On April 27, 1979, workers in the production, trucking, shipping, and kitchen departments at Erewhon Trading Company voted to form a union affiliated with Local 925 of the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). Discontent had been brewing for some time. The company began in 1966 as a small “macrobiotic” grocer with two hundred customers and a single storefront on Newbury Street in Boston. After its incorporation in 1968, Erewhon moved into a larger and more upscale store and, more importantly, purchased a warehouse and began wholesale distribution of its natural foods products to regional purchasers. It also expanded to Los Angeles, with the same storefront-and-warehouse business model. By 1973, Erewhon had fifteen thousand customers at its stores and almost three hundred thousand wholesale customers. It was a big business, or at least a bigger business—like the natural foods industry overall, which saw its sales multiply from $60 million to $600 million between 1968 and 1973.
The first union in the sector, the Alternative Food Workers Alliance (AFWA), was formed in 1975 at Westbrae Foods in Berkeley, California. The example of the AFWA encouraged disgruntled Erewhon workers to form a caucus in late 1976 to discuss their grievances with management, who responded with a mix of generous benefit proposals and heavy-handed union-busting tactics. Two years later, the Erewhon union was a done deal. “In addition to concerns about wages, working conditions, and medical benefits,” the New Age Journal reported, “Erewhon employees cite as a major reason for the unionizing effort . . . their feelings that behind Erewhon’s New Age image lay the reality of an uncaring and unresponsive management willing to exploit them just as any ‘straight’ business might.”
It was not supposed to be like this. For Erewhon’s founders, their interest in macrobiotic food was an expression of their commitment to the Buddhist concept of “Right Livelihood,” which emphasized meaningful work as much as wholesome eating. Like other counterculture business leaders, they assumed an intrinsic synergy between the values that imbued their products and the values that animated the firm’s work environment. Accounts of working at Erewhon in the late 1960s were isomorphic to contemporary accounts of working for Steve Jobs or Ralph Nader. There was a charismatic entrepreneur: Paul Hawken, an early employee who took over management of the firm from its founders, Aveline and Michio Kushi, in 1967 and oversaw its incorporation and expansion. Hawken’s management was scrupulously anti-bureaucratic. Before the expansion, decisions were made as often as possible by consensus of the store’s six employees. There was “no structure,” Hawken proudly insisted, “no rules, no by-laws or regulations.” The result, in Hawken’s telling, was a familiar atmosphere of inexhaustible devotion to work. “All of us felt in our bones that we had a tiger by the tail,” Hawken wrote in 1973. “A sort of giddy optimism pervaded the new store, abetted by all of us working 12 to 20 hours a day . . . The intensity was so thick you could scoop it up and bag it. All of us felt like passengers on a very fast vehicle bound for unknown places.”
If “economic man” was the symbolic image that held the industrial age together, the image at the heart of the New Age would, perhaps, be the entrepreneur.
The vehicle proved to be moving a little too fast for Hawken, however. That same year, overwhelmed by the magnitude of Erewhon’s growth, he resigned his position, sold his 25 percent ownership share, and moved to an intentional community in Findhorn, a village in northern Scotland. After a brief sojourn he divorced his first wife and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area with an Australian woman, Anna, whom he had met at Findhorn. Financial mismanagement swiftly reduced him to near bankruptcy, which he aimed to rectify by writing a book about Findhorn while working as a gardener. It helped that, at least among countercultural business enthusiasts, he was extremely famous. Bantam Books purchased the Findhorn book for $200,000. Other aspiring countercultural entrepreneurs in the Bay Area began to seek out Hawken at home to enlist his advice in managing their businesses, which bestowed on Hawken a burgeoning reputation as a “turn-around genius.” The Erewhon name also got Hawken in the door at SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), a think tank in nearby Menlo Park with an illustrious roster of corporate partners.
Hawken’s chief admirer at SRI was the engineer and social scientist Willis Harman, who directed the Institute’s “futurology” operations. The future kept the money flowing at SRI. Harman’s group was one of the temples of “scenario planning” in the 1970s, an approach to planning that emphasized research-based but imaginative, even science-fictional narrative writing over formal, mathematical modeling, and which piqued the interest of a variety of corporate power players—most notably Royal Dutch Shell—worried that traditional planning approaches were no match for the decade’s social and economic dislocation.
