Volume 3, No. 2The American Entrepreneurial Spirit

Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs

The American Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Primer

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This introduction to the special issue on the American entrepreneurial spirit sketches its significance to American culture. The entrepreneur is an important cultural archetype that reflects the zeitgeist. Accordingly, fears, anxieties, desires, and wishes may be projected onto the entrepreneur; the figure of the entrepreneur—and interpretations of the entrepreneur as a hero or villain—is thus a cultural barometer that provides insight into the American psyche.

Heinz Tschachler

George Washington, the Godfather of American Entrepreneurism

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Among all U.S. presidents, George Washington still ranks as the wealthiest. By the time of his death, he owned more than 52,000 acres, which secured his position among the top-ranked land-holding gentry of his day. In Washington's America, secured property was one of the most potent and consequential ideals, much as it also was a dominant cultural investment, with property figuring as "a matter of progress," in the words of a British social philosopher. In eighteenth-century America, individual property was related to working one's own land, which became the basis of civic virtue, conveying status and authority. At Mount Vernon, Washington was a farmer, not a planter, and a scientific farmer at that. Farming was not the easiest route to riches, though, and Mount Vernon's glorified façade of wealth and grandeur only covered up an operation that was, at best, only marginally profitable. Over the years, therefore, Washington became an intrepid figure in financial investment and risky enterprise, not the least of which was the development of the new national capital, whose location on the Potomac had been decided upon in June 1790. With his involvement in the capital venture, Washington fashioned for himself a new mode of economic selfhood and familial belonging that was keyed to the emerging market economy. He became what Joseph A. Schumpeter in 1911 described as a "risk-taker," America's "first commercial man" (President Calvin Coolidge in 1932), and, finally, the "godfather of American entrepreneurism" (historian Richard Norton Smith in 1993).

Stefan Rabitsch

'When you look at a calf, what do you see?': Land(ed) Business, Manifest Entrepreneurialism, and Competing Capitalisms in the Contemporary West of Yellowstone

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For a popular, mass media text, Paramount's hit television show Yellowstone (2018–) packs quite a punch. It renders visible in a mass-mediated, synecdochial format the latent and ongoing effects that settler colonialism and its entanglements with the necrotic logic of capitalism have on lifeworlds in the contemporary West. By making a traditionally privileged place—a multigenerational cattle ranch—the principal target of intrusive, increasingly powerful agents of big non-agricultural capital, who are portrayed as a threat to the local and regional polity and the social fabric of the rural West, Yellowstone says something tangible and pertinent about the fastest growing region in the United States, and the massive changes in land use and land development that have registered in the past two and a half decades.

This article pursues a goal that is twofold. Firstly, it will map the Trans-Mississippi West as an entrepreneurial habitat where the agents of settler colonialism initiated patterns that continue to undergird land ownership, land development, and land use policies in the contemporary West. Secondly, I will read and explicate how Yellowstone remediates New/Post-West scholarship—the work of social historians and cultural geographers in particular—with a seemingly didactic zeal. Ultimately, this yields a rather sober(ing) view of entrepreneurism in that its frequently quoted Schumpeterian definition—creative destruction—amounts to an ideological position that can only ever produce formations of violence, be they physical, psychological, epistemic, symbolic, and/or ecological.

Kelly Payne, Janel Simons

The Bicycle in the Service of Reform: Frances Willard's Social Entrepreneurship, Her 'Do Everything' Policy, and the Temperance Temple Campaign

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This essay situates Frances Willard's temperance reform campaigns as entrepreneurial in nature, and claims Willard as a key nineteenth-century American social innovator. Much has been written on Willard's temperance policies and her leadership in the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement as well as her founding of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Organization. The writings Willard produced on women's access to and engagement with the bicycle as a reform technology has not been explored. In offering a narrative of the strategies and experiences Willard used to employ the bicycle as a tool or ally for temperance reform and woman's rights, this essay argues for the inclusion of women's voices in the public sphere and in publication around social and economic mobility. The bicycle offered Willard and her WCTU organization a key metonymic image--the wheel--around which to analyze the relationship of temperance to everyday lives. Willard's "Do Everything" campaign can be seen as the nineteenth-century equivalent of vast social entrepreneurship.

Michael Fuchs

Creative Extinction: Serial Cycles of De-Extinction and Re-Extinction in Resurrection Business

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This article explores the videogame Jurassic World Evolution (Frontier Developments, 2018). As a business simulation, Jurassic World Evolution makes playable—and asks players to perform—a serialized cycle of de-extinction and re-extinction: dinosaurs are resurrected only to be wiped out again when a successor that is "better, louder, with more teeth" (to quote Jurassic World's operations manager Claire Dearing) becomes available. The revenue players generate is thus founded on a cycle of extinction, de-extinction, and re-extinction. In so doing, the videogame suggests that de-extinction does not promise a future primarily defined by the overcoming of extinction and the becoming-real of the dream of reestablishing natural abundance through techno-scientific means, but rather a future characterized by an exponential growth in serialized extinctions, made possible by techno-science. That the videogame puts players in charge of both finances and developing their dinosaur "assets" draws players' attention to molecular biology as a new place of production. Hence, resurrection science and its biocapitalist entanglements not only exploit past extinctions but rather suggest that this biocapitalist venture is based on speculation—reaping seemingly unlimited future profits from a potentially never-ending cycle of extinctions, de-extinctions, and re-extinctions.