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This thesis defends economic personalism as the sufficient anthropological basis for understanding entrepreneurship. The first chapter explores the motivations for human action, particularly within the tradition of the philosophical anthropology. The main actor in the economy, the bearer of uncertainty, is the entrepreneur. In the second part, the different aspects of entrepreneurial activity are contrasted with each other: the alertness for hitherto unnoticed profit opportunities, the importance of ownership and the ability to forecast the future and to turn these plans into reality. The investigation of the function of the entrepreneur within the enterprise completes this discussion and leads to the confrontation of the anthropological concepts of methodological individualism and economic personalism. Currently, the tradition of economic personalism is more useful to remove the individual from macroeconomic utilization of mathematical models. Furthermore, entrepreneurial activity reveals the tight limits of methodological individualism that are not able to fully recognize the broadness of the concept of the entrepreneur.

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Bernhard Adamec graduated with a Master´s in philosophy at University of Vienna. He spend a semester abroad at Georgetown University in Washington DC. For years he studied theoretical and practical questions concerning entrepreneurship. In his thesis he reflects on the true nature and essence of the entrepreneur.

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