Men in Business : essays on the historycal roll of the entrepreneur with two additional essays on amrican business leaders

The Editor of this book welcomes the opportunity to write for a new and wider audience a new Preface to a volume that may have seemed a mav erick when first published a decade or so ago, but which has since won solid respect in the fields of history, economics, and sociology. Its own particular field, which we once called "entrepreneurial history," under took to bridge these different disciplines, and others, such as psychology and anthropology. By employing the best that social science had to offer, entrepreneurial history sought especially to further the understanding of one of the principal institutions of modern life, the free business system.

That entrepreneurial history succeeded in its mission is not for me to say. But I assert with full confidence that its approach to history remains undeniably sound; and if one added to its predilection for social science a preference, too, for those engaging unscientific features of history in gen eral-I mean imagination, judgment, and art-one would have the full kit for understanding man in his universe, so far as he can be understood. This preference for imagination, judgment, and art was rarely acknowl edged by the strict entrepreneurial historians with whom I was associated at Harvard University for a few years before the initial publication of this book. But I here take the liberty to acknowledge it for them, and to sug gest to the reader that he will find these essays at once enlightening, intel lectually stimulating, and a pleasure to read. I am aware that essays of my own appear in this volume. But I am speaking of my pleasure in the others.