Mitopeia do empreendedor: narrativa de um mito capitalista

Literature on the rhetoric of economics and narrative economics has emphasized the roles of stories and narratives in the development of economic theory. One of the most known narratives in economic folklore is of the “hero entrepreneur”, as an individual who triumphs after a journey of adversity, bringing new products and economic development to a community. The individual focus of entrepreneurs is present in the writings of scholars of entrepreneurship and public intellectuals, such as Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner, Fritz Redlich, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, among others. Whether they wanted or not, they ended up building a mythology of the entrepreneur that manifested in the popular consciousness. Using literature from comparative mythology and on the popular views of the hero, this article applies the Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model to understand how popular views of the hero penetrated the entrepreneurship discourse, the mythopoeia (confection of a mythology) of the entrepreneur. The article also analyzes the potential problems of this narratives, especially on its legitimation of the status quo, how it does not represent the actual entrepreneurial process, and has potential harmful consequences for both entrepreneurs and the rest of society, using authors such as Roland Barthes, Milton Santos, among others. However, the article concludes that myth, independent of critique or not, will remain ubiquitous and the narrative of the entrepreneur as a hero will remain relevant, therefore future studies should work to humanize the entrepreneur so that cooperation between theory and practice be improved.