Peter Lewin has written, offers "a fresh, immensely revealing perspective."

In Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, Klein rehabilitates and expands the classical concept of the entrepreneur as a judgmental decision maker, linking the capitalist-investor and the entrepreneur-promoter. Building on foundations laid by the Austrian School of economics, Frank Knight's theory of uncertainty, and the modern economics of organization, Klein shows how an entrepreneurial perspective sheds light on firm size and structure, corporate governance and control, mergers and acquisitions, organizational design, and a host of managerial and financial problems.
He also offers a reinterpretation of the modern Austrian School and a critique of the "opportunity-discovery" perspective in modern entrepreneurship studies. In a series of shorter essays he tackles the economics of the Internet, network theory, the socialism of the intellectual class, the financial crisis, and the contributions of Carl Menger, F.A. Hayek, and Oliver Williamson.
"Mainstream economics has utterly failed to come to grips with the challenge of integrating the capitalist entrepreneur into its general market model. But that may be about to change. This superb book by Peter Klein forces the issue. It is simply too logical and well reasoned for the profession to ignore. The storied entrepreneur is about to have a new chapter written in its intellectual history." — Henry G. Manne, dean emeritus, George Mason University School of Law