Labor, Creation, Hubris: Reading the Austrian Neoliberals with Arendt
Abstract
Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of action in her critique of both the Marxist utopia of labor society and the liberal understanding of consumer society can help us to grasp a subtle yet important difference in early neoliberal discourse. Preeminent neoliberal thinkers such as Ludwig Mises and Joseph A. Schumpeter wrote their major works a decade before Arendt. Bringing the cornerstone concept of entrepreneurial action into the Arendtian framework shows us how these two Austrian sources of modern neoliberal theory effectively proposed two antithetical hypotheses of entrepreneurial action.
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