What is a “work ethic”? In its most common usage, the phrase connotes a personal quality: the capacity and enthusiasm for hard work, claimed in countless cover letters and celebrated in graduation speeches. In the hands of politicians, capitalists, and certain members of the chattering class, it is a collective phenomenon at the heart of a society and economy: a set of ideas and attitudes about work, centered on the inherent moral and social value of toil, that both fuels and legitimates accumulation. Articulated most famously by Max Weber in 1904’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (written after his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair that same year), the work ethic as a social good has been used to explain—and justify—inequalities at many scales for nearly a century, from the relative success of different groups of immigrant workers to the making of global empires. Herein lies a fundamental tension: Under capitalism, we are taught from an early age to cultivate our personal work ethic, but we go on to labor in a world structured by a collective work ethic that we did not make—one that demands not just our labor but our belief in its constructed meaning.

Despite its determinative role in much political and economic thinking, the work ethic is often a remarkably static, up-or-down proposition: Workers, or nations, either have it or they don’t. Work, however, has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, and so too, we might surmise, has its meaning. Looking at the title of Erik Baker’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, a reader might expect a very recent history, one focused on the cult of entrepreneurship promulgated by Silicon Valley “founders,” venture capitalists, and their business-school cheerleaders. Instead, Baker shows us that the roots of what he calls the “entrepreneurial work ethic” run much further into the past, and deeper into our institutions and public discourse, than many of us had previously realized.

Baker, a lecturer and union organizer at Harvard and an editor at The Drift, locates the origins of the entrepreneurial work ethic in the political, economic, and cultural transformations of the early 20th century. He grounds his history in a specific economic shift: the emergence and persistence of structural unemployment in the US economy that began with the consolidation of industrial capitalism at the end of the 19th century. When workers could no longer find sufficient grindstones against which to put their noses, Baker argues, the “industrious” work ethic—the familiar 19th-century valorization of never-ending toil—lost some of its sway. Enter the entrepreneurial work ethic, promoted not by academic economists or social theorists but by popular psychologists and management intellectuals whose output, Baker writes, “influenced much more profoundly how ordinary people have thought about their working lives.” Baker’s detailed reading of this corpus—from “New Thought” treatises and the memoir-manifestos of celebrity capitalists to business-school journals and management textbooks—runs through the heart of his narrative.

Throughout the book, Baker enters a dialogue with a new generation of leftist historians—among others, he cites Amy Offner, Gabriel Winant, and Elizabeth Tandy Schirmer—who have unearthed continuities between eras traditionally periodized in opposition to one another and, in the process, have shown how phenomena associated with neoliberalism are, in large part, products of industrial capitalism. As a result, Baker’s book is at once a focused analysis of the constellation of ideas that make up the “work ethic” and an interrogation of the inherent instability of American economic life over the past century.

Baker begins his book with the observation that something significant changed in the American economy at the end of the 19th century. As industrial productivity increased “faster than capitalists were investing—and faster than the ranks of manufacturing workers were expanding,” he writes, working people across the nation found themselves faced with “an economic landscape in which full-time jobs with regular pay were not merely toilsome but persistently, structurally scarce.” Whereas the growth of industrial productivity had once depended on a growing supply of proletarian labor, now it relied on both capital- and labor-saving innovations, including the scientific-management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the widespread electrification of factories, which idled workers while rewarding the creators of new technologies and work processes. Entrepreneurialism was both an explanation of what was happening and one solution to the crisis—or so it seemed. And as structural unemployment persisted in the US economy, so did this new work ethic.

Baker is clear that entrepreneurialism did not usurp the concept of industriousness in one fell swoop. Rather, he writes, “entrepreneurialism has always thrived most in the United States amid precarity and economic turbulence.” What this idea had, powerfully, was a counter-cyclical appeal, both to out-of-work Americans and to a ruling class eager to sell them an individualist way out of collective misery during recessions. “Each new normal,” Baker observes, “eventually proved ephemeral in its own right, revitalizing the demand for a new entrepreneurial vanguard.” Entrepreneurialism did not, at first, fully take hold during downturns, but it always grew, laying the foundation for its trajectory of dominance from the 1970s right up to the explosion of the “gig economy” after the 2008 recession.

