"Then, again, the ability to organize and conduct industrial, commercial, or financial enterprises is rare; the great captains of industry are as rare as great generals"
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Sumner is smuggling hierarchy into the language of merit. By likening “captains of industry” to “great generals,” he borrows the moral glamour of battlefield command to dignify the boardroom. The comparison isn’t neutral; it’s a rhetorical upgrade. Generals are presumed necessary, their authority earned under pressure, their victories framed as collective salvation. Put industrialists in the same sentence and you quietly convert private accumulation into public service.
The key word is “rare.” Scarcity here does ideological work: if top-tier business leadership is as uncommon as military genius, then outsized rewards start to look less like a policy choice and more like nature’s wage scale. Inequality becomes not a system to interrogate but an inevitable outcome of talent distribution. The line also performs a neat inversion: labor, regulation, and public infrastructure fade into the background, while the entrepreneur’s coordinating role becomes the decisive force that makes “industrial, commercial, or financial enterprises” exist at all.
Context matters. Sumner wrote in America’s Gilded Age, when railroads, trusts, and finance were consolidating power and the vocabulary of “efficiency” was often used to launder monopoly into competence. In that climate, praising the exceptional organizer is also a defense against reformers who saw corruption, exploitation, and political capture. The subtext: don’t meddle. You can no more mass-produce captains of industry than you can mass-produce Napoleons, so let them command, let them profit, and treat their dominance as a kind of national necessity rather than a contested arrangement.
The key word is “rare.” Scarcity here does ideological work: if top-tier business leadership is as uncommon as military genius, then outsized rewards start to look less like a policy choice and more like nature’s wage scale. Inequality becomes not a system to interrogate but an inevitable outcome of talent distribution. The line also performs a neat inversion: labor, regulation, and public infrastructure fade into the background, while the entrepreneur’s coordinating role becomes the decisive force that makes “industrial, commercial, or financial enterprises” exist at all.
Context matters. Sumner wrote in America’s Gilded Age, when railroads, trusts, and finance were consolidating power and the vocabulary of “efficiency” was often used to launder monopoly into competence. In that climate, praising the exceptional organizer is also a defense against reformers who saw corruption, exploitation, and political capture. The subtext: don’t meddle. You can no more mass-produce captains of industry than you can mass-produce Napoleons, so let them command, let them profit, and treat their dominance as a kind of national necessity rather than a contested arrangement.
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| Topic | Entrepreneur |
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