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RECONSIDERATION

HAD NATURE TAKEN a more typical course,Christopher Lasch would still be with us.Only sixty-one years old when onValentine’s Day, 1994, he succumbed tocancer in his Pittsford, New York, home,Lasch died while still in his intellectualprime. The book for which he may beremembered longest, The True and OnlyHeaven: Progress and Its Critics, had ap-peared just three years earlier. And hehad just finished, with the aid of his daugh-ter Elisabeth, the manuscript of The Re-volt of the Elites and the Betrayal of De-mocracy, a book in which he attemptedto bring into focus the problems posedfor authentic democracy—the health ofwhich, as we shall see, was always Lasch’soverriding concern—by the detachmentof the new privileged classes, both physi-cally and ideologically, from commonmen and women.

In The Revolt of the Elites Lasch fore-told the political divide that would pre-occupy political commentators a decadelater. “The new elites are in revolt against‘Middle America,’” he warned, “imaginedby them to be technologically backward,politically reactionary, repressive in itssexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes,smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.”1

This would seem to be the lament of acultural conservative, and in fact, by theend of his life Lasch wore that label fairlycomfortably. But he had once beenclosely associated with the political Left,and part of what made, and continues tomake, Lasch’s analysis so arresting is thathe never entirely disavowed such influ-ences as progressivism, Marx, Freud, andthe Frankfurt School. Unlike the Left’sother postwar exiles, he never underwenta Damascene ideological conversion, butrather gradually and reluctantly came toshed certain leftist presuppositions andpreoccupations. Lasch never became aCold Warrior, in contrast to those of hispeers who migrated from Partisan Reviewto some form or other of neoconservatism.Nor did he ever blunt his critique of eco-nomic and political centralization andthe technological rationality that sus-tained them: unlike Irving Kristol, he wasnot prepared to muster even one cheerfor capitalism. It might be said that Laschdid not so much repudiate his mentors onthe Left as combine their insights withthose of others—including, to name justa few, Orestes Brownson, Henry George,Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, ReinholdNeibuhr, and Philip Rieff—to create a veryoriginal and potent critical brew. It mightalso be said that his work confirms thetruth of T. J. Jackson Lears’s observationthat “the most profound radicalism is

On Christopher LaschJeremy Beer

JEREMY BEER is Director of Publications at theIntercollegiate Studies Institute and Editor inChief of ISI Books.

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often the most profound conservatism.”2

That is one reason, perhaps, that itseems Lasch’s popularity is now on therise, especially among those for whomthe partisan narratives of the culture warshave lost much of their credibility.3 Cer-tainly, to turn to Lasch’s oeuvre today is tobe struck forcefully by its refreshing inde-pendence. Lasch managed to be at onceboth democratic and antiliberal. Nega-tively, his criticism was founded on atheoretically rich, psychologically in-formed understanding of the interrelatedhistories and effects of class, consumercapitalism, therapeutic culture, and tech-nology. Positively, it was based on a re-spect for—and an ardent wish to defend—the unenlightened, traditional values andpreferences of the petit bourgeois: fam-ily, hard work, loyalty, craftsmanship,voluntary association, ethnicity, sport,moral clarity, and faith. It all added up to,in his words, a thoroughly “unclassifiablepolitical equation.”4

II

Robert and Zora (Schaupp) Lasch, bothborn in Nebraska, were impeccably pro-gressive intellectuals. Robert, some nineyears younger than Zora, attended Ox-ford as a Rhodes Scholar from 1928 to1930 and went on to work for most of hislife as an editorialist at Midwestern news-papers, including the Chicago Sun andSun-Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.5

Zora took her doctorate in philosophyfrom Bryn Mawr College in 1925. She spentmost of her career as a social worker butlater taught logic at Washington Univer-sity and a couple of other schools. Goodlogician that she was, Zora, as her sonrecalled, “had a no-nonsense approach toideas, which it took me some time to learnto appreciate.”6

Robert and Zora’s first child, RobertChristopher Lasch, was born on June 1,1932. The Omaha, Nebraska, householdinto which he arrived was not only highly

political and intellectual but, in his ownrecollection, militantly secular. YoungChristopher used to enjoy unsettling thesons and daughters of his Republicanneighbors by poking fun at their religiousbeliefs and “flaunting” his atheism.

Christopher enrolled at Harvard (wherehe roomed for at least two years with JohnUpdike) in the fall of 1950 and emergedfour years later with an A.B. in history andthe Bowdoin Prize for his honors seniorthesis. Columbia, with its renowned his-tory department, was the next stop. Laschentered in the fall of 1954 and finished hisdissertation in 1961 under the directionof William Leuchtenburg. RichardHofstadter, however, emerged as the fac-ulty member who would exert the largestinfluence on Lasch, even though Lasch’sonly formal association with him was as aresearch assistant one summer. As differ-ent as Lasch’s own version of Americanhistory and culture would become,Hofstadter remained one of those figureswith whose ideas Lasch felt he had tograpple for the rest of his life.

While at Columbia, Lasch married NellCommager, daughter of historian HenrySteele Commager. Before finishing hisdissertation Lasch taught history at Wil-liams College and Roosevelt University.After taking his doctorate, he secured anappointment as assistant professor ofhistory at the University of Iowa. Just twoyears later, in 1963, he was made associ-ate professor.

