Summary
THE word 'entrepreneur' was imported into English from the French in the early 19th century. The usage had a risque connotation. It was first associated with someone who put on musical variety shows. The eminent but dour Scottish Victorian, Thomas Carlyle wrote testily of "French gambling entrepreneurs". The link to business, as in the one who receives profits, came in the 1880s when the new- fangled academic economists needed a word that was less tainted by class origins than that of capitalist - a perfectly serviceable word that Dr Marx had lately made to sound devilish.
Entrepreneurship only makes it into the dictionary in 1934, and the Economist magazine - which has a notoriously conservative stylebook - did not admit the word until 1959. Indeed, in the 1950s, the words entrepreneur and entrepreneurship are often quoted in conjunction with other not-quite-PC professions such as advertising and marketing.See the full content of this document
Extract
Looking Up to Profitable Motives
The Scots, despite a good claim to having invented both capitalism and academic economics, grasped the new concept late, doggedly clinging on to our small, entrepreneurial family firms until the 1960s, by ...
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