Israel Kirzner’s Theory of Entrepreneurship

Israel Kirzner’s 1973 book Competition and Entrepreneurship marked the beginning of the revival of Austrian economics.

Steven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is Economics Editor at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise at Ball State University. Horwitz has written extensively on Austrian economics, Hayekian political economy, monetary theory and history, and macroeconomics.

Summary:

Israel Kirzner’s 1973 book Competition and Entrepreneurship marked the beginning of the revival of Austrian economics. Kirzner explained that while prices were the medium by which knowledge in an economy spreads, the cause of that spread is entrepreneurial activity-​-​people recognizing previously unimagined opportunities to combine inputs into more valuable outputs. Entrepreneurship is not an exercise in maximization under given constraints, but a discovery procedure. For Kirzner, markets are competitive when that discovery procedure is unconstrained, as opposed to when markets match the assumed conditions of the textbook “perfect competition” model.