Until arriving at Iowa, Lasch hadthought of himself as working within theliberal tradition. Besides Hofstadter, hewas attracted to thinkers like Lionel Trill-ing, George Kennan, and Walter Lippmann.But the deepening freeze of the Cold Warand Lasch’s Midwestern populist-progres-sive instincts ultimately made it impos-sible for him to accept what he saw as thehard-edged and seemingly hard-heartedanti-democratic elitism of the anticom-munists’ “realist” foreign policy. It seemsto have been while at Iowa that Lasch’s

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Lasch’s heterodox inclinations. Abestseller, it is the book with which hisname has been most closely associatedever since.

Three other books—and numerousarticles, reviews, lectures, panel discus-sions, and the rest of the trappings ofacademic fame—followed. The MinimalSelf (1984), The True and Only Heaven(1991), and The Revolt of the Elites (1994)all failed to achieve the popular successof The Culture of Narcissism, but eachcontinued to reflect important changesin Lasch’s thought.10 By the early 1990s,Lasch viewed himself as hewing to a cul-turally conservative populism that em-phasized the need to nurture the institu-tions and practices associated with tradi-tional communities and, especially, theneed to acknowledge human limits. Herealized that it was against such an ac-knowledgment that the entire modernproject had set its face, “that the normalrebellion against dependence” which ourreligious tradition teaches is common toall men had been “sanctioned by our sci-entific control over nature.” The ironywas that while “[t]hose wonderful ma-chines that science has enabled us toconstruct have not eliminated drudgery,...they have made it possible to imagineourselves as masters of our fate. In an agethat fancies itself as disillusioned, this isthe one illusion—the illusion of mas-tery—that remains as tenacious as ever,”especially among those cosmopolitan,hypermobile, liberated elites who wereconsolidating their control over politics,economics, and culture.11

III

Before he became a radical historian,Christopher Lasch (or Kit, as he was knownby his friends, family, and colleagues) wasan insightful historian of radicalism—and also liberalism and progressivism.Lasch’s first book, a revised version of hisdissertation, appeared in 1962 as The

growing disillusionment with the liberalCold Warriors led him to become inter-ested in the burgeoning “Madison school”of diplomatic history then enjoying popu-larity in radical circles. The University ofWisconsin historian William ApplemanWilliams was especially influential onLasch, not least because Williams led himto Marx.7

In 1966, Lasch moved to NorthwesternUniversity, where he was made full profes-sor just five years after completing hisdoctorate. But his stay was brief. EugeneGenovese had just been tapped to turnaround the aging and fractious historydepartment at the University of Roches-ter. Deemed virtually unhireable by Ameri-can universities because he had verypublicly espoused the cause of theVietcong, Genovese had been serving outhis exile in Montreal. Now he was back,and he wanted, in Lasch’s words, “to shapea department that would be fairly explic-itly committed to the enterprise of his-torically informed social criticism and atthe same time not committed to any spe-cific form of it.” Marxian critics were cer-tainly welcome. Genovese soon con-vinced Lasch to come on board, and hearrived in the fall of 1970.8

Although already an accomplishedscholar who was well known in leftistcircles by the time he arrived at Roches-ter,9 it was while there that Lasch pub-lished his best-known work. Haven in aHeartless World: The Family Besieged,which appeared in 1977, was widely no-ticed and marked the beginning of a moreserious cleavage between the directionof Lasch’s work and what had become Leftorthodoxy. The first of Lasch’s books todraw heavily on Freud and the FrankfurtSchool (Herbert Marcuse, T. W. Adorno,Max Horkheimer, and followers), it alsoattracted particularly stinging criticismfrom Lasch’s audience on the Left. TheCulture of Narcissism: American Life in anAge of Diminishing Expectations, broughtout two years later, further demonstrated

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American Liberals and the Russian Revolu-tion. By that time he had published overtwenty pieces, but most of these werereviews that had appeared in his father’sSt. Louis Post-Dispatch.12 It was with thisbook that he began to make his academicreputation.

The specific subject of this book—thecrisis caused by the Russian revolutionand its consequences for liberals’ beliefin progress and the natural goodness ofman—was not one to which Lasch wasoften to return. But even here, though hewas not ready to take seriously either theMarxist or conservative alternatives,13

Lasch had identified fundamental flawsin liberalism, especially its complacentoptimism and messianism. In many ways,American Liberals marked the beginningof the end of his identification with liber-alism. Now at Iowa, he was becomingincreasingly attracted to the Marxism hehad so recently dismissed. In 1962, Laschpublished a short but portentous reviewin the school newspaper, the Daily Iowan.The book under consideration was Erosand Civilization, by Herbert Marcuse. InMarcuse, Lasch encountered both Freudand Marx through the lens of the Frank-furt Institute for Social Research’s mostfamous expositor. Over the next twentyyears, at least, no two thinkers were moreimportant to Lasch’s intellectual devel-opment.

