Richard Baxter – The Modern Frame

Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context

Over the course of three previous essays, I sketched some of the origins of what I have called “the modern culture of achievement”.¹ What has been missing up to this point in these explorations is a historical understanding of the context in which these origins emerged. The origins of modern success literature (and its corresponding culture) came about at a time when the quest to succeed existed in an almost exclusively–though not entirely–secular way. As Max Weber observed, the “spirit of capitalism” reached a point where it became self-sufficient, no longer requiring the religious impetus which had sparked it.² It was in the rational and methodical reorganization of life, structured around the idea of a vocation or calling, which laid the groundwork for what I have described in the origin story.³ This is what I had in mind, when, speaking of success literature in Part I, I wrote, “the literature in question developed and emerged within a culture that already existed”. It is within the context of the larger whole of socioeconomic history that a deeper and broader understanding of the origins of achievement culture will emerge.⁴

The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part II

The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of a unique development in the history of success literature. Ideas and concepts that can be found in both the Transcendentalist and New Thought movements steadily came to be applied to the end-goal of success and wealth creation. This unique synthesis also led to the development of a peculiar science, or what I will refer to as a theology, which was intended to support it.¹ In the wider scheme, technological innovations and continuing industrialization led to an expanding scope of economic and sociological change. Among these changes is the growing use of the telephone and electricity, the development of the automobile and airplane, the age of radio and broadcasting, the rise of the motion picture and the film industry of Hollywood.² The growth of corporations and mass production yielded an ever-expanding set of commodities and consumer goods, in turn leading to the arrival of the professional salesman–a unique sociological type which provided perhaps the first popular audience for the burgeoning industry of success literature.³