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American Entrepreneurship as Action Translated into Heuristic Discourse

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The Fictions of American Capitalism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics ((PSLCE))

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship as a master narrative and an epistemic paradigm is a governance structure of the American variety of capitalism. This chapter examines the modes of translation of entrepreneurial action into a variety of interrelated heuristic discourses. These discourses do not only hold experiential, cognitive, and performative value for individual entrepreneurs and external stakeholders, they also have a structuring impact on society as a whole and its institutions in particular. The chapter focuses on the retrospective fictions textualizing entrepreneurial action within a historically specific form of entrepreneurial capitalism (neoliberalism). It offers a classification of them into genres and subgenres, highlighting their location at the crossroads of literary fiction, theory, and action and showing the gradual conversion of technè into gnosis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Emerson (1844) considers that “[c]haracter is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature.”

  2. 2.

    Wikipedia has an entry titled “Bibliography of Donald Trump” listing 19 autobiographic narratives today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibliographyofDonaldTrump. Accessed 4/9/2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, Paris, France

    Jacques-Henri Coste

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  1. Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, Paris, France

    Jacques-Henri Coste

  2. Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France

    Vincent Dussol

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Coste, JH. (2020). American Entrepreneurship as Action Translated into Heuristic Discourse. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_7

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