The dynamic concept and practice of fitness today

Fitness is different from sports. Though sport can, of course, be many things and take on many forms, it is usually defined as physical competition according to a set of standardized rules, with competitors striving to outdo opponents and set records. Sport tends to be practiced in a bureaucratically organized system of classes and leagues.Footnote ⁹ Fitness, by contrast, addresses a more general ability of the body, and its practice is rather unorganized. Fitness is neither about setting records nor about winning races or medals. Being fit and working on one’s fitness can mean many different things. Very concretely, it can mean surviving an online “Monday night SWEAT meetup” with a global fitness celebrity, conquering and enjoying the twenty-one hairpin turns up to L’Alpe d’Huez on a bike, jogging a Friday evening loop leisurely, or simply taking the stairs instead of the elevator. It does not really matter which practice or achievement we talk about when we talk about fitness. Fitness is conceived not as a particular achievement or a substantive attribute of the body, as philosopher João Tziminadis put it, “but rather in terms of conditions of possibility: being stronger, smarter, and longer-lived should be the aim.”Footnote ¹⁰ Thus fitness is about the ability to do and to achieve things with our bodies, and about wanting to improve the ability to do and achieve things. Both the pursuit of fitness and the state of being fit can be pleasurable, and at the same time mean the voluntary submission under the regulatory ideal of a well-working body. The practice of increasing strength and physical ability is as rewarding and grants as much social recognition as the consequent achievements themselves. Seen against the backdrop of its unsubstantial meaning, fitness can be understood as reaching beyond the body by indicating a general ability for self-conduct and self-government.

When magazines, health insurance providers, government programs, or academic publications discuss fitness, they tend to stress a close relation between fitness and health. This close relation is emphasized by philosopher and sociologist Karen Volkwein, who defines fitness as “health achieved through training.”Footnote ¹¹ This seemingly clear-cut definition has a couple of complex connotations. First, as we know from personal experience, fitness does not endure. Maintaining it demands constant investment – “training,” as Volkwein says. Living in the age of fitness does not allow for breaks. We should be active and conceive of the body as a present participle – as being endlessly in the making.Footnote ¹² Second, the verb “to achieve” indicates that undertaking a certain effort (for instance taking the stairs instead of the elevator) is seen as a matter of our own choice and responsibility. Understanding human beings as making their own choices means seeing them as responsible and competent agents of their achievements, of their health, and of every other aspect of their lives. This has important ramifications.Footnote ¹³ If health is something we can “achieve” through investment, and if these investments seem a matter of our choices, then the responsibility for our health is put into our hands. As sociologist Stefanie Graefe writes, “the idea that the modern subject can and should invest in and work at themselves assumes that this investment is not the effect of authoritarian coercion, but takes place voluntarily.”Footnote ¹⁴

For understanding the nexus of fitness, liberalism, and power, it is important to note that the power of fitness does not operate through coercion, but rather through enticing voluntary submission. “Submission,” writes philosopher Manon Garcia, “is the fruit of the situation.”Footnote ¹⁵ Nobody forces us at gunpoint to exercise; we choose to do so. At the same time, the promise of health, as well as success, achievement and recognition, is powerful, and even more so when those outcomes are seen as the result of our own striving. This steers our conduct and nudges us to work on ourselves, yet without coercing us to do so. Without voluntary choice, self-government, and agency, fitness would not count as achievement. All three are embedded in the concept of fitness. Unpacking this relationship and the ties between fitness, freedom, and power requires exploring how fitness in all its permutations has been fabricated in history. This demands a long historical perspective, starting even before liberal discourse and politics became so powerful. Writing a history of the present is not to presume clear-cut or even causal relations between the past and the present, but to understand history as forming the space in which the present can unfold.Footnote ¹⁶

Static fitness in increasingly dynamic times

Fitness had a very different meaning from its present one before the age of liberalism. In early modern times, it meant the opposite of human agency, the opposite of the desire, will, and the ability to achieve and to alter one’s existence for the better. Fitness was static rather than dynamic. Back then, it meant that one’s position in life was God-given and eternally fixed, and that people had to accept their lives as they were – as “fitting” for them as a person. This meaning of fitness was in the sense of “to fit into something.” British novelist Henry Fielding provided a pointed depiction of this static understanding of fitness in his 1749 novel Tom Jones. The story is a commentary on eighteenth-century English society, and the changes it was undergoing at the time. Whenever the title character’s teacher, aptly named Mr. Square, rants against the changing times and advocates the traditional notions of a rigid social order, he invokes “the unalterable rule of right and the eternal fitness of things.” Obviously for Mr. Square, fitness meant that things do not change, and that a person’s position in life is immutable because it is ordained by God or nature. In early modern European estate-based societies, feeling an ambitious desire to advance one’s station was tantamount to sin and rebellion.Footnote ¹⁷