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To take hold, though, the idea first had to be sold. Enter the “New Thought” movement, an offshoot of spiritualism and Christian Science whose mishmash of preachers, publishers, and promoters “attracted millions of enthusiasts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Baker writes. New Thought’s leaders, including the delightfully named Ralph Waldo Trine, are no longer household names, but they sold millions of books, pamphlets, and magazines in their era. Moreover, as Baker explains, their promise that “individuals in the right mental state could connect with a reservoir of infinite cosmic energy that would allow them to conjure opportunity out of thin air and to transcend any obstacles, no matter how apparently insurmountable,” proved enticing to a wide swath of Americans whose lives had been destabilized by rapid economic change, whether uprooted from farms and small towns or thrown into unemployment as factories retooled and industries transformed.

Most importantly, while Trine and his ilk may be largely forgotten now, their biggest fans have left an enduring legacy. Baker’s opening chapter begins not with Trine but with one of his acolytes, Henry Ford. Despite being synonymous today with standardized mass production and consumption, Ford, in his own day, believed himself to be both an exemplar and a promoter of the “joy of creative labor.” Ford’s telling of his rise to glory—in a ghostwritten 1922 autobiography—followed a New Thought template celebrating the entrepreneurial individual for their creativity as much as, or more than, for their industriousness. These texts developed a common mantra, Baker writes: The true entrepreneur could “make his own job.”

A series of contradictions quickly emerged in the nebula of ideas that made up the entrepreneurial work ethic, which Baker calls the “paradoxes of entrepreneurialism.” For the masses, entrepreneurialism was a promise that individual creativity—evidenced by incessant work in pursuit of success above and beyond one’s own job description—offered a path out of both unemployment and the drudgery of non-entrepreneurial work. For the elite, it affirmed their particular qualities, whatever they understood those to be. This could get ugly, quickly; Ford asserted that creativity was to be found in the “non-Jewish worker,” grafting his antisemitism onto entrepreneurialism with ease.

Nowhere were these contradictions more visible than in the schools of business and management, where entrepreneurialism made the leap from pop psychology to a field of academic inquiry. The leaders in this field—industrial psychologists, personnel managers, and by the 1930s, professors in the nascent field of human relations, most notably at Harvard Business School (HBS)—preached a new model for the manager of the future, one whose leadership, Baker explains, would soften the blows of Taylorism and deskilling and “inspire workers to view compliance with cutting-edge labor techniques as its own reward.” Adherents of entrepreneurialism undertook all manner of study, from sociological surveys that affirmed the power of human relations to new “entrepreneurial histories” of Western civilization.

At this juncture, many well-known academics did get involved in this work. As Baker notes, Weber himself was among a corps of German-speaking scholars whose studies in the 1910s came to focus on the entrepreneur “as the driving force of capitalist economies,” a figure who would not only create new machines and businesses but instill the “joy in work” (Arbeitsfreude) in people who had lost their love for labor through years of industrial drudgery. Joseph Schumpeter, a generation younger than Weber, brought these ideas to the United States upon his arrival at Harvard in 1932.

While studies and papers lent intellectual heft to what the New Thought had wrought, business school, then as now, functioned as a finishing school as much as a site of study. In serving this function, it helped that the scholarship in vogue at Harvard Business School relied on a combination of psychology and inborn masculinity to explain the power of entrepreneurship. As Baker writes, citing Werner Sombart’s exhortation that entrepreneurs were “men (not women!),” the entrepreneur, in the new social science emanating from Germany and Austria, “became a Nietzschean conqueror, setting the world ablaze with his energy and virility.” At HBS in the 1930s, future capitalists and their managers learned that insufficient masculine energy, not the catastrophic failure of global capitalism, was the problem facing their world.

This idea was reinforced at junkets for junior executives hosted by HBS professor Philip Cabot, where exclusively male groups met to facilitate what another HBS scholar, Elton Mayo, described as “the downward movement of the effete, the upward movement of the vigorous and capable.” Cabot and Mayo hosted these elite gatherings in order to interrupt what he and his fellows feared, Baker writes, was “the feminizing culture of modernity.” It was these gatherings of Brahmins, deep into the New Deal that many of them loathed, that kept the entrepreneurial flame burning as both a public good, articulated by scholars, and a private affirmation that the Brahmins and their white, male, Protestant fellows belonged at the top.

