WORK
The New Spirit of Capitalism
Boltanski and Chiapello's 1999 masterwork tracing how capitalism absorbed the artistic critique of the 1960s and emerged in a new form organized around projects, networks, and flexibility.
Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999, translated 2005) is Boltanski's most influential book, co-authored with Eve Chiapello. Through comparative analysis of French management literature from the 1960s and the 1990s, it demonstrates that capitalism periodically renews its legitimacy by absorbing the critiques leveled against it. The artistic critique of the 1960s — demanding authenticity, creativity, and liberation from bureaucratic stifling — was not defeated by capitalism's defenders. It was incorporated, its vocabulary transformed into the operating language of a new organizational form built around project-based work, network coordination, and the demand that workers bring their whole selves — creativity, passion, personality — to the job.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's methodological innovation was to treat management literature as primary evidence of capitalism's self-understanding. Boltanski and Chiapello built a corpus of 60 influential management texts from each period and analyzed the vocabulary, the justifications, the figures of exemplary practice. What they found was a wholesale transformation: the 1960s