Lasch’s next book was The New Radical-ism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectualas a Social Type (1965). Although Laschwas becoming increasingly familiar withthe work of Freud and Marx and theirepigones, Freudian and Marxian catego-ries did not yet figure prominently in hisanalysis. For this reason, and because itengages the same themes, this book canbe viewed as a counterpart to The Revoltof the Elites, which would appear nearlythirty years later. Indeed, in The NewRadicalism Lasch foretold the detachedclass of elites that he would target forblistering condemnation in Revolt.

Through biographical studies of JaneAddams, Randolph Bourne, Mable DodgeLuhan, Lincoln Steffens, and other early-twentieth-century figures of the Left, Laschcontended in The New Radicalism thatthe appearance of the “intellectual” inAmerica had coincided with the develop-ment of radicalism, and therefore that“modern radicalism or liberalism” is aphase in the “social history of the intellec-tuals.”14 For Lasch, the rise of an intellec-tual class was problematic because itreflected—was in fact a consequence of—“that cultural fragmentation that seemsto characterize industrial and postindus-trial societies.”15 The radical intellectualssaw themselves as a distinct class stand-ing against the bourgeoisie, whose edu-cational practices, culture, and sexualrelations it intended to reform. By con-trast, the progressive tradition had beenmore populist and middle-class in originand style; it was interested in generatinggreater political and economic equality,not cultural transformation.

The bigoted elitism of the new radi-cals, argued Lasch, in words not very dif-ferent from those he would use threedecades later, consigned them to politi-cal ineffectuality. “In the people as awhole—‘the people,’ in whose intereststhe new radicals so often professed tospeak—they aroused indifference at bestand resentment at worst....” And their ob-session with overcoming the intangiblerepression that they believed character-ized the bourgeois family made themnearly incomprehensible to laymen. “Therevolt of the intellectuals had no echoesin the rest of society.”16

On the contrary, far from being toopowerful, for Lasch it was the very weak-ening of the traditional family broughtabout by the growth of the state and theindustrial economy that generated therevolt of the intellectuals and their free-floating anxiety. His basic thesis, whichhe would seek to refine for the rest of hislife, was the following:

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When government was centralized and poli-tics became national in scope, as they had tobe to cope with the energies let loose byindustrialism, and when public life becamefaceless and anonymous and society anamorphous democratic mass, the old sys-tem of paternalism (in the home and out ofit) collapsed, even when its semblance sur-vived intact. The patriarch, though he mightstill preside in splendor at the head of hisboard, had come to resemble an emissaryfrom a government which had been silentlyoverthrown. The mere theoretical recogni-tion of his authority by his family could notalter the fact that the government which wasthe source of all his ambassadorial powershad ceased to exist.17

IV

The Agony of the American Left (1969) andThe World of Nations (1973), both prima-rily composed of reworked articles, es-says, and reviews, marked the high pointof Lasch’s Marxist phase. In the formerbook, Lasch lamented that the radicalLeft had no realistic “program for change”because its intellectuals had been co-opted by the government and the corpo-rations and had accepted the premises ofthe Cold War. He saw hope in the revivalof prematurely abandoned mass-basedradical movements of the earlier twenti-eth century, such as populism and social-ism, especially if these were infused witha Marxist understanding of class inter-ests. In the latter volume he dealt againwith the inherent flaws of liberal reformmovements and liberalism itself. Evenhere, where Lasch continues to employMarxian social analysis, it is easy to seehow unorthodox his Marxism was in hisvery un-Marx-like view of history. For Laschadmitted to a “long-standing antipathy toWhiggish or progressive interpretationsof history. I have never found very con-vincing those explanations of history inwhich our present enlightenment is con-trasted with the benighted conditions of

the past; in which history is regarded as‘marching,’ with occasional setbacks andminor reverses, toward a better world.”18

Of course, Lasch’s skepticism towardWhig historiography would culminate inThe True and Only Heaven, publishedeighteen years later.

The publication of Haven in a HeartlessWorld, however, marked a new phase inLasch’s work. With The Culture of Narcis-sism and The Minimal Self, it representsthe first entry in Lasch’s trilogy of psycho-logical critiques of late-twentieth-centuryculture. Intended as a “theoretical intro-duction to a historical study of the fam-ily,” Haven also represented a substantialloosening of Lasch’s always somewhattenuous ties with left-wing orthodoxy.Ironically, as Lasch later recalled, he wassteeled in his break by reading some ofthe essays of the Frankfurt School socialphilosopher Max Horkheimer, one of theauthors of The Authoritarian Personality.Horkheimer, in Lasch’s account, had hadthe courage to change his mind about thepatriarchal family after he emigrated toAmerica “and encountered a type of fam-ily that seemed to produce individualslacking a sense of purpose or direction,unable to commit themselves to anythingor to take an interest in anything beyondtheir immediate pleasure, driven by ill-formed and contradictory desires, andlacking any attachment to the past orfuture or to the world around them.”Lasch’s own growing “doubts about thedesirability or even the feasibility of anopen-ended experimental approach tosexuality, marriage, and childrearing”were confirmed in Horkheimer’s analysis.More importantly, Horkheimer’s “willing-ness to modify his theoretical and ideo-logical preconceptions in the light ofempirical evidence” provided Lasch with“a model of intellectual integrity and cour-age, at a time when such models were inshort supply.” Even so, Lasch still consid-ered Haven to be the work of a radical. Itwas the Left, he argued in the preface to

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the paperback edition, that had under-gone a “major reorientation” in the 1970s,not him.

