Eu Startup: a sutil arte de tornar-se empreendedor e o novo fantasma do capitalismo

Abstract

This work seeks to discuss the spread of entrepreneurial language throughout society, aiming to understand what entrepreneurship is and what it means to be an entrepreneur, within the framework of becoming. To this end, it associates two traditions with sociology, the conflict tradition and the symbolic interactionist tradition, to reformulate the Weberian interpretative scheme resulting from the discussion on the use of scale change for comprehensive processes, the micro-macro problem. In order to elaborate a scheme that contemplates, in a wave-like manner, structure, mobilized ideas, the dispute over the interiority of individuals, practices of adaptation and production of subjectivities, and the elaboration of societal reconstruction. The literature was consulted to observe the processes of reformulation of capitalism since the acute crisis of liberalism and the reformulation of liberalism into neoliberalism; passing through the constitution and deconstruction of passive welfare state and the process of hegemony of austro-american neoliberalism from the 1970 onwards; the text discuss the role of the active welfare state (workfare) and the establishment of the warfare state, both in the realm of sociability and austerity. It also debates the tradition of the “spirit of capitalism” in the social sciences, its reinterpretations, and research practices concerning it. Furthermore, it explore this unknown present, participating in both neoliberal hegemony and the reconfigurations of the “Spirit” — entrepreneurship. It finds that the literature fails to define it, much less see it as a permanent reflexive activity, a process of becoming. The narrative versions of entrepreneurship—emic, emic, and aesthetic—were consulted to better understand the scope of the reworking of the dispute over subjectivities in current capitalism and how this simultaneously shapes interiorities and societies/the State through the use of the language of becoming an entrepreneur. Through this, it is understood that capitalism reconfigures itself, not in another guise of the well-defined spirit of capitalism, but, through restlessness, signifying emptiness, and haunting, in the guise of the ghost of capitalism.