OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Nan Enstad is the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Director of the Food Studies Network at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also affiliated with the departments of History, Gender and Women's Studies, Afro-American Studies, and with the Program in Public Humanities. She teaches courses on gender history, cultural history, and the history of capitalism. Enstad's work examines global capitalism through a cultural history approach that locates value in the daily innovations of ordinary people. She is the author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (2018) and Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999.)
This talk uncovers historians’ role in generating the cult of the entrepreneur by exposing the way that economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of destructive innovation (currently enjoying a two-decade-long comeback) became infused in the historical narrative of entrepreneurial innovation developed and promoted by Alfred Chandler, the father of business history, in his masterpiece, The Visible Hand. (Spoiler: Chandler’s application was not based in primary historical research but was ideologically imposed.) This idea of innovation placed enormous power in the prescience of a rogue entrepreneur who refuses to follow the rules of industry, is unafraid to offend, and therefore brilliantly if ruthlessly reorganizes industry according to his own vision. While this talk centers on historians’ role in creating and popularizing this figure, it also traces the cult of the entrepreneur’s migration out of historical and economic thought and into popular and political culture, culminating in our own historical moment.