Haven attempted to defend the familyon the basis of two premises: the first wasthat the family has a crucially importantrole in the shaping of personality; thesecond was that certain personality traitsare more compatible with different kindsof sociopolitical arrangements than oth-ers. Thus, wrote Lasch, embedding hisargument within an elaborate apparatusof psychological theory, those economic,cultural, and political forces which haveweakened the bourgeois, nuclear familyhave had profound consequences be-cause they have also altered the person-ality development of the rising genera-tion. Lasch emphatically did not believethat the family was a “haven in a heartlessworld,” as is often thought (a misreading,or rather non-reading, of his book that helamented), but rather that this had beenthe conventional myth of the family sincethe American industrial revolution of thelate nineteenth century. Lasch believedprecisely the opposite: that the condi-tions of modern life—its wars, commerce,politics, social decay—were such thatthe family was less able than ever to serveas a refuge from the outside world, even asthat role was more necessary than ever.

Lasch believed that the family had beenin a state of decline for a hundred years orso. This decline, one of the primary char-acteristics of modern society, was theresult of the expropriation by larger so-cial institutions of activities once under-taken by families. Industrial capitalismtook production out of the household.Capitalism then appropriated workers’skills and knowledge, replacing them withscientific management and an efficientlystructured, bureaucratic, hierarchicalwork environment. At the same time,workers’ private lives came increasinglyunder the control of medical, social, andgovernmental authorities. The result wasthat people had become highly depen-

dent on corporations and the centralizedstate in nearly all matters, which reducedthem to a degree of servitude incompat-ible with the ideals of democracy. Themost important of such changes, forLasch’s purposes in Haven, was “the ex-propriation of child rearing by the stateand by the health and welfare profes-sions.” But he insisted that the socializa-tion of reproduction was intrinsically re-lated to the socialization of production.

The Culture of Narcissism built on thepsychological argument offered in Havenby applying its insights to Americanculture’s “current malaise,” the latter aword that would attach itself with merci-less persistence to the Carter years. A truevirtuoso performance, one of those rarebooks that manages to sustain real origi-nality for several hundred pages, TheCulture of Narcissism was nonetheless verymuch a book of its time—not only in thecultural subjects to which Lasch paidcritical attention, but also in its despair-ing, pessimistic tone. Though he tried tomuster some reasons for hope, things didnot seem to be going well in Americansociety—or, as the second sentence ofLasch’s preface put it, “Those who re-cently dreamed of world power now de-spair of governing the city of New York.”19

Liberal culture, which seemed “in its deca-dence to have carried the logic of indi-vidualism to the extreme of a war of allagainst all,” seemed to be on the verge ofsuicide. Furthermore, the liberationistcritiques of both radicals and Marxistshad become irrelevant, speaking as theydid to the conditions that pertained un-der the reign of “economic man” but not“psychological man,” the characteristichuman type of the new therapeutic agewho had been effectively liberated fromthe allegedly repressive, authoritarianbourgeois order only to find himself en-slaved by his own seeming etherealityand the paternalistic state.20

The defining characteristic of psycho-logical man, the apotheosis of advanced

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capitalism, was his anxious narcissism.Lasch used the psychoanalytic under-standing of this term to describe a new,socially pervasive (if often sub-pathologi-cal) personality structure that was theconsequence of “quite specific changesin our society and culture—from bureau-cracy, the proliferation of images, thera-peutic ideologies, the rationalization ofthe inner life, the cult of consumption,and in the last analysis from changes infamily life and from changing patterns ofsocialization.”21 Characterologically, nar-cissism manifested itself in “profusion inthe everyday life of our age,” wrote Lasch.Individually, its symptoms included “de-pendence on the vicarious warmth pro-vided by others, combined with a fear ofdependence, a sense of inner emptiness,boundless repressed rage, and unsatis-fied oral cravings,” not to mention, lessdirectly, “pseudo self-insight, calculat-ing seductiveness, nervous, self-depre-catory humor.” So much was understoodby a number of psychoanalytic theorists.Lasch’s contribution was to reveal theextent to which contemporary socialconditions both helped create (e.g., byundermining and dispersing parentalauthority, which made it “almost impos-sible for the young to grow up”)22—andreflected (e.g., in “the intense fear of oldage and death, altered sense of time, fas-cination with celebrity, fear of competi-tion, decline of the play spirit, deteriorat-ing relations between men and women”)the rise of the narcissistic personality.

In essence, Lasch contended, givencurrent social conditions—“lawless, vio-lent, and unpredictable”23—the feelingsof helplessness and dependence associ-ated with narcissism were rational. Morethan ever, the individual found himselfentirely exposed to the power of thestate, distant corporations, and theirseemingly unaccountable bureaucra-cies. Lasch’s goal was to show that thetherapeutic response to this situation isself-defeating. “Arising out of a pervasive

dissatisfaction with the quality of per-sonal relations, it advises people not tomake too large an investment in love andfriendship, to avoid excessive depen-dence on others, and to live for the mo-ment,”—in other words, it tends to rein-force the very sort of narcissistic traits“that had created the crisis of personalrelations in the first place.”

