And, perhaps more important, from a strategic point of view, in her 1993 afterword to Revolution from Within, Steinem asked the difficult question: what are self-help and Twelve-Step groups offering people that feminism, the Left, and the labor movement have failed to provide?

Feminist groups were among the first to recognize that personal change was catalyzed by group participation, while group participation could also forge larger social and political agendas. That these groups were able to wed a culture of collective self-help with political actions offered a model for other social movements.39

In less than thirty years, “self-help”—once synonymous with mutual aid—has come to be understood not only as distinct from collective action but actually as its opposite.

One is saved from a life of meaningless contingency and accident by a self-conscious life plan. Work is reimagined, not as a deprivation for which one ought to be compensated but as means of expressing oneself, as a source of identity and personal fulfillment.

As each cell in the body is said to contain the DNA “blueprint” for the entire organism, Steinem’s individual is called upon to realize itself in the whole.71 In such a model, individual change would inevitably lead to social transformations, as long as the individual led a life of self-expression rather than conformity.

Assuming Weber’s central insight to have been correct, then in the face of the dramatic transformation in the forms of contemporary capitalism, some new ethos ought to be unfolding right before our eyes.

Why have people embraced self-help groups—what do they get there that they don’t get in political organizations?

A sense of personal security is anomalous, while anxiety is the norm. To manage this anxiety, individuals have been advised not only to work longer and harder but also to invest in themselves, manage themselves, and continuously improve themselves.

Maintaining the fiction of the autonomous self, a laborious fiction that is ultimately unsustainable, has become hard work.