Harman, however, had grander ambitions for futurology. His overarching aim was to lay sophisticated theoretical foundations for what was beginning to be known as the “New Age” movement. New Agers were alums of the counterculture of the 1960s who were devoted to a particularly rigorous set of “alternative lifestyle” practices, including natural-foods diets, holistic and homeopathic health remedies, and spiritual disciplines modeled on East Asian and North American Indigenous religious traditions. They were also distinguished by their commitment—hence the name—to the conviction that these lifestyle practices would, in rather short order, become nearly universal in Western societies, a transformation that would amount to the inauguration of a new epoch in the history of human cultural evolution. Harman had two goals: to lend these concepts intellectual respectability, and to convince New Agers that businesses like Hawken’s Erewhon were the most effective vehicles for bringing about the social transformation they desired.
The Harman group’s most extensive statement on these questions came in a report titled Changing Images of Man, published by SRI in 1974 (shortly before Hawken’s arrival) and in a mass-market edition in 1982. Changing Images of Man was prepared by a lengthy list of collaborators headlined by the Sarah Lawrence mythology professor Joseph Campbell, who shared Harman’s mix of New Agey spiritual beliefs and right-wing economic politics. The report invoked Campbell’s scholarly authority to expound a scheme in which human civilization proceeded from one “age” to another, each anchored in a core “Image of Man” embodied in cultural symbols and mythological artifacts. Contemporary Western civilization, the authors charged, had become an “industrial state,” in thrall to a one-dimensionally “economic” Image of Man. Industrial capitalism and social-democratic policymaking, on this account, were equivalently dehumanizing: “Just as the complexities of ecology fare badly from single-valued approaches of such physical technologies as DDT,” the authors wrote, “so too do the complex needs of the human system from treatments such as typify exclusively allopathic (drug-based) medicine, or a minimum-wage law.”
The solution was to abandon the effort to respond to the ills of corporate bureaucracy with “public bureaucracy.” Instead, society should embrace “creative voluntarism,” which resonated better “with the individualism of the frontier and the energetic activism of American enterprise.” The ensuing age of “human capitalism” would restore access to “meaningful work” by eliminating “discouragements to entrepreneurship and responsibility” within “massive bureaucratic structures.” If “economic man” was the symbolic image that held the industrial age together, the image at the heart of the New Age would, perhaps, be the entrepreneur.
Paul Hawken fit right in. He was appointed the lead author on a new project, to be published concurrently with the mass-market edition of Changing Images of Man, that aimed to present the Harman group’s work in more accessible language. The volume that Hawken ultimately produced with James Ogilvy and Peter Schwartz, Seven Tomorrows, focused on the calling card of the SRI futures division: scenario planning. Hawken and his coauthors presented seven possible trajectories for the coming decades, each presented as a fictional potted history of the recent past written in the early twenty-first century. Most were dystopian, depicting the logic of the industrial state eventuating in authoritarianism, ecological collapse, nuclear Armageddon, or a Hobbesian war of all against all. The scenario with the happiest ending was entitled “Living Within Our Means,” which began with escalating ecological and political crisis but wound up producing an era of spiritual renewal and social decentralization, with citizens rediscovering “strengths that had long been forgotten in the relative ease of contemporary life.” In this future, “the United States seems to crackle with a kind of excitement that others envy,” bogged down instead by “cumbersome administrative answers to complex geopolitical problems.”
Hawken and his coauthors concluded by urging that something much like this pleasant outcome could still be attained without the cataclysmic prologue. Once more the key was entrepreneurship, operating within a relatively deregulated economic landscape. “Precisely where we need a market economy to stimulate innovation and efficiency, for example, in the administration of social services, we see massive and inefficient bureaucracies,” the authors complained, echoing contemporary calls for privatization. They asserted that “in recent years a number of analysts have succeeded in demonstrating that the fundamental tenets of Keynesian and neo-Keynesian economics are inadequate,” declining to cite their sources, although one suspects these analysts may have been professors at a certain university on the south side of Chicago. Only by revitalizing “traditions of hard work and cultural solidarity” through “small businesses, cottage industry, and . . . the dignity of work” would it be possible to “stimulate productivity without resorting to socialist bureaucracy,” Hawken and his collaborators argued. They attributed this wisdom to the movement they called the “Transformational Alternative,” which had “performed the service of moving public debate away from obsolete argument between Right and Left.” For its “most comprehensive statement” they recommended a recent book by Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy.