In the final pages of this rich anddensely argued book, Lasch distinguisheshis critique from that of conservatives,whom he faults for refusing to connectthe social and personality changes de-scribed by Lasch with “the rise of mo-nopoly capitalism.”24 Libertarian conser-vatives like Ludwig von Mises exagger-ated the personal autonomy made pos-sible by the free market in the same waythat they exaggerated the extent to withthe state was fundamentally at odds withcapitalist enterprise. In fact, therapeuticand consumer culture are intrinsically—and historically—related via their con-nection to the rise of corporate capital-ism. “The same historical developmentthat turned the citizen into a client trans-formed the worker from a producer intoa consumer.” The result, to which conser-vatives’ pro-capitalist ideology blindsthem, is that to struggle against the nar-cissistic dependence associated with thenew therapeutic bureaucracy will meanto resist also the dependence created bycapitalism itself. Lasch concludes by ex-horting his readers to look to the “tradi-tions of localism, self-help, and commu-nity action,” or, in other words, to resistthe forces of narcissism by seeking “tocreate their own ‘communities of compe-tence.’”25

V

The timing—and title—of The Culture ofNarcissism could not have been better.Not only did it become a bestseller; it alsocaught the attention of Patrick Caddell,Jimmy Carter’s pollster and trusted advi-

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sor (Carter himself had supposedly speed-read the book). Thus did it happen that inMay 1979, Christopher Lasch arrived atthe White House for a private dinner withthe president. He had been summoned,along with a half-dozen or so other aca-demics, activists, and journalists (includ-ing Daniel Bell, Jesse Jackson, and BillMoyers), to discuss the state of the nationwith President Carter. The early summerof 1979 was a difficult one for the presi-dent. The energy crisis was at its peak, andafter four televised addresses and a num-ber of failed legislative initiatives, Carterhad decided to regroup by inviting astream of “prominent citizens”—journal-ists, politicians, intellectuals, and reli-gious, business, and civic leaders—to givetheir two cents on how he ought now toaddress the issue. To Carter’s mind, theseprominent citizens confirmed whatCaddell had argued in a long memo,namely, that a spiritual “malaise” lay atthe root of the nation’s many practicaldifficulties. It was this condition that thenation’s leader needed to address.

On July 15, 1979, Carter delivered thetelevised address that would come to beknown as the “malaise” speech. In fact,Carter—unlike Lasch—never did use theword “malaise.” But what he did say wasunusually severe for a modern president.The nation, he warned, was undergoing a“crisis of confidence” that was “threaten-ing to destroy the social and the politicalfabric” of the country. Specifically, “toomany of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Humanidentity is no longer defined by what onedoes, but by what one owns.” The flour-ishing of consumerist materialism coin-cided with the decline of civic involve-ment and civility itself. “Two-thirds of ourpeople do not even vote. The productiv-ity of American workers is actually drop-ping, and the willingness of Americans tosave for the future has fallen below that ofall other people in the Western world....[T]here is a growing disrespect for gov-

ernment and for churches and for schools,the news media, and other institutions.”Carter was as sober and stern as a Puritandivine: “This is not a message of happi-ness or reassurance, but it is the truth anda warning.” The nation was at a “turningpoint.” It must not go down “the path thatleads to fragmentation and self-interest.Down that road lies a mistaken idea offreedom, the right to grasp for ourselvessome advantage over others.” Rather, thecountry must embrace “the path of com-mon purpose and the restoration of Ameri-can values.”

Needless to say, Carter’s speech didnot prove especially popular with a pub-lic that wanted “answers,” not a sermon,and certainly not a sermon that scoldedthem for their selfishness while advertingthat a more austere future lay ahead. Laschwas not terribly impressed himself, sub-sequently writing Caddell to urge the presi-dent to “temper his appeal for nationalsacrifice with some kind of assurancethat those most vulnerable—the poorand disadvantaged—wouldn’t be askedto carry a disproportionate burden.”26 Helamented that his psychoanalyticallysophisticated use of the concept of “nar-cissism” had been understood to meansimply that Americans were “selfish” or“egoistic” when he had meant to conveysomething very different, that the con-temporary self is so contracted that it is“uncertain of its own outlines” and hencetends either to “remake the world in itsown image”—the Promethean error thatis reflected in the cult of unlimited tech-nological development—or else “tomerge into its environment in blissfulunion,” which requires a radical or abso-lute denial of selfhood.27 To attack theproblem of consumerism required notthe moralism reflected in Carter’s speechbut rather seeing it as a consequence ofthe degradation of work. Mass produc-tion and mass consumption, Lasch con-tended, depend on social arrangementsthat “tend to discourage initiative and

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self-reliance and to promote dependence,passivity, and a spectatorial state of mindboth at work and at play.”28 In other words,these arrangements, fundamentally anti-democratic in their implications, are thesource of our contemporary malaise.

