The question seems innocuous, almost trivial. And yet, she resists.
Ask an entrepreneur which party they vote for: you will get a vague answer, a shrug of the shoulders, sometimes a slight irritation. This discomfort is not rhetorical modesty. It signals something deeper about the very nature of the entrepreneurial phenomenon, and what it reveals about our collective relationship to change.
Intuition holds, until it gives in…
The dominant prejudice is known: to be an entrepreneur is to be right-wing. The chain of equivalences is simple: the entrepreneur is liberal, liberalism is right-wing, a hasty conclusion. Historical genealogy first proves this intuition. Tocqueville defended individual freedoms, Saint-Simon believed in the transformative power of industry, and the contemporary French entrepreneur stands at the intersection of the two. But this cartography stumbles on two blind spots which weaken it considerably.
The first is the tension between entrepreneurship and conservatism. The right cannot be reduced to liberalism, and a central current has always run through it: the conviction that the established order is worth preserving rather than disrupting. But an entrepreneur, by definition, is not satisfied with the world as it is. He thinks it is possible to create where nothing existed, to transform where habit had taken hold. This faith in transformation is not intrinsically left-wing, but it comes into direct contradiction with the conservative posture. Wanting to be on the right and an entrepreneur without specifying what we mean by that is to erase a tension constitutive of the founding gesture.
The second blind spot is even more destabilizing: the entrepreneurial act is crossed by a meritocratic ideal which was, for two centuries, a left-wing fight. When someone creates their business so as not to depend on inherited assets, to prove that we can build from nothing, they are replaying a promise that comes from the Third Estate, not from the Ancien Régime. This liberalism, meritocratic, anti-determinist, oriented towards personal achievement, is much closer to the Republican left than to patrimonial liberalism which defends the transmission of family capital.
The word “entrepreneur” hides more than it reveals
The confusion comes from yet another problem: the word “entrepreneur” aggregates figures that do not have the same relationship to the world. The artisan baker and the founder of a tech unicorn share a legal status, not a conception of the economy. At least seven figures deserve to be distinguished. The craftsman, anchored in the duration of a profession and the direct relationship with the client, has historically voted to the right before moving, over the last twenty years, towards more populist positions. The SME manager shares this classic right-wing anchoring. The captain of industry subscribes to economic Gaullism and believes in a strategic state. The committed entrepreneur, mission-driven businesses, social economy, carries a project explicitly anchored on the left. The content creator embodies a diffuse individualist liberalism, critical of structures and taxation. The French startuper is center-right, Europhile and in favor of a partner state. Finally, the American tech libertarian – the figure of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen – pushes the logic to its limits: technology must bypass or replace the State itself.
Seven figures, seven worldviews, and almost no shared political coherence. And yet, these profiles recognize each other. Put in the same room an artisan, an ecological cooperativist and a founder of startup : they will find more to say to each other than with a theorist from their own political side. This paradox deserves an explanation.
What brings them together despite everything
Any political movement is based on three levels: a diagnosis of what is wrong, a horizon of what would be desirable, and a theory of change on how to achieve it. On the first two levels, the entrepreneurs share absolutely nothing. Their diagnoses diverge, their horizons sometimes clash head-on. But on the third level, that of the theory of change, they converge in a striking way, around two united convictions.
The first is a thesis on the place of change: reality is transformed mainly by private initiative, by individuals or small groups who act on their scale, and not by the State, public debate or organized collective action. The second is a pragmatic epistemology in the philosophical sense of the term, that of William James and John Dewey: the value of an idea is measured by its concrete effects. We are not trying to prove in a test, we are testing in reality. If it works, it’s true. Otherwise, we iterate. This method accepts error as learning, prefers the particular to the general, and does not wait for consensus before acting.
It is this coupling – private initiative and experimental pragmatism – which unites otherwise opposing profiles. The artisan and the cooperativist do not agree on what a desirable economy is, but they agree on how something is built in the real world. This posture also explains why so many entrepreneurs seem apolitical: the terrain of parties, programs and elections simply seems to them to be the wrong terrain. For them, the lever lies elsewhere.
This belief is not liberalism in disguise. Liberalism articulates the three stages of a political movement: a diagnosis, a horizon and a theory of change. Entrepreneurs only occupy one, in this case the third, which makes their position compatible with radically different political projects. If this entrepreneurial conviction were liberal at heart, it would not be able to accommodate the committed entrepreneur whose horizon is explicitly anti-liberal. But she welcomes him.
Entrepreneurship is neither right nor left. It is above all a method. And this is precisely what makes this debate so difficult to resolve and so revealing of the way in which change, real or hoped for, is constructed in a society.
