The Republic of Entrepreneurs: Letters, Science, and the Civic Mechanics of Modern Prosperity

This paper advances the idea of a republic of entrepreneurs - a spontaneous, rule-governed order in which many people repeatedly propose, test, and diffuse improvements - and argues that it is the main engine of modern prosperity. We braid this republic with the republic of letters and the republic of science, contending that open discourse, self-governed inquiry, and contestable enterprise reinforce one another to convert useful knowledge into useful industry. The analytical backbone integrates Cantillon’s functional entrepreneur, Mises’s economic calculation and residual claimancy, Hayek’s discovery procedure and dispersed knowledge, Kirzner’s alertness and equilibration, Mokyr’s Industrial Enlightenment and “market for ideas,†McCloskey’s rhetoric of bourgeois dignity, and Phelps’s grassroots dynamism. Historical cases - Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and biomedicine - show that breakthrough eras depended less on elite R&D and more on dense portfolios of small, decentralized experiments under general rules that kept feedback honest and imitation lawful. We contrast this republican view with outcome-targeting, elite-centric growth models, derive testable implications (proposal density, feedback speed, diffusion breadth), and sketch a policy stance that privileges general over discretionary rules, interoperability and open standards, reputation systems that make quality legible, and intellectual property that teaches while remaining finite. Reframing innovation as a civic practice explains both the magnitude and inclusiveness of the Great Enrich- ment and recommends "republic of entrepreneurs†as a term of art for growth and development economics.