All this leads me to express a certain dissatisfaction with the role assigned to the entrepreneur in the Schumpeterian system. . . . Here it is enough to observe that Schumpeter's entrepreneur and the one developed here can in many ways be recognized — and, let me add, reassuringly recognized — as the same individual. But there is one important respect — if only in emphasis — in which Schumpeter's treatment differs from my own. Schumpeter's entrepreneur acts to
disturb an existing equilibrium situation. Entrepreneurial activity
disrupts the continuing circular flow. The entrepreneur is pictured as
initiating change and as generating
new opportunities. Although each burst of entrepreneurial innovation leads eventually to a new equilibrium situation, the entrepreneur is presented as a
disequilibrating, rather than an equilibrating force. Economic development, which Schumpeter of course makes utterly dependent upon entrepreneurship, is “entirely foreign to what may be observed in . . . the tendency towards equilibrium.”
By contrast my own treatment of the entrepreneur emphasizes the equilibrating aspects of his role. I see the situation upon which the entrepreneurial role impinges as one of inherent disequilibrium rather than of equilibrium — as one churning with opportunities for desirable changes rather than as one of placid evenness. Although for me, too, it is only through the entrepreneur that changes can arise, I see these changes as
equilibrating changes. For me the changes the entrepreneur initiates are always toward the hypothetical state of equilibrium; they are changes brought about
in response to the existing pattern of mistaken decisions, a pattern characterized by missed opportunities. The entrepreneur, in my view,
brings into mutual adjustment those discordant elements which resulted from prior market ignorance.
—Israel M. Kirzner,
Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 72-73.
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