Kirzner’s 1967 paper introduced entrepreneurship to Mont Pèlerin via Mises and Hayek

Evidence

The topic of entrepreneurship arrived rather slowly at the meetings of the Mont Pèlerin Society. It was not discussed explicitly until the Vichy general meeting in 1967, when Israel Kirzner drew on Mises and Hayek in his important paper on “Methodological Individualism, Market Equilibrium and the Market Process” in a session on “The Teaching of Economics at the Present.” Kirzner drew a distinction between “Anglo-American price theory” interested in conditions of equilibrium and “Austrian price theory” interested in the market process. Kirzner suggested that, in contrast to the purely calculating and economizing role of the individual in the Anglo-American equilibrium world, there was an additional entrepreneurial element in the Austrian world of market processes due to the fact that individuals operate under conditions characterized by a lack of knowledge necessary to calculate and economize. “It is the entrepreneur,” he wrote, “who is the prime mover in the market process.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Kirzner’s knowledge-based entrepreneurial theory connects to Hayek’s knowledge problem and general Austrian market-process work in the reader’s neoliberalism map.