It was an appropriate choice. Remembered today for its status as an early-eighties New Age Bible, for its Hair-inspired astrological title and motifs, and for its kookily optimistic tone, we less often recall the extent to which The Aquarian Conspiracy was a manifesto for entrepreneurship. “Entrepreneurship fills many of the needs of transformation,” Ferguson wrote, using her preferred word for the spiritual rebirth that would define the New Age. The titular “conspiracy,” a constellation of individuals that Ferguson encountered through her career as a countercultural journalist who literally breathed the spirit of the New Age together, was among other things a network of entrepreneurs. “The Aquarian Conspiracy,” Ferguson wrote, “encourages the individual in the lonely enterprise of changing jobs, starting a business, changing the practice of a profession, revitalizing institutions.” This mutual support could take humble forms: A group of friends in Washington, D.C., started a “go-for-it-group” to support each other in pursuing their “vocational goals.” “Within a year,” Ferguson reported, “several had begun to realize their dreams,” abandoning the establishment for an entrepreneurial life: “A librarian had started her own acting company, an attorney had opened a center for the study of psychology in law, another member turned her farm into an artists’ colony, and a bureaucrat resigned his job to go into business with friends.”
Ferguson argued that Aquarian Conspirators could also encourage entrepreneurship within their existing workplaces through the proper management style. “In the same way that a gifted teacher releases capacities in the learner, a gifted manager helps workers realize potential skills, enterprise, creativity,” Ferguson wrote, in a perspicuous restatement of the postwar vision of democratic leadership. “Much as the new paradigm of education sees in all of us the creative potential we once attributed only to geniuses, management trainers are beginning to look at all employees as potential self-managers who can begin to think like entrepreneurs.” Dynamic, entrepreneurial managers had the ability to launch their employees into the New Age through their example and encouragement.
Many aspects of Ferguson’s account of the Aquarian Conspiracy required an imaginative leap, to say the least, but the idea that there was a burgeoning movement of New Agers devoted to encouraging their peers to embrace entrepreneurship was firmly grounded in reality. One of its pillars was the San Francisco-based Briarpatch Society, led since 1974 by Dick Raymond, a Harvard Business School alum who himself had “dropped out” of the corporate world to publish Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Briarpatch described itself as a “network,” but it was really a nonprofit consultancy; member businesses would pay anywhere from $30 to $110, depending on their size, for six months of free advice from Raymond and his team. At its peak in 1977, there were over six hundred Briarpatch members throughout the Bay Area—“ice cream shops, grocery stores, teachers of Tantric yoga, toy manufacturers,” according to a profile in the New Age magazine The Sun, plus a camera shop in the Castro operated by a man named Harvey Milk. From 1981 to 1986, Briarpatch operated a small business school, the Noren Institute, which offered courses on subjects such as “Marketing Without Advertising” and “Running a One Person Business.” It operated mainly by taking students to visit Briarpatch member businesses. The Briarpatch directors also encouraged members to invest in each other, providing an alternative to traditional capital markets that were seen as impersonal and inaccessible.
Arguably the most significant institution of the New Age entrepreneurship movement was the School for Entrepreneurs in Tarrytown, New York, founded by Robert Schwartz. Schwartz owned a mansion in Tarrytown that he had converted into a retreat center for corporate executives from firms such as IBM and AT&T. In the mid-1970s, Schwartz became obsessed with the New Age movement and its unexpected resonance with his own pro-business philosophy. (Peter Drucker, he believed, was “the best writer on management by far.”) He invited its luminaries, including Joseph Campbell, E. F. Schumacher, and Esalen founder Michael Murphy, to “salons” at the Tarrytown house that focused on theorizing entrepreneurship in New Age language. Campbell, for instance, would opine that the entrepreneur was “the modern era’s version of the hero with a thousand faces” that he analyzed in his most famous book.
The promise of countercultural entrepreneurship was that through right livelihood and force of will it was possible to transcend the antinomies of work and leisure.
