Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The author Samuel Smiles was a Scot who lived in mid-19th century London. His book promoted the Puritan way of life, propagating both the virtues of early Victorian enterprise as well as its author’s own social idealism. An interesting aspect of the Smiles thesis is that he did not regard self-help as selfish – the concept was indissolubly bound up with service to others.
Your next book elaborates on the content of this good managerial culture. Tell us about Self-Help.
The author Samuel Smiles was a Scot who lived in mid-19th century London. His book promoted the Puritan way of life, propagating both the virtues of early Victorian enterprise as well as its author’s own social idealism. An interesting aspect of the Smiles thesis is that he did not regard self-help as selfish – the concept was indissolubly bound up with service to others. The British, who had created the Puritan managerial culture and gave it to America, largely abandoned it in the mid-Victorian era, a century before America. However, it survived and prospers in distant Japan, in part because of Smiles’s book. Within a year of first publication in English, Self-Help had been translated into Japanese, whereupon it became one of ‘the founding texts’ of the Meiji era, the period when Japan rose to be a world power. Smiles’s book inspired a peasant farmer, Sakichi Toyoda, to found a company to manufacture textile machinery; today Sakichi’s great-grandson, Akio Toyoda, chairs its successor, Toyota Motor.
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Will Hopper is founder chairman of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London and former chair of investment bank W J Hopper & Co Limited. He has represented Greater Manchester West as a Conservative member in the European Parliament and is co-author of The Puritan Gift.
