Cult of the Will

Cult of the Will is the first comprehensive study of modernitys preoccupation with willpower. From Nietzsches will to power to the fantasy of a triumph of the will under Nazism, the willits pathologies and potential cureswas a topic of urgent debates in European modernity. In this study, Michael Cowan examines the emergence of will therapy and its impact on arts and culture in Germany after 1900. The books five chapters lead readers through cross sections of modern German cultural history, including not only literature and aesthetics but also medicine, economics, body culture, and pedagogy. Modernitys fixation on willpower helped prepare the way for fascism, but this trajectory is not Cowans main concern. His focus falls rather on more widespread technologies of the self and their role in the effort to reimagine agency for a modern subject caught up in increasingly complex systemic networks.