Historical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Public Policy

Special issue call for papers from Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy
Guest Editor:
Michael J. Douma, Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

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Rationale for the special issue: 
1.    Promote historical understanding of entrepreneurship.
2.    Recognize the impact of entrepreneurs on historical change.
3.    Reconceptualize historians as entrepreneurs.
4.    Consider ways to add entrepreneurial activity to the syllabus and curriculum of business and economic history.

Overview:
Josef Schumpeter lamented that historians generally believe that “all that is needed to explain a given historical development is to indicate conditioning or causal factors.” (Schumpeter, 1947). Schumpeter countered that the “creative response” that actors have to certain conditions and factors is less predictable. Indeed, historians can never know all of the conditions or factors contributing to change. We know that cause and effect can never been seen, but that it must be intuited from the evidence. By recognizing the creative responses of individual…