Self-help doctrine reduced national progress to the moral character of individuals.

Evidence

‘The worth and strength of a state’, wrote Smiles, ‘depend far less on the form of its institutions than on the character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilisation is but a question of … [their] personal improvement.’ The book was about ‘character’ (akhlaq in the Arabic translation), and about the ‘moral discipline’ (tarbiya) by which those of an idle character are made ‘industrious’ (mujtahid). The habit of industry (al-ijtihad) is the moral quality upon which the state and its progress depend. ‘National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s Protestant ethic and the Victorian moralization of industry — the same character/economy collapse appears in Rose’s ‘Governing the Soul’.