The entrepreneurial function did separate itself out and become a distinct role within society: This is a historical fact of the greatest significance. It was not just a matter of specialization, that is, of the differentiation of a task that had previously been performed by the individual producer. Separating out entrepreneurial decision making meant transforming this task and transforming the whole social organization of production along with it. The artisan made decisions about the use of resources according to a whole range of diverse criteria, none of which ever predominated over any of the others. But the entrepreneur's sole measure of success is profit and the sole threat to his existence is the failure to profit. Owning the work process without himself being engaged in it directly, an entrepreneur has an overwhelming interest in only one aspect of it, the spread between unit price and unit cost. Everything is measured in terms of its impact on this one variable. Unfortunately laborers continue to experience the multiplex reality of work directly and they try to satisfy their need for a coherent way of life by appropriately shaping the diverse features of the work experience. Here, rather than merely in the area of remuneration, is where the inevitable antagonism between capital and labor arises.

The emergence of the entrepreneurial role, in any case, involved the creation of a whole new mode of production. Once established somewhere in an economic system of the eighteenth-century type, such a mode of production proliferates by two means.