Book Reviews

• Date: 01 December 1975
• Published date: 01 December 1975
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X7502000412
• Author: Roger Sherman
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Israel

M.

Kirzner,

Competition and Entrepreneurship,

Chicago:

University

of Chicago

Press

(1973), 246 pp.

$9.95.

What

do

entrepreneurs

do?

With

keen alertness

they

first

recognize

any

profit opportunity,

any

difference between

what

consumers willingly will

pay

for

a good

or

service

and

what

will be accepted by owners of the resources

required

to

pro-

duce it. Then they employ resources to indulge such con-

sumers'

wishes, coordinating resource use

and

thereby bene-

fiting society without actually owning

any

resources them-

selves.

They

inevitably compete because

they

are

alertly

seek-

ing

profit,

and

they cannot waste resources even when heavily

eng-aged in

advertising

and

sales promotion because all

their

efforts

are

aimed

at

satisfying

consumers' interests.

If

you

accept this description you will of course

agree

that

if

after

an

entrepreneur

had

been especially successful, society were

to confiscate his gains,

that

would discourage

entrepreneurial

alertness in future, which could

harm

consumers and so

must

be deplored. This is

Israeal

Kirzner's

full-circle;

entrepre-

neurs

do good things

and

deserve

their

winnings,

for

they

are

the undisputed heroes of the

market

process.

Kirzner

has

usefully elucidated

important

economic issues

in his previous books; in Competition and Entrepreneurship,

he intends adescription of the

market

process in which

the

entrepreneur

plays acrucial role.

He

criticizes the focus of

standard

price theory on equilibrium, a final outcome which

is dull

and

pallid compared with the more

important

entre-

preneurial-competitive

market

process

that

causes it.

His

at-

tack on theories of

market

equilibrium

rests

mainly on

their

lack of realism,

and

he is especially critical of the model of

static-certainty

perfect

competition (a la Lionel Robbins) in

which

products

appear

already

to be given

and

well-defined,

and only a cost-minimizing effort by business

managers

re-

mains to symbolize competition. He sees

the

entrepreneur

as

having

amore

vital

role in the

market

process, bringing

together

buyers

and

sellers

and

even

creating

products

and

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