One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay higher wages. But it also comes from popular psychology. As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are “entrepreneurial.”

In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age. Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones. Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.”

Baker’s book tells a story about the unholy union between American psychology and American business—not just how it was formed, but how it came to present as universal truths concepts that were in fact derived from economic scarcity. The story begins with New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement that emerged in response to the trauma of American capitalism as it swaggered into the Gilded Age. Writers like Ralph Waldo Trine, who became a favorite of Henry Ford, believed that “creative” people had the power to manifest opportunities for themselves even amid the direst circumstances. There’s a reason William James felt the need to address the movement in his scrupulously compassionate book The Varieties of Religious Experience. New Thought claimed that “personal thoughts are forces,” that “serenity” and “happiness” are available to anyone who adopts the right attitude, that the universe has a reservoir of positive vibes to draw from. Like James, Baker approaches his subject with care and curiosity. He is less interested in the credulousness of those who believed in “mind cures” than he is in the material conditions that created such a strong demand for intellectual moonshine. At a time of great upheaval, he writes, “New Thought promised to restore power to the individual” and “grant practitioners the ability to overcome ‘concern’” about the “precarious labor market.” Eventually, this quirky strain of neo-transcendentalism evolved into what Baker calls a “doctrinally fuzzy success philosophy.”

That philosophy is just as fuzzy now as it was a century ago. It remains with us in the form of personal-growth seminars, advice podcasts, and the bright, encouraging schlock filling space in airport bookstores. Then as now, the field was nothing if not a huckster’s paradise. One of the more amusing figures, Napoleon Hill, a con man and the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich (1937), urged his readers to cultivate a self that one could market, which required “imagination.” His own imagination invented a meeting with Andrew Carnegie as a ploy to sell more books; other creative schemes included credit fraud, an oil-stock scam, and embezzlement from charities. This message paired nicely with that of the more renowned and less explicitly fraudulent Dale Carnegie, who emphasized the importance of turning talents and passions into cash. Both authors preyed upon the fragile, desperate millions still recovering from the market crash.

In the fifties, Norman Vincent Peale, a preacher, New Thought evangelist, and eventual officiant of Donald Trump’s first wedding, produced one of the most popular self-help books of all time, The Power of Positive Thinking. “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself,” Peale writes, “the more energy you will have.” Strangely, for Peale, that “something bigger” didn’t include unions or the social infrastructure built by Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he fumed against at every turn. The book has never been out of print, and Baker is good at explaining why. For people afraid of falling behind in the wake of the Great Depression (or, in our own time, the Great Recession) the entrepreneurial ethic that arose from New Thought literature “functioned as a sort of insurance policy—not just a failsafe strategy in case of unemployment, but a preemptive ward against redundancy and obsolescence.”

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.

The term “positive psychology” was coined in 1954 by Abraham Maslow, whose relationship with entrepreneurs in Arizona and California is one of the book’s many fascinating subplots. According to Baker, Maslow saw “entrepreneurial leadership” as one of the best applications of his psychological theories of motivation and self-actualization. A similar fondness for business can be found in Maslow’s successor, Martin Seligman, whose work in the nineties and early aughts emphasized the usefulness of positive psychology to achieving success at work. (Flourish, his 2011 book, was blurbed by Tony Hsieh.)

The incentive to make one’s insights more amenable to executives and consultants seems to be irresistible. This is how the author of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, became the author of Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, for example. Not that the insights themselves are wrong. Just as Dale Carnegie was right to say that people love to hear the sound of their own name, it is probably true that “autoletic” workers (those who discover intrinsic motivation and achieve “flow”) will feel more satisfied at work. But Baker is calling attention to the fact that these ideas become popular among managers for ignoble reasons: they make it cheaper and easier to burden employees with the task of preserving their own well-being. “Autoletic” workers are more easily exploited, as are those who treat their jobs as extension of themselves. The basic career advice one gets from positive psychology is that throwing yourself into your work is the best way to achieve success and personal fulfillment. And since Americans, as Baker suggests, “prize psychological health as highly as a religious duty,” to fail to be entrepreneurial is a kind of mortal sin.

The Christian language of “duty” and “calling” comes from Max Weber, the German sociologist who studied the problem of how to encourage Arbeitsfreude, or “joy in work.” Weber’s 1904 visit to the United States helped convince him of his famous thesis that the main driver of worker motivation was the Protestant ethic. His colleague Joseph Schumpeter, building upon the supposed link between economic and personal growth, celebrated the entrepreneur as the innovative, heroic force behind “creative destruction”—the kind of leader who inspires joy, meaning, and purpose. The problem, Baker argues, as he combs through the legacy of German social science, is that for some, the only purpose of life is to win at any cost. “The entrepreneur became a Nietzschean conqueror,” he writes, “setting the world ablaze with his energy and virility.” This holds true even when proponents of “creative destruction” adopt a sunnier idiom in Northern California. Baker describes Steve Jobs, who encouraged “an almost cult-like esprit de corps” in his Macintosh unit, as “the most ruthless entrepreneur to emerge from the counterculture.” In Silicon Valley, charismatic leadership of the kind that aroused the Austrian economists was given a friendly, New Age twist. Baker’s genealogy helps explain why American startup culture is so deeply weird.

But it’s not weird, of course, to seek work that is meaningful and satisfying. Hence the universal appeal of the entrepreneurial ethic: it offers the founder, the franchisee, the gig worker, and the influencer the same promise of freedom, and it offers those with W-2s a reason to clock in every day. Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship. That’s especially true when the ethic becomes a management philosophy, as it did during the consulting boom of the seventies and eighties, when “value creation” and “innovation” served as important alibis for cost-cutting and deregulation. “The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic,” he writes, “is to reconcile workers to precarity.” It also creates the illusion that the tech billionaire and the gig worker (who receives no benefits and cannot join a union) are aligned against the wet blanket of government regulation.

Because this ideology is custom made for slumps and busts, it can never be discredited. Baker echoes the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, who discovered a correlation between corporate downsizing and the rise of “positive thinking,” when he says, “Bad news for the economy has always been good news for the entrepreneurial work ethic.” The result is a tragic cycle:

On the one hand there is burnout, a hustle culture whose intensity many Americans feel is grinding them into mental, emotional, and physical depletion. On the other hand, there is the lingering poison of deindustrialization, the anomie or social decay that appears to creep into communities where work disappears. But to some extent, these complaints are two sides of the same coin. The looming specter of worklessness is one important motivator of the punishing demands we make on ourselves when we are at work. And our relentless search for innovation and optimization in turn renders swaths of the workforce redundant and obsolete. On and on it goes, in a perpetual spiral.

Make Your Own Job diagnoses that spiral by showing how our economic and psychological pain form a kind of double helix. And Baker allows us to see why the genre of business self-help—and the management theory it often serves—is so predatory. “We are the CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc.” Tom Peters wrote in “The Brand Called You,” published in Fast Company in 1997. This pressure to build a personal brand is one of the great pathologies of the past three decades—not only because the LinkedIn startup crowd is so insufferable, or because a personal brand is currently looting the federal government with the help of a lunatic entrepreneur, but because this ethos ultimately corrupts our souls and relationships.

There is nothing wrong with finding spiritual value in one’s career—provided that value doesn’t exist to be exploited by a billionaire. And of course it’s fine to love what you do. But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.

Make Your Own Job
How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
Erik Baker
Harvard University Press
$35 | 352 pp.