In Fielding’s novel, Mr. Square is a reactionary character. He opposes the philosophical, political, and social changes emerging on the horizon that would introduce agency and self-government as political principles and new ideals.Footnote ¹⁸ These principles were related to new concepts of society and what was seen as its “origin,” which were ideas being discussed with increasing intensity at that moment in history. These new concepts no longer presupposed a divine power at the beginning of human society, but were premised instead on a social contract between principally free human beings who had chosen to form a body politic with the goal of improving their lot. This transformation in political thought was foundational even though, as philosophers and historians have shown in recent decades, this freedom was white and male. I will come back to this later.Footnote ¹⁹

To fathom this new idea of freedom, voluntary choice, ambition, and a society based on a social contract, it is helpful to go back to the writings of political theorist John Locke. In the late seventeenth century, the intellectual godfather of liberalism had conceptualized the contract society as a “voluntary union” of naturally free men.Footnote ²⁰ According to Locke, men actively concluded a contract to form a society, and the type of power that stood at its beginning was voluntary and bottom-up instead of sovereign and top-down. At the same time, according to Locke the contract was inspired by a natural human desire for happiness, which he posited as the driving force of human existence. Before Locke, English philosophers had condemned a human desire for happiness as “unlawful,” “restless,” and willfully rebellious, whereas Locke presented it as enshrined in humaneness.Footnote ²¹ But human beings are not overpowered by this desire, he argued. They are not forced to put commands of the mind into practice. Rather, he depicted them as endowed with the ability to relate to their desire and choose whether to convert desire into action, or not. According to Locke, the ability to act upon one’s own choices makes man a genuinely political being. It empowers men to form a “voluntary union” in the first place.Footnote ²² Power in this new type of society is the ability to choose voluntarily, and in this spirit Locke specified power “as able to make … change” and as belonging “only to agents.”Footnote ²³ These agents act voluntarily, yet they are guided in acting by the promise that their desire will be satisfied: their desire for achievement, happiness, health, landed property, recognition, security, wealth, and many other things.Footnote ²⁴

For Locke, the relation between desire and action was one between mind and body, which is particularly noteworthy in a history of fitness. He depicted human beings as able to decide whether they transform a desire of the mind into an action of the body. No matter how strong their desire might be, according to Locke human beings can “begin or forbear, continue or end” willful motions, such as taking a step or lifting an arm, which are meant to put commands of the mind into bodily practice and satisfy desire: “The [beginning or] forbearance, of that action, consequent to such order or command of the mind, is called voluntary.”Footnote ²⁵

It is well known that the social contract is a construct, providing a theoretical and political basis for how power and agency ought to be considered. Yet only a minority of people could claim the rights that were supposedly guaranteed to everyone.Footnote ²⁶ Membership in this voluntary union, as well as its benefits, was the reserve of white and able-bodied men. To put it differently, the Lockean subject with the ability to convert willpower into physical motion was white, male, and able; that is, equipped with a well-working mind and body. Moreover, white men saw themselves as endowed with the right to decide for everyone else, whom they perceived as unable to act prudently and properly on their own command.Footnote ²⁷

Locke himself embodies this understanding of freedom and voluntary choice as genuine human ability and political principal on one hand, while practicing exclusion and domination on the other hand. In his new political anthropology, he declared decision making and voluntary motion key principles of the human species and posited his philosophy in direct opposition to the authoritarian rule of the British king. However, since the 1660s Locke had participated in British settler colonialism with all its exclusionary and genocidal consequences. In 1669, he was among the authors of the constitution of the recently founded colony of Carolina, and that document explicitly subjugated Black slaves to the authoritarian rule of white freemen.Footnote ²⁸

