The Theory of Business Enterprise
by Thorstein Veblen
1904


Preface

     In respect to its point of departure, the following inquiry
into the nature, causes, utility, and further drift of business
enterprise differs from other discussions of the same general
range of facts. Any unfamiliar conclusions are due to this choice
of a point of view, rather than to any peculiarity in the facts,
articles of theory, or method of argument employed. The point of
view is that given by the business man's work, -- the aims,
motives, and means that condition current business traffic. This
choice of a point of view is itself given by the current economic
situation, in that the situation plainly is primarily a business
situation.
     A much more extended and detailed examination of the
ramifications and consequences of business enterprise and
business principles would feasible, and should give interesting
results. It might conceivably lead to something of a revision
(modernization) of more than one point in the current body of
economic doctrines. But it should apparently prove more
particulary interesting if it were followed up at large in the
bearing of this modern force upon cultural growth, apart from
what is of immediate economic interest. This cultural bearing of
business enterprise, however, belongs rather in the field of the
sociologist than in that of the professed economist; so that the
present inquiry, in its later chapters, sins rather by exceeding
the legitimate bounds of economic discussion on this head than by
falling short of them. In extenuation of this fault it is said
that the features of general culture touched upon in these
chapters bear too intimately on the economic situation proper to
admit their being left entirely on one side.
     Of the chapters included in the volume, the fifth, on Loan
Credit, is taken without substantial change, from Volume IV of
the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, where it
appears as a monograph.