Critics of neoliberalism help erase the internal diversity of entrepreneurship theory.

Evidence

The failure to untangle the process of reviving and revising Schumpeter means that diverse and even contradictory entrepreneurship theories are now presented under the common banner of neoliberalism, although “[t]here is not much left of Schumpeter’s entrepreneur in the post-Schumpeterian entrepreneurial theories. Only the conception that the entrepreneur need not be the owner has survived.” Critics of neoliberalism are thereby unwittingly complicit in covering up important dimensions of the intellectual history of entrepreneurship and they miss the crux of the matter. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘Schumpeterian entrepreneurship’ as commonly invoked retains almost nothing of Schumpeter’s own concept besides the non-owner entrepreneur.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s map-building goal: it names the exact mechanism by which the caricature persists — critics treating contradictory theories as one monolith.
• DEEPTHINKING: The meta-point — intellectual critics becoming ‘complicit’ in the flattening they condemn by reproducing the nominal umbrella — resists one-sentence summary and rewards reflection.