Despite these tensions between Locke’s philosophy and his practices, his conception of the social contract introduced a new form of power to the polity. Instead of building on sovereign power, Locke’s polity drew on the power of desire, the power of the promise, and the power of human agency and achievement. This new kind of power entailed the power of distinction (between those who are portrayed as more or less able to handle their desires through prudent willful motion), and the power of exclusion (from the right to a self-determined handling of desire). It also entailed the normative power of a liberal, ambitious, self-governing subjectivity as a regulatory ideal, as well as the power to nudge others to submit voluntarily to this ideal and act in a particular manner (for instance by fostering certain desires or by making certain voluntary choices highly normative).Footnote ²⁹

What does all this have to do with fitness and the body? Obviously, the modern, dynamic concept of ambitious fitness resonates with the Lockean idea of human agency, voluntary choice, and the desire for achievement. After all, fitness in its modern shape is nothing but the voluntary conversion of willpower into motion with the aim of satisfying one’s desires. Fitness promises to empower us to satisfy the purportedly given (yet historically shaped) desires for advancement and a good life, and to live up to the ideal of liberal subjecthood. To put it differently: the voluntarily moving body is self-government in practice and at the heart of this new political formation.Footnote ³⁰ John Locke, again, claimed that “men’s happiness, or misery, is most part of their own making. He, whose mind directs not wisely, will never take the right way; and he, whose body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it.”Footnote ³¹ Thus both the social contract and fitness are built on the dynamic ability of voluntary motion. Both have been ableist concepts from the beginning, because they exclude those who are portrayed as not able or not wanting to move, while holding the individual responsible for their ability and for their own life course.Footnote ³² Therefore political scientist Stacey Clifford Simplican proposes to read Locke’s social contract “as a capacity contract, which bases political membership on a threshold level of capacity and excludes anyone who falls below.” The ability to move voluntarily is key to being acknowledged as a fully functional subject. It is essential to a society based on the capacity contract and on the regulatory ideal of fit and ambitious subjecthood.Footnote ³³

Fitness in the new republic

American founders enthused about the United States as a voluntary union of states and men. In 1791, Thomas Paine, who was among the most influential intellectual spokesmen of the American project, maintained that “there is no will but the voluntary will of the people.”Footnote ³⁴ With the creation of the United States, the principle and practice of improvement and of working on the self and one’s abilities gained political traction. This is perfectly expressed by the Declaration of Independence from 1776. By declaring “the pursuit of happiness” a basic right next to life and liberty, this founding document established the practice of self-governing ambition at the political center of the new society. In a history of dynamic fitness as ambition for achievement, it is more than a nitpicky distinction to note that it was not happiness itself that was declared a basic right, but its active pursuit. Happiness demanded ambitious striving.Footnote ³⁵ Pursuing happiness and the satisfaction of desire were based on, as we have learned from John Locke, the genuine ability to convert willpower into motion with the aim of improving one’s existence.

This practice was not yet called fitness back then, and self-work did not yet focus on the body. Yet, from the late eighteenth century onwards, striving for improvement would turn into a key practice in a liberal society, stressing individual ability to achieve things, no matter what exactly these things were. This meant the beginnings of a dynamic understanding of the self and society. It differed substantially from Mr. Square’s static “eternal fitness of things,” which, by the nineteenth century, American authors would despise as an aristocratic, British conception of fitness.Footnote ³⁶ As historian Douglas Bradburn has pointed out, in the early years of the American Republic, it was quite unclear what being an American citizen exactly meant. However, Americans knew that American citizenship meant not being subjected to external authority and force, but demanded the capability to engage proactively in civic practices and strive for achievement.Footnote ³⁷

