Theories of Entrepreneurship: Historical Development and Critical Assessment

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Ricketts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Theory Of The Firm ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Neoclassical Economic Theory ◽  
Evolution Of Ideas ◽  
Economic Thinking ◽  
Entrepreneurial Role

The historical evolution of ideas about the entrepreneur is a wide-ranging subject and one that can be organized in different ways — theorist by theorist, period by period, issue by issue and so forth. What follows is a compromise between these possibilities. This article starts with some very broad reflections about economic change over thousands of years and the connections between these changes and the economic thinking of the time. A recognizably ‘modern’ idea of the entrepreneur begins to emerge in the eighteenth century and part of this article is devoted to the role of entrepreneurship in classical and neoclassical economic theory. In the next five sections, the article looks at particular areas that have been associated with debates about the entrepreneurial role — uncertainty, innovation, economic efficiency, the theory of the firm, and economic development. A final section presents a brief summary and comments on the place of the entrepreneur in evolutionary models.

The Romanesca as a Spiritual Sign in the Operas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the role of a musical pattern, the Romanesca schema, as a signifier of spiritual meanings in opera. It addresses the relationship between the Romanesca and the hymn topic and argues that the schema, semantically empty in its origins, acquired in the late eighteenth century connotations of ceremony, solemnity, alterity, and even transcendence. Several vignettes from operas by Haydn and Mozart illustrate how composers deployed the pattern in scenes depicting worship, prayers, and ritual actions. Beethoven’s Fidelio occupies the final section, a case study that shows the Romanesca interacting with other elements of the musical structure for expressive purposes. The chapter provides a novel interpretation of certain moments of the opera, suggesting that Beethoven relied on the sacred implications of the Romanesca—arguably available to historical listeners—to intensify the spiritual dimension of the drama.

Health in the Eighteenth Century

Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 222-245
Author(s):  
Tom Broman
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Emotional Instability ◽  
First Offers ◽  
Made In

This chapter first offers a survey of definitions and conceptions of health in the eighteenth century, drawing on a range of sources including medical textbooks such as Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones Medicae and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. It then moves on to examine the notion of “sensibility” that offered a link between the organic and the mental and moral spheres of human life. The Swiss thinker Samuel Auguste Tissot is discussed for the close connections he draws between moral and physical deficiency. The role of “sensibility” in accounting for women’s supposed emotional instability is related to anatomical ideas about the gendered body, for instance in Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme. A final section looks at advances made in public health during the period.

Praxeology, Entrepreneurship and the Market Process: A Review of Kirzner's Contribution

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Jakee ◽  
Heath Spong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theory Of The Firm ◽  
Market Process ◽  
Mainstream Economics ◽  
Seminal Contribution ◽  
Entrepreneurial Role

It is surely Israel M. Kirzner who has promoted the role of the entrepreneur more than any other author in the second half of the twentieth century. His description of the market process and entrepreneurship in his Competition and the Market Process (1973) represents a seminal contribution to Austrian thinking, although it has been slow to catch on in broader circles. As Humberto Barreto argues above, for example, an entrepreneurial role seems to have disappeared from mainstream economics as the theory of the firm progressed (1989, pp. 95–98). The standard core of microeconomics allows little room for entrepreneurial elements, particularly if the latter are defined in terms of uncertainty, intuition, ignorance, and disequilibrium. In light of this intellectual discord and given his recent retirement, it is timely to reconsider Kirzner's unceasing efforts to resurrect the role of the entrepreneur, and especially his effort to reconcile this role with conventional neoclassical approaches.

"‘A Peculiar Gift of Providence": The Power-Imbalance Caused by Gift-Giving in Millenium Hall

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisia Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Gift

Sarah Scott's eighteenth-century novel Millenium Hall canvasses the role of gift-giving in the dynamics heteronormative-domestic, economic, and spiritual relationships. The pharmakon of the gift plays a central role in Scott's understanding of philanthropy, and the construction of her female-inhabited, female-run utopia. This article's principle occupation is to show that all instances of gift-giving in Millenium Hall create power-imbalances between the superior giver and the inferior receiver; however, Sarah Scott's female utopia constructs the most preferable type of subservience.

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
High Water ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This book sheds further light on the nature of church reform and the roots of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) through a study of eighteenth-century Catholic reformers who anticipated the Council. The most striking of these examples is the Synod of Pistoia (1786), the high-water mark of late Jansenism. Most of the reforms of the Synod were harshly condemned by Pope Pius VI in the bull Auctorem fidei (1794), and late Jansenism was totally discredited in the ultramontane nineteenth-century Church. Nevertheless, much of the Pistoian agenda—such as an exaltation of the role of bishops, an emphasis on infallibility as a gift to the entire Church, religious liberty, a simpler and more comprehensible liturgy that incorporates the vernacular, and the encouragement of lay Bible reading and Christocentric devotions—was officially promulgated at Vatican II. The career of Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810) and the famous Synod he convened are investigated in detail. The international reception (and rejection) of the Synod sheds light on why these reforms failed, and the criteria of Yves Congar are used to judge the Pistoian Synod as “true or false reform.” This book proves that the Synod was a “ghost” present at Vatican II. The council fathers struggled with, and ultimately enacted, many of the same ideas. This study complexifies the story of the roots of the Council and Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of reform,” which seeks to interpret Vatican II as in “continuity and discontinuity on different levels” with past teaching and practice.

Injecting Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Dacome
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Blood Vessels ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Anatomical Models ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

Chapter 7 furthers the analysis of the role of anatomical models as cultural currencies capable of transferring value. It does so by expanding the investigation of the early stages of anatomical modelling to include a new setting. In particular, it follows the journey of the Palermitan anatomist and modeller Giuseppe Salerno and his anatomical ‘skeleton’—a specimen that represented the body’s complex web of blood vessels and was presented as the result of anatomical injections. Although Salerno was headed towards Bologna, a major centre of anatomical modelling, he ended his journey in Naples after the nobleman Raimondo di Sangro purchased the skeleton for his own cabinet of curiosities. This chapter considers the creation and viewing of an anatomical display in di Sangro’s Neapolitan Palace from a comparative perspective that highlights how geography and locality played an important part in shaping the culture of mid-eighteenth-century anatomical modelling.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

The Power of the Cross and Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Early Byzantine

This chapter shows the unquestionable role of the sign of the cross as the primary sign of divine authority in Carolingian material and manuscript culture, a role partly achieved at the expense of the diminishing symbolic importance of the late antique christograms. It also analyses the appearance of new cruciform devices in the ninth century as well as the adaptation of the early Byzantine tradition of cruciform invocational monograms in Carolingian manuscript culture, as exemplified in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and several other religious manuscripts. The final section examines some Carolingian carmina figurata and, most importantly, Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis, as a window into Carolingian graphicacy and the paramount importance of the sign of the cross as its ultimate organizing principle.

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