Looking Back At A Self-Help Legacy

Ann Friedman reviews Stephen Watts’s Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America, which investigates the man who gave us How to Win Friends and Influence People, the perennial bestseller first published in 1936. Carnegie’s main strategy for getting ahead? He argued that once you realized “people are mainly self-interested … by playing to those interests with unwavering enthusiasm, success [is] a given”:

Instead of judging people for what they want, Carnegie suggested, we should try to understand their cravings and cater to them. This line of thought, perhaps, explains such modern capitalist horrors as the Doritos Locos Tacos at Taco Bell—but it was clearly in harmony with the emergence of a mass consumer economy. In the early twentieth century, “a new ethos emerged that was preoccupied with personality development, personal happiness, interpersonal relations, and self-fulfillment,” Watts writes, describing it as “a form of individualism less concerned with religious salvation or overt economic profit than with emotional well-being.” Whereas Carnegie’s bootstrappy, individualist sensibility could be seen as libertarian, he was in fact decidedly apolitical—almost in the manner of a “Hey, I’m just doing me” Silicon Valley bro who can’t see the larger implications of his worldview.

Reviewing Watts’s book in November, Maureen Corrigan elaborated on the cultural shifts Carnegie’s work heralded:

Carnegie’s emphasis on projecting a sunny personality was part of a larger shift away from a Victorian concern with character and self-denial to a modern fascination with advertising, consumerism and self-promotion. Carnegie’s teaching promised to pay off in self-fulfillment and fat wallets. … Watts shows how particularly attuned Carnegie was to the psychological needs of Americans beaten down by the Great Depression, who needed to hear that positive thinking would garner positive results. It’s easy, of course, for we contemporary readers to dismiss Carnegie’s teaching as mere boosterism and Babbittry, but his self-help legacy has endured well beyond his own death in 1955, and flourishes in our own age.

The Economist released a new video interview with Watts here.