In the early republic, members of the emerging middle class were not so sure how widespread and robust a capability for and will to self-government were among the majority of Americans. Understanding liberty as achievement was full of dangers, as US House member Fisher Ames from Massachusetts wrote in 1805: “The ever-varying and often inordinate desires” of the people threatened to lead to anarchy, and “the individual, who is left to act according to his own humour, is not governed at all.”Footnote ³⁸ Doubts about lower-class people’s ability for voluntary self-government were widespread, and American politicians pointed out that in a body politic without external authority, they needed to learn and improve their ability for self-government.Footnote ³⁹ A plethora of strategies and tactics, from self-help books to reformatories and penitentiaries, were meant to teach Americans how to govern themselves, channel their desires in a productive direction, and live a life of responsible decision-making. Even though penitentiaries in particular used coercion and often violence, their purpose was to teach the art of self-control and proper self-conduct to those who had failed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Since the founding era, leading characters of the new republic proclaimed the benefits of physical activity for the well-being of the individual. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, recommended two hours of walking or horseback riding every day. Yet in a history of fitness, Jefferson’s advice must be read with two caveats. First, it foreshadows the exclusionary power of fitness, because it was clearly directed at the Virginian gentleman, not enslaved Black Americans (including those owned by Jefferson himself) or ordinary farmers and laborers, who didn’t have the time or horses to spare. Second, in the first decades of the new republic, bodily exercise was not yet praised in a systematic manner or conceived of as a citizenship practice. Even among the white upper classes and the emerging middle classes, physical training took hold only gradually over the course of the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1820s, however, some pioneering educators began embracing it. Several American states introduced Northern European gymnastics and other exercise practices such as fencing and swimming to their school and college curricula. Francis Wayland, president of Brown University, praised the benefits of “regular physical exercise” for the intellect.Footnote ⁴¹

In the 1830s, exercise discourse and politics began to address broader audiences as part of a larger health movement stressing issues like temperance, dietary reform, and better ventilation in homes and workplaces. Exercise advocates were sounding the alarm over softening individual bodies and the presumed consequences for the nation as a whole. In public magazines and books, authors were questioning a physically untrained man’s capacity for achievement and therefore for living up to the demands on citizens of a free society. First and foremost, rising urbanization was seen as a threat to individual and national health. The weekly New York Mirror, for instance, lamented that “a healthy man in New York would be a curiosity.” The “sedentary life” of the modern city man, the lack of physical exertion, and the neglect of exercise were said to cause bodily weakness. In the 1840s, the growing fear of bodily deterioration provided an increasingly powerful incentive to work on one’s physical ability, and it began to stimulate an exercise movement. “Physical indolence” was invoked as a major threat, and social commentators were pointing out with increasing sharpness the importance of physical ability for responsible self-government and good citizenship.Footnote ⁴² The idea that fitness for self-government, first, had a corporeal dimension and, second, was not naturally given, but had to be actively “acquired,” was soon of central importance for the liberal political narrative of the United States. That idea of dynamic fitness was both a promise and an expectation addressed to Americans who wanted to succeed as citizens of a liberal society. It was in sharp contrast to the prior notion of fitness as inherent and immutable, which was now seen as resonating with an aristocratic concept of government.Footnote ⁴³

Soon, authors in popular magazines such as the North American Review would describe training – “exercise” – as a supreme source of energy.Footnote ⁴⁴ They praised a growing physical-culture movement, and prodded readers to participate actively and “seek the blessings” of the gymnasium.Footnote ⁴⁵ The notion of making the body flourish by bringing it under submission had a specifically Protestant connotation, which was soon underscored by the so-called “muscular Christianity” movement.Footnote ⁴⁶ The praise of exercise was also reaching beyond the body, and exercise was framed as a general “philosophy of life,” and a moral virtue because “it is the rule of nature, that we shall have what we work for.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Conversely, this meant that Americans would not have what they did not work for, and by the 1860s Americans had come to view exercise as “the principal condition of development,” according to Dio Lewis, who was among the most popular fitness apostles.Footnote ⁴⁸ One’s energy level, achievements, and success in life were portrayed as dependent on one’s own choice and striving, and physical health was deemed a “necessary condition of all permanent success.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By exercising their bodies, human beings could supposedly “exorcise” diseases and “gymnasticize themselves into power.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Education reformer and US Congressman Horace Mann from Massachusetts, among others, stressed that point by saying that “every leap and spring aids in renewing the substance of the body … Every motion helps to construct a fortification against disease, and to render the body more impregnable against its attacks.”Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, a self-described “strength-seeker” wrote in an autobiographical article about his own empowerment through training: “Until I had renovated my bodily system by a faithful gymnastic training, I had been subject to nervousness, headache, indigestion, rush of blood to the head, and a weak circulation.”Footnote ⁵²