Whether or not Carter or Caddell oranyone else interpreted it correctly, withThe Culture of Narcissism Lasch achievednational stature as a culture critic—even,arguably, contributing indirectly to theelection of Ronald Reagan, who unlikeCarter (and the dour intellectuals whohad influenced him) understood the elec-toral advantages of unrelieved, even im-plausible optimism. (Reagan “told thevoters it was morning in America, eventhough it was more like 9:30 at night,” inthe words of James Howard Kunstler.)29

The Culture of Narcissism was comparablein its popular penetration to later workslike Allan Bloom’s Closing of the AmericanMind or Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.Almost everyone had heard of it; manybought it; few bothered to read it; andeven fewer understood it.

If anything, The Minimal Self, perhapsLasch’s most underrated book, is morefulfilling than its two predecessors. Inthis book Lasch links his critique of thera-peutic culture with the problems of envi-ronmental exploitation, industrialism,and technology. Lasch criticizes the so-cial movements of the Left—the environ-mental, women’s, and peace move-ments—for, among other things, misun-derstanding the teachings of psycho-analysis, which teaches that human hap-piness, or at least “ordinary unhappiness,”lies in achieving a balance between “sepa-ration and union, individuation and de-pendence.”30 Psychoanalysis “refuses todissolve the tension between instinct andculture.”31 Its beauty, in a way, is that itdoes not “work.” In making self-knowl-edge its goal, it rejects the technologicalapproach to the self inherent in othertherapeutic approaches. Psychoanalysisis a most inefficient technology—perhaps

its chief recommendation.Freud attempted to strengthen the self,

typically by bringing subconscious im-pulses and desires into consciousness,where they can be dealt with more con-structively. In contrast, many among theenvironmental, feminist, and peace move-ments advocated the abandonment ofthe concept of the individual self and itsfusion with nature or the social whole, anapproach that to Lasch vitiated their oth-erwise useful critiques of instrumentalreason. Authentic selfhood, argued Lasch,lies in the awareness of one’s dividednature, in the “awareness of man’s con-tradictory place in the natural order ofthings.”32 Indeed, the echoes of anewfound respect for the West’s religioustradition are clearly present in Lasch’sargument that “[s]elfhood is the painfulawareness of the tension between ourunlimited aspirations and our limitedunderstanding, between our original in-timations of immortality and our fallenstate, between oneness and separation.”33

However, in Lasch’s account selfhoodis not threatened so much by these socialmovements as it is by the therapeuticideology promoted by mass industrialculture. In frustrating individual initia-tive and accountability, this ideologyteaches individuals not to trust their ownjudgment, indeed to see the self as anobject, while paradoxically seeing exter-nal objects as extensions or projectionsof the self. Though “self-liberation” is theostensible goal of therapeutic ideology,the liberation of the self from a stablepublic or common world has revealedmore clearly than ever that the self onlytakes shape in the presence of externalconstraints; or at least that absent suchconstraints, the imagination is exposed“more directly than before to the tyrannyof inner compulsions and anxieties.”34

The defenders of mass, consumer cul-ture claim that whatever is lost in its riseis more than made up for by the spread ofcomforts and wealth throughout all

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classes, especially the lower, notes Lasch.In other words, the wide array of choicesonce available only to the rich are avail-able to all in a consumer culture, and soto deplore consumerism is to unwittinglyreveal one’s aristocratic snobbery. Laschrebuts this argument by noting that thechoices open to the weakened, depen-dent selves that pervade consumer cul-ture are trivial, having to do with “lifestyles”rather than matters of moral import. Theonly choices a consumer society will ac-cept are those that are nonbinding andhence relatively meaningless. “A societyof consumers defines choice not as thefreedom to choose one course of actionover another but as the freedom to chooseeverything at once. ‘Freedom of choice’means ‘keeping your options open.’ ...[S]uch is the open-ended, experimentalconception of the good life upheld by thepropaganda of commodities, which sur-rounds the consumer with images of un-limited possibility.”35 Industrialism andgenuine democracy, therefore, are any-thing but mutually reinforcing.

VI

After The Minimal Self, Lasch drifted awayfrom Freud, Marx, and their FrankfurtSchool interpreters. His break with thecultural Left also became more thoroughand more obvious. In the 1960s and 1970she had been a frequent contributor toorgans of Left opinion like the Nation andthe New York Review of Books, publishingin those periodicals twelve and forty-fivearticles, respectively. But his last articlefor the Nation appeared in 1980, and after1984 he wrote only one article (on Reagan)for the New York Review. The postmodernLeft irritated him, and the feeling wasmutual.

In the late 1980s, Lasch began to ex-plore systematically his instinct that thebest way to transcend the Left-Right im-passe in American life was through thereinvigoration of the populist tradition.

