Abstract
It is often assumed that politics is just about the state and what it does. Here I argue for a much broader view, in which politics can include activity that has nothing to do with getting the state to behave differently, by suggesting several ways in which the seemingly apolitical activity of entrepreneurship can fall into three broad categories of political action. The first is in establishing institutions or practices that help guarantee some demand of justice. The second is mitigating and circumventing state injustice. The third is in building a foundation for future action. After that, I discuss two benefits to entrepreneurial politics over state-mediated alternatives, both of which relate to dealing with the constraints of prevailing ideology. The first is that entrepreneurship allows those who are alert to alternative political possibilities to act on that alertness without first overcoming ideological barriers. This argument draws on Israel Kirzner's account of entrepreneurship's equilibrating function. The second point builds upon Joseph Schumpeter's account of its disequilibrating function: successful entrepreneurial action can destroy existing ideological assumptions about what is possible.
