for: Self-help (law)

POV: date=December 2007 Expand: date=July 2007

The basis for self-help is often self-reliance, publicly available information, or support groups where people in similar situations

Sociological theories of self-help

An expansion of the technologies that empower individuals to conduct both trivial and profound activities binds together the diverse genres which apply self-help conceptsFact: date=February 2007. Self-help book-publishing arose from decentralization of ideology, from a growth of publishing industries using expanded printing technologies and (at the pinnacle of growth ) from the spread of new psychological sciencesFact: date=February 2007. Likewise, self-help legal services grew around expanded access to document-production technology (viz: the printing industry in the 18th century).Fact: date=September 2007 The Internet, with the ever-expanding selection of commercial and information services which it offers for free, exemplifies movement toward self-help on a grand scale.Fact: date=September 2007

History

The authors of First Things First invoke wisdom literature dating back as far as 2500 B.C. as a validation of their particular enumeration of fundamental human needs. Within Classical Antiquity, the advice poetry of Hesiod, particularly his Works and Days, has been seen as an early adaptation of Near Eastern wisdom literature. The Stoics offered advice with a psychological flavor. The genre of mirror-of-princes writings, which has a long history in Islamic and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of Biblical wisdom literature. Proverbs from many periods embody traditional moral and practical advice of diverse cultures.

"Self-help" appears to have been first used in the legal context, referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use lawful means on their own initiative to remedy a wrong.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) published the first self-consciously personal-development "self-help" book — entitled Self-Help — in 1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves", provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the oft-quoted maxim that also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733 - 1758). Alcoholics Anonymous was started by two alcoholics, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith who first met on May 12, 1935. The twelve-step program grew from this to become perhaps the world's most popular basis of self-help care.Fact: date=September 2007

Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) is often considered to have began the self-help movement in the 20th century when he published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. Having failed in several careers, Carnegie became fascinated with success and its link to self-confidence, and studied the subject for years. Carnegie's books have since sold over 50 million copies. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the use of repeated positive thoughts to attract happiness and wealth by taping into an "Infinite Intelligence".