Exercise was understood as both strengthening and expressing one’s ambition and willpower. A growing discourse punctuated that exercising was a matter of individual resolve, as there were almost no external constraints to keep Americans from partaking if they chose to do so. Exercising was said to be possible wherever and whenever, “at home, in a yard, or study, and … in the fragments of hours that fall between the changes of occupations, or the visits of friends.”Footnote ⁵³ Exercise apostles acknowledged that while it might be tiring for beginners and even “stretching out an arm or a foot” was hard without training, it became easier in time and was worth the effort because it would “create health,” prevent illness, and make the use of drugs and medicine unnecessary.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly, in the 1850s and 1860s a modern and dynamic understanding of fitness in the sense of Karen Volkwein’s “health achieved through training” by a self-governing Lockean subject was in the making, grounded in the human ability to choose to convert willpower into motion. In 1862 the Atlantic Monthly underscored the significance of exercise for the body as well as for the notion of a liberal citizenship of achievement, stressing that without proper exercise not only was health hard to achieve, but “every phase of human life would be stripped of progress, success, and glory.” The article’s author, physical-culture advocate and homeopath Dio Lewis, praised what he called “artificial training” – meaning bodily exercise that was not in the context of physical labor – as “designed to fit us for the more successful performance of the duties of life.” Even though exercise was not enforced, the fitness discourse was of immense normative power. The new rationality maintained that achieving “progress, success and glory” – the very hallmarks of successful liberal subjecthood in mid-nineteenth-century America – was barely possible without “training and discipline.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The portrayal of “bodily fitness” as most important “for any given pursuit … in the conduct of life” was connected to a perception of the modern body going through a difficult time.Footnote ⁵⁶ Social critics and exercise advocates warned that in modern society, “evidences of physical deterioration crowd upon us.” The problems of urbanization were portrayed as escalating into a full-blown national crisis, and as posing a threat to both the individual and the nation.Footnote ⁵⁷ This sense of crisis was exacerbated by a popular understanding at the time of “the history of civilization” as “the history of an improving physique.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The body had clearly moved to the center of modern understandings of the body politic, society, and civilization, while the bodies of urban middle-class men in particular were seen as deteriorating instead of improving. “Modern times,” with their “city and sedentary life,” were said to produce “morbid,” “irritable,” “unwholesome,” “contentious,” “crabbed,” and “soured” men who were without a “harmoniously developed and healthfully working physical constitution,” and thus lacked the ability for proper self-government.Footnote ⁵⁹

Many middle-class men worked in occupations that would soon be called “white-collar jobs.” In modern capitalism, clerks and managers developed into a class of their own. The frailty of this new class of white men was a key topic in the discourse and politics of fitness, more so than the muscle fatigue of the laboring classes.Footnote ⁶⁰ The nonuse of the body in white-collar work seemed to threaten the vigor and masculinity of men, and their vigor (or lack thereof) was projected onto the whole nation.Footnote ⁶¹ Decades before the Census Bureau and historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the official end of the frontier in American history in the early 1890s, the lost connection to the energizing outdoors among the urban middle class stoked worry about the “mighty rampart of our nation against an army of diseases, and [against] the effemination of a whole race of men.” Exercise appeared to be the remedy.Footnote ⁶²

The increasing fear of bodily weakness needs to be understood against the backdrop of the mid-nineteenth-century momentum of Darwinism. Darwinism boosted the importance assigned to able, fit bodies, and it obviously fell on fertile ground. British naturalist Charles Darwin did not invent the theory of competition for limited resources, but he declared it the natural principal of every species’ existence on the planet. Only the fittest would survive this competition and flourish, according to Darwin, and in subsequent decades his idea would penetrate American and modern self-understanding.Footnote ⁶³ Evolution, according to Darwin, represents a dynamic process of constant variation, mutation, and adaptation.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, initially Darwin’s understanding of fitness was a traditional one of static fitness, as he claims that only those creatures that fit best into a certain environment will survive. Mutations and adaptations are thought of as chance events of nature, and not as the effect of working on one’s body. Yet slowly but steadily over the years, in the wide reception of Darwin’s work, fitness took on the modern, dynamic meaning. Fitness for survival was no longer seen as a consequence of nature and chance. Fitness was instead understood as subject to one’s ambition and physical ability to improve it for survival. This change from static to dynamic fitness pervades the US American and the transatlantic fitness discourse, and it is compellingly illustrated in German translations of Darwin’s book. Early German editions translated “the survival of the fittest” into das Überleben des Passendsten, meaning the survival of the most fitting.Footnote ⁶⁵ Later editions, however, translated “survival of the fittest” into das Überleben des Tüchtigsten, meaning the survival of the most industrious, strenuous, and capable, with capability stemming from one’s choices and efforts.Footnote ⁶⁶ The adaptation of Darwin’s theory reinforced the prevailing fitness discourse, and sealed the deal. Existence became an endless struggle for survival and for improvement, and exercise was meant to empower Americans to improve and perform well in this struggle. Even though one was not forced to exercise and did so voluntarily, working out was the effect of both one’s own choice and one’s desire to be a certain kind of subject and succeed in a naturally competitive world.Footnote ⁶⁷

