The claim that people buy ideas rather than products, the conceit at the core of today’s branding-design complex, was at the time a startling and somewhat unsettling assertion.

Through the decades, self-help authors had helped members of the growing urban white-collar class see themselves as independent smallholders despite feeling increasingly like slaves to a system they could neither control nor understand. Using rags-to-riches anecdotes to demonstrate that everyone is master of his own destiny, the genre is

As we saw, the concept of creativity was forged as a psychological solution to structural problems, in an age that preferred to see problems in psychological terms. In many ways we are still in such an era—see how quickly we turn to medical and neurological explanations for widespread problems like loneliness and depression that have profound

Yes, institutional calcification is a real phenomenon, and leaders who come from outside and aren’t afraid to shake things up can be incredibly generative (as long as “shaking things up” isn’t just a euphemism for privatizing, downsizing, etc.). But when the whole business of “changing the world” reflexively demeans career experts and specialists

In the creative act, Maslow wrote, we become “free of other people, which in turn, means that we become much more ourselves, our Real Selves.” This authentic self was not the social self that dominated interwar thought but the absolutely autonomous self, free of any entanglements or obligations. Like a modern-day Rousseau, Maslow celebrated the

The problem, Bass reiterated, was not the method itself, but the way in which it had become “a substitute and symbol of creativity.”

It’s as if the intervention itself—an intervention against the “Great Man” theory of history (that nonetheless regularly praises great men), and against the supposed elitism and obscurantism of the Romantics (that nonetheless tries to re-enchant our everyday existence)—is what the concept of creativity allows people to do.

By insisting that everything from scientific theories to battlefield maneuvers to consumer gadgets to parenting tricks were the results of “creative thinking,” Osborn reduced each particular feat to an interchangeable unit called the “idea,” which anyone could have. This was the dignifying sleight of hand, the flattering oversimplification behind

Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of “creativity.”