CONCEPT
Romantic Capitalism
The cultural formation in which work is experienced not merely as duty but as love — as a passionate engagement that fulfills the deepest needs of the self, making exploitation feel like self-expression.
Romantic capitalism is Illouz's name for the successor to the Protestant work ethic Max Weber identified at the turn of the twentieth century. Where Weber's subject felt the duty to work as a calling imposed by a theological imperative, the romantic capitalist experiences work as love—as passionate engagement with a vocation through which her truest self is made visible. The demand that work be fulfilling is cultural, not managerial. No one forces the builder to love her work. The culture ensures that not loving one's work is experienced as a personal failure, a sign of insufficient self-development. This reframing eliminates resistance at its root: the worker who loves her work does not experience exploitation as exploitation. It feels like self-expression.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The formation developed through the twentieth century via the convergence of Bell's creative class, Silicon Valley's passion-as-prerequisite ideology, and the broader cultural romance with work as identity. By the 2020s, the demand