Baker’s middle chapters chart the percolation of entrepreneurialism through many layers of postwar American thought and governance. In conversation with many other new histories, Baker shows how corporations won concessions from politicians and policymakers at the height of the “New Deal Order,” often deploying entrepreneurialism as a Cold War–compliant synonym for American capitalism at home and abroad. Entrepreneurialism proved a particularly effective rejoinder to demands for redistribution, as well as a common explanation for what “underdeveloped” communities lacked, whether abroad or in the “inner cities” and Appalachian coalfields. For those suffering from “poverty in the midst of plenty,” as the mid-century description went, schools of management prescribed the cultivation of a “local entrepreneurial cadre,” while a new generation of self-help writers promoted “the power of positive thinking” (the title of Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling 1952 book). Entrepreneurialism was not the only prescription available, but as Baker shows, it was poised for predominance by the time the contradictions of postwar liberalism strained past their breaking point.

While Baker continues to focus on popular psychology and management intellectuals, his later chapters examine the viral spread of entrepreneurialism during and after the 1970s. He brings together a host of seemingly strange bedfellows speaking the same language on an entrepreneurial continuum stretching from Ralph Nader to Steve Jobs to Ray Kroc and finally Sam Walton. Their politics, and even their relationship to capitalism, may not have fully aligned, but when it came to work, all of them extolled the virtues of creativity and measured it, in their canvassers, employees, and franchisees, through the willingness to work unreasonably long hours. What united the “social entrepreneur” pounding the pavement to win a ballot initiative in a Northeastern city and the Walmart manager spending hours on the road between small towns in Arkansas was the expectation that they were, by virtue of giving their entire lives over to their work, both “making their own job” and making a greater contribution to society than the simple clock-puncher.

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.

A book about entrepreneurialism is, inevitably, hurtling toward a date with the “disruptors” of the aughts and 2010s. Baker knows this; indeed, he tees it up in the introduction with the observation that “our image of ‘the entrepreneur’ is still dominated by two antipodal figures: the tech billionaire and the gig workers using that billionaire’s app to scrape out an income.” It is a testament to Baker’s spadework in the preceding chapters, however, that by the time we get there, we know what to expect. The digital platforms and tools may be new, but the self-help literature and the affirmations from management gurus are much the same: promising liberation, delivering exhaustion.

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America was published six days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and thus it feels particularly and painfully relevant. Elon Musk’s sneering assertion that fired federal workers should find “high productivity” jobs in the private sector could easily have come from Henry Ford, and so too could Musk’s love of pseudo-scientific racism. Mark Zuckerberg and his embrace of MAGA machismo as an opportunity to restore “masculine energy” to industry would have fit right in at one of the HBS weekend soirees. Trump himself, of course, claims the mantle of an entrepreneurial businessman, even if he’s only played one on TV.

If the entrepreneurial work ethic has exhausted us while empowering successive generations of increasingly vile overlords, what other options do we have? On his final page, Baker makes a key point: “If the entrepreneurial work ethic can accommodate both conservative visions of tradition and liberal visions of progress, the one thing it can never make peace with is a politics of class conflict.” Baker nods to this conclusion throughout the book, though often glancingly, but at the last, he is clear: If there is not enough work to go around, there is surely enough wealth and profit to feed and clothe and house people, and even to allow us to thrive, if we can seize it. In parallel to the point that entrepreneurialism has flourished even when the economy has crashed, we can of course observe the rise of anti-capitalist ideas about work and wealth at these same moments, from the unemployed councils and CIO drives of the 1930s, to the full-employment organizing and rank-and-file rebellions of the 1970s, to the anti-work politics of Occupy Wall Street and the success of the Bernie Sanders campaigns after the Great Recession. Billionaire biographies continue to extol the joys of entrepreneurship—Baker quotes Musk on the delights of toil in his introduction—but after working for employers that demand everything before kicking employees to the curb in a downturn (or, for that matter, a pandemic), many working people have learned, in Sarah Jaffe’s formulation, that “work won’t love you back.”

The question of how to respond to economic uncertainty has become a periodic contest between entrepreneurialism and solidarity over the past century, and working people in the United States are once again faced with this challenge. Building a movement to combat the self-styled entrepreneurs in power will not be easy, but it can be done: Doordash made the single largest donation to Andrew Cuomo’s primary campaign for mayor in New York City, but the “dashers” it robbed of tips for years cast their votes for Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialism, where they could. Sustaining this momentum will require continued organizing, but going it alone, as Baker shows, will surely be even more exhausting.