This was the thesis of The True and OnlyHeaven, which begins by noting that boththe contemporary Left and Right hadcontempt for the idea of “limits” of anykind, since the idea that there could beany immovable constraints on humanendeavor threatened the underlying pro-gressivist ideology to which both sub-scribed. Even conservatives, he observes(citing Paul Gottfried’s and ThomasFleming’s history of the conservativemovement) had all but abandoned what-ever residual “skepticism about progress”they may once have harbored.36 The rheto-ric of their most recent political hero,Ronald Reagan, was infused with the rheto-ric of shallow optimism, claimed Lasch.Reagan was a true believer in Progress. Hespoke of “traditional values,” but the val-ues he wished to promote

had very little to do with tradition. Theysummed up the code of the cowboy, theman in flight from his ancestors, from hisimmediate family, and from everything thattied him down and limited his freedom ofmovement. Reagan played on the desire fororder, continuity, responsibility, and disci-pline, but his program contained nothingthat would satisfy that desire. On the con-trary, his program aimed to promote eco-nomic growth and unregulated businessenterprise, the very forces that have under-mined tradition. A movement calling itselfconservative might have been expected toassociate itself with the demand for limitsnot only on economic growth but on theconquest of space, the technological con-quest of the environment, and the ungodlyambition to acquire godlike powers overnature. Reaganites, however, condemnedthe demand for limits as another counsel ofdoom.37

Still, the idea of progress retained ap-peal because it envisioned a future ofunlimited economic growth, a vision forwhich the experience of the previous twoor three centuries admittedly providedample support. (Lasch assumed, withoutarguing the matter, that this expectation

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was no longer rationally tenable.) But italso retained appeal because it had beenfinally detached from utopianism. Themost viable progressive ideology—theonly one to emerge intact from the riseand fall of the modern era’s revolutionaryand totalitarian regimes—was the onecreated by the new science of politicaleconomy in the eighteenth century. Itwas not to “those second-rate thinkersmore conventionally associated with theidea of progress—Fontenelle, Condorcet,Godwin, Comte, Spencer,” but rather tothe moralists associated with this newscience—Bernard Mandeville, DavidHume, Adam Smith, and others—“that weshould look for the inner meaning of pro-gressive ideology.”38 For Smith et al. prom-ised not utopia but the indefinite expan-sion of prosperity, a lower but seeminglymore achievable goal.

However, even this more modestproject required the dramatic alterationof traditional moral valuations. For onething, unlike the classical, Christian, andrepublican traditions, “the modern con-ception of progress depends on a posi-tive assessment of the proliferation ofwants.”39 Austerity and self-denial haveno place in the modern, progressiveconception of the good life. For “thriftand self-denial” mean nothing less, ulti-mately, than “economic stagnation.”40

Desire and appetite, on the other hand,must now carry a positive valence. For-merly condemned as potentially insa-tiable and therefore subject to a panoplyof private, public, and religious con-straints, for there to be progress desireand appetite had now to be continuallystimulated. Furthermore, this progressiveideology, by proposing a world continu-ally improving and without end, neces-sarily entails the institutionalization of asense of impermanence, the sense “thatnothing is certain except the imminentobsolescence of all our certainties.”41

Lasch’s book attempts to highlight themost important critics of this new idea of

progress while showing that the mosteffective criticism can be traced to thepopulist tradition and its preference fora rooted life centered on family, neigh-borhood, and church. In this sense, TheTrue and Only Heaven may be regarded asLasch’s attempt to provide a pedigree fora more radical, more democratic—andmore consistent—brand of cultural con-servatism.

VII

There is nothing farfetched about thisinterpretation. By the time True and OnlyHeaven was published in 1991, Laschclearly thought of himself as a culturalconservative. Indeed, in a revealing 1990First Things article titled “Conservatismagainst Itself,” he referred to the populisttradition he hoped to rejuvenate as thenatural home of cultural conservatives,so long as they truly wished to be associ-ated with “a respect for limits, localism, awork ethic as opposed to a consumeristethic, a rejection of unlimited economicgrowth, and a certain skepticism aboutthe ideology of progress.”42 By the sametoken, however, Lasch had little interestin movement conservatism and what hesaw as its illogical embrace of consumercapitalism. As early as 1987, in a NewOxford Review symposium on “humanesocialism and traditional conservatism,”he had called on cultural conservatives“to take cultural conservatism back fromthe capitalists,” a call he repeated else-where.43

Lasch denied, furthermore, that con-servatism necessarily implied a defenseof social hierarchy and existing distribu-tions of power. Economically, he was aleveler, convinced that cultural conser-vatism was “quite compatible...with a com-mitment to radical democracy.”44 Thismay be one reason why he had little usefor traditionalist thinkers, including theSouthern Agrarians. In The New Radical-ism, in one of his few published mentions

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of conservatives of the first half of thetwentieth century, Lasch argues that theSouthern Agrarians and their “kindredspirits” Irving Babbitt and T. S. Eliot hadessentially adopted the line that artistsshould retreat from the political arenaand focus on the cultural arena, that theyshould not attempt “to influence thestruggle for power.” The Agrarians, forinstance, in I’ll Take My Stand, besidesattacking industrialism and capital-PProgress, had also “implicitly” attacked“politics itself,” in Lasch’s judgment, “sinceit was unlikely that political action foundedon such a program had much chance ofsuccess in the twentieth century.” In fact,for Lasch, only “some of the agrarians” hadeven “argued rather half-heartedly” for anagrarian political program; they “seem tohave been saying that writers and artistsshould ‘take their stand’ on an issue whichwas cultural, not political.”45

