The Art of Gratitude by Jeremy David EngelsISBN: 9781438469331
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
The Art of Gratitude explores how the emotional experience of gratitude has been enlisted in neoliberal governance through the language of debt. Jeremy David Engels sketches a genealogy of gratitude from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary self-help movement. One of the most striking things about gratitude, Engels finds, is how consistently it is described using the language of indebtedness. A chief purpose of this, he contends, is to make us more comfortable living lives in debt.