Creation in Schumpeter’s Theory Between Gift and Appropriation

The Schumpeterian entrepreneur drives the capitalist process through the introduction of innovations. Alternately impetuous boxer and Don Quixote of the production functions, the entrepreneur is part of a creative process by which emerge novelties which upsets existing economic structures. The “ride” of the entrepreneur cannot be reduced to cost-benefit calculations, but falls under a logic of the gift: the entrepreneur “creates without respite, because he can do nothing else”. Nevertheless, he is at the origin of a capitalist economy founded on private property and profit. Capitalism belongs to the logic of economy, that is to say, to a system of appropriation which excludes all forms of gift and gratuitousness. This paper intends to question the apparent tension between a regime of gift and a regime of appropriation in order to highlight the ambivalence of the economic creation.