"The wide appeal of entrepreneurialism also demonstrates its malleability. The former New Leftists who embraced entrepreneurship in founding organic grocery stores or alternative bookstores could feel secure that their businesses 'were simply "faithful and uncluttered expressions of yourself,"' Baker writes, even as they, too, became bosses demanding more and more of their workers. On the other end of the political spectrum, the Amway founders Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel preached a New Right language of 'family values' by promising that their direct-sales model would bring families closer together, as in the idealized mom-and-pop shops of yore. Deindustrialization and high levels of unemployment did much to undermine what was left of industriousness as a work ethic in the 1970s and ’80s, but the appeal of entrepreneurialism to both the New Right and the New Left positioned it not just as the heir apparent but as a new logic for organizing society overall.
Nick Juravich at The Nation reviews Erik Baker's Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.
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