Now that I consider it, I’m not sure what exactly an entrepreneur is. Is it just someone who starts a business? But why is starting a business good, when we don’t know what kind of businesses are being started? Conservatives surely don’t want more abortion access startups, and liberals wouldn’t rally behind a new gun manufacturer. The term is mind-bogglingly inclusive, as the historian Erik Baker notes in his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which chronicles the creation and ascendance of the idea of entrepreneur from the end of the nineteenth century until today, through the writings of popular psychologists, self-help authors, and management theorists. “Our image of ‘the entrepreneur,’” Baker writes, is “dominated by two antipodal figures: the tech billionaire and the gig worker using that billionaire’s app to scrape out an income.” When both the ruler and ruled are entrepreneurs, what could it possibly mean? We live in a time in which all our lives are dominated by massively powerful monopoly corporations, and yet we focus on a mythical, marginal figure.
The triumphalism of the entrepreneur reached a fever pitch in the period following the Great Recession. The entrepreneur was valorized everywhere, accepted as a universal good, touted by extreme conservative business leaders and social democrats alike. Thousands of business school courses on entrepreneurship are taught by scores of endowed chairs. But why? What is so special about entrepreneurialism and small business? Two new books show how the celebration of small business and the entrepreneur has recurred in American history, emerging out of crises, playing to vague notions of democratic ideals and diverting attention from those who caused these crises in the first place.
When the founders of the United States got together to draft their framework for a government, industrial production—large factories churning out goods with large workforces tending machinery—only existed at the margins. The country was an agrarian economy with small cities and a high degree of self-employment. Firms were generally small, and even by 1850 the average employer had only about eight employees. (Though rare, large employers like the New England cotton producer Pacific Mills had thousands of workers.)
And so it was that the rise of the industrial economy after the Civil War caused a major existential crisis for the young nation. With the new machines and mass production, firms got bigger, self-employment declined, and an increasing number of people worked for a wage. For the first time, the nation was no longer a society of farmers and small businesses. But the country had been founded on a vision of autonomy that rested on Thomas Jefferson’s cherished idea of the “yeoman farmer.”