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While generally sympathetic to my approach, Phillipe Fontaine argues that the "rhetorical perspective and its associated treatment of the successive disappearances and appearances of the entrepreneur nonetheless suffer from . . . weaknesses" (Fontaine 1998, 278). I respond that, when properly understood, his comments actually illustrate the power of the rhetorical perspective and the way it can be fruitfully extended to address new questions.
Whereas the historians of economic thought have typically focused on the "disappearance" of the entrepreneur and tried to explain this phenomenon by referring to the inadequacies of the neoclassical theory of the firm, emphasis on equilibrium, and mathematical language, I argued instead that the entrepreneur's place would be better understood by carefully examining the metaphors and stories of schools of thought in economics (Co,gel 1996). Fontaine finds two weaknesses in my approach. First, noting the current lack of an agreed definition or a unified theory of the entrepreneur, he argues that the entrepreneur could be present but go unnoticed. Second, he argues that my approach "fails to explain how the different modes of narrative actually infiltrate economic discourse" (ibid., 278).
Let me address Fontaine's concerns by first distinguishing between the levels of discourse about the entrepreneur. The controversy surrounding the role of the entrepreneur in economics involves discourse at three levels: the entrepreneurs themselves, the economists, and the historians of economic thought, each level with its own...