Hello, I was wondering if anyone could give a clear distinction between the Misean idea of the “Promoter” and an Entrepreneur. Is there a real difference between these 2 are did Mises just dislike the term Entrepreneur and favour the term Promoter or did he mean more by the term Promoter than is generally attributed to the term Entrepreneur?
This is a very interesting question. Promoters and entrepreneurs, in any case, are people badly needed with lots of ideas and strive to get us out of the global recession!
Seems like Salerno has a working paper on exactly this topic.
I haven’t read the entire article I admit, but after briefly looking through it, it doesn’t seem to say anything about the difference betwen the idea of a promoter vs Entrepreneur. It seems to focus on the difference between an Entrepreneur and a Manager which is an entirely different matter.
Mises explicitly warned against the dire consequences of
confusing what he called the “methodological makeshift” or “imaginary construction” of
the pure entrepreneur with the richer conception of what he called the “promoter
entrepreneur,” formulated to capture the fullness of entrepreneurial action in the real
market process. This latter concept, which has been re-dubbed the “integral
entrepreneur” for the purposes of this paper, is delineated and contrasted with the
Kirznerian pure entrepreneur in section 4.