One salon attendee was Eric Utne, the editor of the New Age Journal. Utne put Schwartz on the cover in 1976, pointing Uncle Sam-like at the reader above a headline that blared, “American business needs you!” The accompanying interview showed that Schwartz knew his audience: “Entrepreneurs and members of the counterculture are both essentially inner-directed; they’re interested in change and innovation,” he pronounced. “They don’t march to other people’s drumbeats.” Prompted by an extremely enthusiastic reader response, Utne encouraged Schwartz to start an entrepreneurial educational program at the Tarrytown house. Twenty-four aspiring entrepreneurs completed the first run of the course in early 1977, drawn by an advertisement in New Age Journal. “The new entrepreneurs,” wrote the New York Times in an article on Schwartz’s school, “feel that they are creating a compelling alternative to traditional corporate life,” providing “rewarding work,” high-quality goods and services, and “energy-efficient” operations. “And they make a profit.”
Officially, however, profit-making was supposed to be beside the point. “Being in business is not about making money,” Paul Hawken asserted in his 1987 book Growing a Business. “It is a way to become who you are.” At their best, businesses were simply “faithful and uncluttered expressions of yourself.” This maxim distinguished the culture of New Age entrepreneurship from the roughly contemporary small-business scene associated with New Left movements: Black Power bookstores and feminist cafés were not understood as expressions of their founders’ individuality but as modes of participation in a collective political struggle. It also helps explain why New Age guides to entrepreneurship were almost exclusively focused on starting a business. If profit was incidental, then everything depended on that initial moment—on the entrepreneur’s ability to imbue the business at its roots with their unique personal spirit. There were no laws of motion intrinsic to the capitalist economy that entrepreneurs would have to confront, only the temptations of avarice and sloth. “It is well within your power as a businessperson to create an atmosphere that is not stifling,” Hawken insisted.
Perhaps this is why Hawken never spoke publicly about the unionization campaign at Erewhon. Without casting aspersions on the integrity of his successors, he simply did not have the resources to explain what had happened. Erewhon executives were no doubt convinced that their intentions were pure, and that there were no problems that good intentions could not solve. The issues that the workers’ caucus had raised could “be solved only through our own self-reflection and our own improvements of spirit and daily operations as well,” co-owner Michio Kushi wrote to employees. By a margin of forty-two to nineteen, they disagreed.
The eruption of class consciousness at Erewhon illustrates the tensions that persisted within the cohort of professional and managerial workers who came of age during the counterculture (or shortly thereafter) and were increasingly encouraged by their bosses—and occasionally their friends—to conceptualize themselves as entrepreneurs rather than employees. The promise of countercultural entrepreneurship was that through right livelihood and force of will it was possible to transcend the antinomies of work and leisure; success and self-expression; managerial hierarchy and anti-authoritarian self-governance; the masculinity of the traditional corporate ranks and the femininity of the casualized and domestic workforce.
But all too often the male “yuppie” of the 1980s found himself holding on firmly to the first horn of this dilemma while grasping only listlessly at the second—working incessantly, climbing new sorts of success ladders, still subordinate to a boss who was much like other bosses except perhaps in the intensity of his personal presence in the workplace, or else transfigured into a boss in his own right, overseeing the exploitation of workers in hospitals and Silicon Valley factories and natural foods warehouses who occasionally struck back with familiar class struggle tactics. The entrepreneurial knowledge workers ran headlong into the personal domination endemic to the employment relation, but also what William Clare Roberts has characterized as the impersonal domination of the capitalist market—the force of structural causality that compels capitalists, whether they like it or not, to act like capitalists.
Dwelling on the frustrations and failures of counterculture entrepreneurship, not just its ecstatic world-changing impulses, provides a useful counterweight to more straightforward stories of the emergence and consolidation of a “new spirit of capitalism” from the counterculture (or the “spirit of 1968,” in the contemporary European context). The ethos of counterculture entrepreneurship was certainly an important moment in the evanescence of the New Left—and in the rechanneling of the anti-bureaucracy sentiment of the professional middle class away from its former solidarity with radical working-class movements and toward new aspirations for a revitalized, more “human” capitalism. But in the aftermath, there was doubt and disappointment as well as bland, euphoric optimism. What mattered was that this ambivalence was channeled inward, toward personal self-examination and self-recrimination rather than social and political critique.
Excerpted from Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America by Erik Baker. Copyright Harvard University Press, 2025.