Governing Citizens Through Self-Help Literature

This article explores contemporary self-help literature as a strategy for enlisting subjects in the pursuit of self-improvement and autonomy. Appropriating democratic liberalism's and neo-liberalism's ways of seeing the individual and the social world, self-help promotes the idea that a good citizen cares for herself or himself best by evading or denying social relations. Yet a hyper-responsible self, the result of self-help practice, is intrinsically linked to the governmental management of populations, and so to less individual autonomy rather than more.