"Work Won't Love You Back"

"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.

"This Pressure to Build a Personal Brand Is One of the Great Pathologies of the Past Three Decades"

"The same anxieties that attracted people to New Thought at the dawn of American capitalism would later fuel demand for the positive-psychology movement, which has since been enshrined in the curricula of American business schools. At first glance, this movement may appear unassailable. Its goal, after all, is to make people happier and encourage them to 'flourish' in their work lives. However, as Baker demonstrates, its primary role is to lend intellectual support to the entrepreneurial ethic. 'Psychology is the idiom through which entrepreneurship is discussed,' he writes. In fact, 'it's not always obvious where positive psychology ends and entrepreneurship begins.' How could it be, when business schools now employ teams of psychologists, urging future leaders to embrace 'grit,' find 'flow,' adopt a 'growth mindset,' and establish their own personal brand? 'Popular psychology,' Baker writes, 'encouraged Americans to cultivate an attractive personality that would help them win the affection of their coworkers and bosses and thus ascend the corporate ladder—instead of striving to embody the transcendent moral values constitutive of the older notion of character.' Baker is keen to expose the harm this movement's entrepreneurial turn has caused the culture at large. The book opens with the tragic story of Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos and the author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Hsieh died in a fire at the age of forty-six after barricading himself in a shed with nitrous-oxide canisters, a propane tank, and candles. It's a cautionary tale about the Faustian bargain 'positive psychology' struck with the startup world."

Drew Calvert at Commonweal reviews Erik Baker's Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

"We Stumbled Into Modernity Accidentally, not by Any Divine Plan"

"The Founding didn't apply these principles as universally as its rhetoric implied. But that rhetoric was transformative. When the Declaration of Independence was written, some dismissed the beginning as flowery boilerplate; what mattered was the ending: Independence! But the boilerplate became a creed, and America's story is the story of that creed—those mere words—unfolding to its logical conclusion. That is what Lincoln did at Gettysburg when he reconceived the meaning of America, what Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to when he called on Americans to live up to their own story's highest principles. A civilization is simply a story: the story the people tell themselves about themselves."

National Review runs an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy.