Literature Network » Thomas Carlyle

Looking up to profitable motives

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From: The Scotsman
Date: 20040914
Author:George Kerevan

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 ...

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