This is an attempt to insert the stories we tell about fear and shame into a history of twentieth-century psychology and its obsession with achievement and modernization. It is an attempt to write an affective history of achievement at the turn of the millennium - and to make this feeling history. Impostor Syndrome is a pop-psychological diagnosis, employed to explain the low presence of women in STEM fields, business and academic administration and ’thought leadership’ in the pubic sphere. The article follows the intellectual lineage of two precursors of Impostor Syndrome, Fear of Success and the Impostor Phenomenon. It argues that the grouping of gender/ race/ success/ affect was a keystone of twentieth-century American psychology and development theory. The history of this feeling has consequences for thinking about situated knowledge, realism and epistemic justice.

In mid-nineteenth-century France, the science of animal nutrition morphed into a Romantic political program. Scientists and socialists formulated a kind of industrial physiocracy that sought to replace wage work and finance capital with an unimpeded flow of excrement.

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How much life is in the living wage? In recent months, a number of major American cities have enacted minimum wage ordinances, offering urban working families a promise of better living conditions. Yet just as minimum wage laws attempt to ameliorate the conditions of low-wage workers, working communities appear under threat by temporary work, automation, task labor, mass incarceration, deportation, and a host of other social pressures. Shifts in capital and labor seem to have swept away any guarantees of secure, steady, and sufficient workingclass employment in the global North. A decent life continues to escape even those within the reach of recent minimum wage victories. The MIT Living Wage Calculator reckons that a $15/hour minimum wage would not suffice in a city like Los Angeles to cover a family's basic expenses. 1 When one considers all the forms of life and all the living people excluded from wage work-by choice, by necessity, or by force-very little potential life appears left in the wage. The era of the wage, some two hundred years old, seems likely to fade sooner or later. The living wage was conceived in opposition to a free market, contractual model of wage work. Scientific wage theories were tied to the mass expansion of wage labor in the midnineteenth century. Yet today, labor increasingly happens in contexts without stable contracts. "Freedom" appears severed from any semblance of contractual relations in the salvage economy of temporary, freelance, sharing, and foraging work that characterizes many global supply chains today. What comes next? If the wage relation is giving way to other unstable socioeconomic forms, where may we search for a promise of life? Wages are not generally thought of as a scientific question. Wage struggles are rarely imagined as epistemological battles; categories like life and labor are taken for granted. Workers 2 in traditional labor histories appear concerned with material conditions and disengaged from critical concepts. Labor historians tell stories of class, power, and politics. Cultural historians from E.P. Thompson to William Sewell made these stories more complex and active by debunking traditional stereotypes of workers as passive receptacles of knowledge and culture. These modifications have led to some engagement with the history of science. I am inspired by historians

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