The Invention of Creativity

Be creative! In today’s society the pressure and the desire to be creative and to produce ever newer things is extraordinarily widespread.

In the course of his investigation, Reckwitz shows how we are living in an age dominated by radical and restrictive processes of societal aestheticisation.

»With great acuity and scientific documentation, cultural scientist Andreas Reckwitz explains why creativity is today seen as a ›natural‹, human faculty, that we consider to be indispensible for our personal development and expression.« Frankfurter Rundschau

»Reckwitz excels in his ability to distil the results of these studies into a concise and coherent analysis. This book is unquestionably worth reading – for anyone who wonders if and why they need, and want, to be creative all the time.« dradio.de

»It is astonishing, as Reckwitz cogently argues, that it is not that the economy has systematically undercut and commercialised the field of creativity, but that on the contrary creativity itself has long since become the driving force and the essential characteristic of today’s global economy. As a result, this is not a book exclusively for cultural sociologists and creative professionals, but rather for anyone who would like to understand what drives our society today and where it is headed.« Fixpoetry

»The Invention of Creativity by Andreas Reckwitz, published as part of the Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft series, is truly a revelation. While everyone is busy falling for the hype surrounding creativity and declaring it a basic human trait with the motto ›everyone’s creative‹, Reckwitz pulls the sociological emergency brake and questions the wholesale stylisation of creativity as a norm, as dogma – with the slogan: ›We want to be creative; and we have to be creative‹. The book is not a mere historical reconstruction, however, but rather an ambitious attempt to understand creativity and our insatiable appetite for novelty through the lens of sociological theory.« changeX