Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Problems in the Behavioural Sciences, Series Number 12)

The concept of creativity, typically defined as a kind of trait or process vaguely associated with artists and geniuses but theoretically possessed by anyone and applicable to any field, emerged as a psychological cure for these structural and political contradictions of the postwar order.

As a new psychological term of art, “creativity” drew a conceptual space that included the greatest accomplishments but also everyday acts of originality. This new concept served much of the function that genius had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that is, the thing imagined to be the engine of the progress of mankind.