As already suggested, the fear of physical decay and the invocation to work constantly to improve one’s abilities were bounded by race and gender. The shaping of oneself, of one’s body, and of society were projects portrayed as only for able-bodied white males. Several authors criticized that by complaining, for instance, that the existing exercise infrastructure offered “little chance for girls, none for old people, but little for fat people of any age, and very little for small children of either sex.” The critics maintained that “men, women, and children should be strong” and be given the opportunity to invest in their “strength of grace, flexibility, agility, and endurance.”Footnote ⁶⁸

For women, only modest exercise was considered appropriate and beneficial, and this coincided with the assumption that they were unfit for full citizenship. Being physically active was one way to oppose the prevailing deterministic view of women’s bodies, their reproductive mission, and their political potential. Having the right and duty to exercise, train the ability of one’s body, and thus prove one’s potential for full civic participation became a demand of the first women’s movement. American women would eventually hold swimming competitions, scale mountains, organize suffrage hikes, and ride the bicycle. Women’s writings tell us how they themselves experienced their exercise and which desires they responded to.Footnote ⁶⁹

A key text on female fitness and liberal citizenship was published at the end of the nineteenth century by American suffragist and longtime president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Frances Willard. At that moment in history, both the women’s and fitness movements were approaching major climaxes. Initially blamed for causing severe damage to women’s reproductive health, the bicycle ultimately contributed more than any other activity to new conceptions of what was possible for women with respect to exercise. In A Wheel within a Wheel, Willard praised exercise as the “harbinger of health and happiness.” Struck by the bicycle mania of the 1890s, Willard valued the bike and bike riding for helping women liberate themselves from the gendered constraints of American society. Bike riding, she said, was a means for women to overcome “the sedentary habits of a lifetime” and embark on “the democratic route of honest hard work” instead.Footnote ⁷⁰ She lauded exercise for teaching her how to discipline her “wobbling will” and find her balance. John Locke resonates in Willard’s assertion that learning how to ride the bike taught her how to convert willpower into motion and connect will and body by making “the mind … and the foot on the pedal” interact. According to Willard, exercise represented “a whole philosophy of life” of autonomous action and independence. Mastery of the bicycle stood for women’s mastery over their lives, and riding the bike gave her “the feeling of freedom and self-reliance” that her companion Susan B. Anthony had also lauded the bike for.Footnote ⁷¹ The bicycle and her fitness to ride it empowered Willard to shape herself into the subject she thought she wanted to be.

For Willard, practicing the interaction of mind and body improved her ability to confront the challenges of life. She saw both modern life and American citizenship as ongoing challenges, demanding constant investment.Footnote ⁷² Empowering her weakened body – weakened by the gendered structures and practices of American society – seemed a precondition for achieving this goal.Footnote ⁷³ Willard wrote from the position of a nineteenth-century women’s rights activist, yet her interpretation of exercise was very much in line with that of the fitness movement and American society in general. The fitness movement had been energized by the criticism of how the (male) body was weakened and “effeminized” by historical, social, and political circumstances. Just as modern men turned to exercise to strengthen their bodies and cultivate their seemingly given ability to convert willpower into motion, achievement, and successful citizenship, Frances Willard did likewise to prove her ability and assert her claim to full civic participation. Thus for Willard the power of fitness was at first exclusionary but then liberating. “Artificial restraints and conventions,” Willard wrote, had kept her from “develop[ing] a good physique.” But she defied those constraints, and added, “sighing for new worlds to conquer, I determined that I would learn the bicycle.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, in a final ironic twist, by challenging gendered assumptions about her limited ability for physical exercise and choice, Willard submitted to the power of fitness.

