The entrepreneur, with a dream and will to found a private kingdom, to conquer adversity, to achieve success for its own sake, and to experience the joy of creation, is a heroic figure in economic development, according to Joseph Schumpeter (1961:3) – sometime finance minister in an Austrian Socialist government and professor of economics in Bonn, Tokyo, and at Harvard. In a similar vein, David McClelland (1961) perceives the efforts of the entrepreneur, in controlling production in both capitalist and socialist economies, as largely responsible for rapid economic growth. For McClelland, the entrepreneur, driven by an inner urge to improve, is motivated by profits as a measure of achievement rather than as a source of enrichment.

Economic historians emphasize that such Schumpeterian captains of industry as John D. Rockefeller (oil), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), James B. Duke (tobacco and power), and Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan (finance) led the fifty-year economic expansion before World War I that made the United States the world's leading industrial nation. Rockefeller combined managerial genius, capacity for detail, decisiveness, frugality, and foresight with a ruthless suppression of competition, the use of espionage and violence to gain competitive advantages, and a general neglect of the public interest to become the symbol of the virtues and vices of these “robber barons” (Nash 1964:347–8).