In his essay on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin wrote that the poet addressed an audience that, unlike the audience for earlier lyric poets, was highly distractible. “Willpower and the ability to concentrate,” he noted dryly, “are not their strong points.” Benjamin here invoked a key modernist theme: the impairment of the will in modern times. This theme was taken up by a wide range of modern thinkers and movements. From Nietzsche's “will to power” to the National Socialist fantasy of a “triumph of the will,” this diagnosis of the modern condition as one of will-impairment, and the necessity of its overcoming, mobilized tremendous discursive, ideological, and cultural forces—forces that, as Michael Cowan writes in his excellent study, themselves became important constitutive elements of modernity.

A primary site of this cultural anxiety concerning modern man's loss of willpower, notes Cowan, was the late-nineteenth-century discourse about nervousness. Amid the darkening political and economic conjunctures of the fin-de-siècle, it was widely held that traditional conceptions of personhood were in crisis, that late-nineteenth-century positivism and biological determinism had reduced the self to a “bundle of sensations,” a merely reactive entity lacking any purposeful agency or volition of its own. Cultural anxieties about individual agency and autonomy were greatly amplified in the voluminous medical literature on the problem of nervousness. The French psychologist Theodule Ribot regarded the widespread nervous disorders of his day as the all-too-natural result of the problem of will-impairment. German sociologist Georg Simmel framed the problem in terms of the hypertrophy of “objective” culture and the atrophy of “subjective” culture.

This story has been often told, but Cowan has found a fascinating and altogether novel way of retelling it, through the lens of the turn-of-the-century preoccupation with overcoming this condition of will-impairment, or abulia. Cowan has uncovered an entire industry dedicated to this project. Emerging as a response to an existential malaise that Cowan defines as rooted in the condition of “being subject to, but not subject of, modernity,” this industry offered a panoply of techniques for restoring agency within a world that seemed to deny it. “Will-therapy” became the object of a new school of treatment. Gymnastics, dance, and reform pedagogy as well were enlisted in the task of rehabilitation. If the self was beleaguered by the stimuli of the modern world, then the solution lay in rigorous commitment to the rituals and exercises of will-strengthening, to what Cowan calls the “performative production of will-power.” Adherents devised a remarkable range of practices that they imagined would put the self firmly back in control of its own destiny.

While such practices invoked earlier, religiously motivated forms of self-discipline, they also drew on the findings of contemporary psychiatry and psychophysiology. The linchpin of this modern project of will-training was its particular reworking of mind-body relations. Its adherents leaned heavily on the doctrine of psychomotor correspondences or ideo-dynamism, which had emerged out of clinical studies on hysteria, and which posited the suggestive power of pathological ideas to produce bodily symptoms. If hysteria represented a kind of nightmare of bourgeois consciousness, then paradoxically it also pointed a way out of the impasse of will-impairment. Through a kind of reverse-engineering, the power of suggestive ideas could be harnessed on the self's behalf, thus “transforming hetero-suggestion into auto-suggestion” (p. 15). Not surprisingly, hypnosis served as key tool of this transformation. While it crystallized a potent anxiety concerning the loss of agency and control, the transformation and reworking of hypnosis in a variety of auto-suggestive, will-strengthening practices fueled an equally potent fantasy of restoring the sovereignty of the self—the fantasy, as Cowan puts it, of the “will's freedom from material, social, biological determinations” (p. 177).

Gymnastics, dance, and other aspects of body-culture also became central features of this project of will-training, a project that paradoxically sought to restore the autonomy of the mind via bodily performance. Through close readings of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze's school of rhythmic gymnastics, the canonical film “Ways to Health and Beauty,” and other manifestations of this new cult, Cowan establishes the remarkable cultural resonance of a movement promising what he calls “liberation from the psychosomatic prison-house of abulia” (p. 141). For the adherents of this cult, will-training became a magic bullet, the antidote to nervousness, alienation in the workplace, breakdown on the battlefield, and a variety of other maladies of modern life.

While this discourse about the will and its imagined restoration has an obviously defensive, anti-modern dimension, it also represents, as Cowan argues, a reworking of an eminently modern theme, one with roots in eighteenth-century discourses of popular hygiene and education. Ultimately Cowan sees will-training as part of the “longue durée of bourgeois identity formation dating back to the Enlightenment” (p. 71). It is one of the main virtues of his book that it succeeds in uncovering a genealogy of will-training both far more complex and much broader than those attuned only to the term's resonance in National Socialist ideology might anticipate.