Concluding remarks: on voluntary submission to the power of fitness

This article has illuminated the power of fitness and its history in the United States. It has shown how fitness has been framed as a form of achievement and good citizenship and how it has operated as a form of power by promising happiness, success, recognition, and participation. This dynamic understanding of fitness is neither natural nor immutable, but has been shaped by history. The article has added to the existing historical research on fitness by tracing its evolution as a form of political power all the way back to early liberal thought and the writings of John Locke. Of course, Locke did not write about fitness as we know it today, nor did he know anything about gyms and smart watches. Yet he contributed to a new political anthropology that assumed a principal ability of human beings to choose whether to convert willpower into motion (or not). Locke placed a genuine human desire for happiness and the ability to pursue this desire voluntarily at the center of a new kind of political order. As the article has argued, power in this new order does not operate primarily through coercion, but through defining an ideal subject as well as through promises, enticement, and the granting of self-responsibility to human beings.

The founding of the United States was a key moment in turning the liberal concept of power into political practice. In the nineteenth century, the new liberal polity was increasingly seen as depending on the physical prowess of its citizens, the ability of their bodies and ultimately their fitness. In the middle decades of the century, a widely diagnosed bodily crisis of middle-class men, paired with ideas of the “survival of the fittest” adapted from Darwinism, made the improvement of one’s physical ability a prime responsibility of good citizenship. The article has shown how, in this historical context, working on one’s fitness was not enforced, yet a passionate attachment to being a fit and capable subject facilitated full citizenship recognition. Thus submission to fitness as a regulatory ideal became a potentially beneficial choice in a liberal discursive and political configuration.Footnote ⁷⁵ As shown by the example of Frances Willard, submitting to the regulatory ideal of the fit and active body could even be liberating by overcoming the gendered and exclusionary constraints of American society. For Willard, riding a bike and improving her fitness demonstrated not only her rightful claim to full political participation, but that of all capable women.

The article has argued that the concept of the self-responsible and self-caring citizen and subject is deeply enshrined in liberal ideas and politics. Yet the claim that we need to explore the history of fitness to understand its power in the present does not mean that the notions, practices, and dynamics of fitness have not changed over the years and centuries. Every piece of historical writing contributes only pieces to the genealogy of fitness, and the power of fitness has ebbed and flowed in modern history. Since the 1970s, when neoliberalism began to eclipse New Deal liberalism, the invocation to work on our bodies and ourselves has gained unprecedented traction.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ideal neoliberal subjects desire to enhance their potential by investing in and taking good care of themselves and by having a proactive relationship with their bodies. Feeling the desire to work out without being coerced to do so, and being passionately attached to this version of subjectivity, are of utmost importance for living up to the regulatory ideal. Accordingly, neoliberalism governs primarily through establishing a certain rationality, as political scientist Wendy Brown writes, and through “consensus and buy-in, [rather] than through violence [and] dictatorial command.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Yet some scholars have argued that the demand to work on our bodies and the power of fitness have become a coercive “authoritarian force” under neoliberalism. For instance, Brian Pronger sees a neoliberal “body fascism” at work, meaning that the desire to be fit should be understood as the product of “force relations of power” and that fitness has become inescapable. Similarly, disabilities scholar Robert McRuer depicts “able-bodiedness” as “compulsory,” with compulsion being “produced and covered over with the appearance of choice.”Footnote ⁷⁸

However, even in neoliberalism we are not forced into the gym at gunpoint, and neither are we coerced to go on bike rides, nor to use our smart watches or other gadgets. Some people do resist the neoliberal urge to work on their fitness, some just do not or cannot want to live up to the demand to be endlessly active selves, while others may not even be affected by the invocation at all. This does not mean that fitness is not a powerful force. Without doubt, the discursive, social, and political configuration makes submission to the ideal of fit subjecthood a strong call and an obvious, reasonable, profitable, and maybe even seemingly natural choice. Yet many people choose differently, and assuming outright coercion obscures the subtlety and therefore the strength of the power at work.Footnote ⁷⁹ It also obscures the potential for resistance and historical change. Only if we allow for at least some room for agency and maneuver are resistance and change possible. As James Baldwin said, history “is present in all that we do,” and Judith Butler argued that resistance does not necessarily exist apart from the regulatory ideal it opposes but is itself enabled by it.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the same time, lack of passionate attachment to the regulatory ideal of fit subjecthood has the potential to reroute the chain of iterations and the fitness paradigm, and perhaps at some point undermine the submissive power of fitness altogether.