Lasch’s gloss on the Agrarians—pub-lished, one must remember, in 1965—isnot only tendentious but also somewhatcontradictory. On the one hand, they hadput forth an unrealistic political program;on the other, they were not really inter-ested in politics at all but in culture. Moreinteresting, however, is that Lasch’s ownproposals put forth later in his life havemuch in common with those of the Agrar-ians. He advocated, for instance, a returnto a “producerist” rather than a consumereconomy. Heavily influenced by IvanIllich, Wendell Berry, and other ecologi-cal writers, he accepted as a foundationalpremise that the rapid exhaustion of natu-ral resources was at hand; and of coursethe critique of progress, so central toagrarian thought, was the central themeof The True and Only Heaven. Tellingly,that book contains no discussion of theAgrarians whatsoever, an especially curi-ous omission given that Lasch includedsome of their writings in one of his gradu-ate seminars.

Finally, Lasch also kept the postwarconservative movement at arm’s length

because of its hard-line anticommunism.Something of an anti-anticommunist,Lasch not only rejected the notion thatthe Cold War demanded a final choicebetween one of two cultures; he also con-tended that even were American society“the most brilliant and virtuous in re-corded history and Soviet Russia the mostperfect tyranny,” one could “still chooseaccommodation over ‘victory’ or even‘containment.’”46 Plausible enough; butlike so many on the Left, Lasch still under-rated, at least in the 1960s, the horror ofSoviet society, holding, for example, thatthe Soviet Union was not inflexibly totali-tarian, that Stalin was the real problem,and that “the world of the twentieth cen-tury—the Soviet Union in particular—has not turned out to be quite so grim asit looked in the late forties and earlyfifties.”47 One cringes to read such judg-ments today, but at the same time Laschwas surely right when, in a discussion ofSidney Hook, he noted that “when theadversary was ‘total evil,’ the ‘imperfec-tions’ of democracy naturally faded fromsight,” and that Hook’s “‘critical’ supportof American culture was hard to distin-guish from unconditional acceptance,” aprocess we see repeated among Hook’ssuccessors today, with Islamism conve-niently substituted for communism.48

VIII

When, in a 1991 interview, Lasch was askedwhere he saw signs of “hope” or “moralvision,” he responded that while therewas “not much” present in organized reli-gion, “one finds flashes of it in the Catho-lic tradition.... One might even say thatthe Pope has some of the best insightsinto social questions”—a rather surpris-ing answer for a former Marxist imbuedwith radically secularist ideals from child-hood.49 But Lasch’s self-identification withthe project of cultural conservatism inthe final decade or so of his life had beenaccompanied by an increasing, if still ten-

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tative, attraction to the Christian intel-lectual tradition. His social thought con-sequently began to incorporate a consid-eration of religion and theological in-sights in highly suggestive ways. For ex-ample, turning Freud on his head, Laschused psychoanalysis to argue that theman or woman of genuine faith actuallypossessed a higher degree of psychologi-cal maturity than did the religiously indif-ferent. And, putting a twist on Voegelin,he published a series of articles in theearly 1990s arguing that gnosticism, theperennial heresy, was not manifested somuch in utopian totalitarianism as it wasin the assumptions and implicit goals ofliberal modernity.50

Much more might be written about thetheological affinities present in Lasch’slater cultural criticism. Readers of The

True and Only Heaven will note theirexistence in his treatment of the virtue ofhope, in his championing of religiousthinkers such as Jonathan Edwards andOrestes Brownson and activists such asMartin Luther King, Jr., and in his critiqueof abortion rights. The spiritual depthand sincerity of Lasch’s writing is impos-sible to miss.

For all that, Lasch never claimed pub-licly to be a believer. Privately, however,things may have been different. AfterLasch’s death, one friend recalled thatLasch had once been asked by a partici-pant at an evangelical conference, “Areyou or are you not a believer?” Lasch wassaid to have replied, “Oh, not really.” Hiswife, however, having heard the ques-tion, quickly interjected, “Oh, yes he is!”51

And so, perhaps, he was.

1. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites andthe Betrayal of Democracy (New York, 1995), 5-6.2. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:Antimodernism and the Transformation of AmericanCulture, 1880-1920, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1994), xx. 3.See, e.g., Patrick J. Deneen, “Christopher Laschand the Limits of Hope,” First Things (December2004), 26-30. In addition, at least two book-lengthstudies of Lasch are currently in preparation, oneby historian Eric Miller, who wrote his disserta-tion on Lasch, and another by sociologist AlanWoolfolk, who is writing a volume on Lasch for ISIBooks’ Library of Modern Thinkers series. 4. Thisis the phrase with which Lasch ended his contri-bution to an October 1991 New Oxford Reviewsymposium on “Transcending Ideological Confor-mity: Beyond ‘Political Correctness,’ Left or Right,”20-22. For Lasch’s argument that the contempo-rary ideological division between Left and Rightis obsolete, see his to The True and Only Heaven:Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991). 5. For thisand other chronological and biographical infor-mation, I am indebted to the chronology postedat www.library.rochester.edu/rbk/LASCH.stm bythe Rush Rhees Library at the University ofRochester, where Lasch’s papers are housed. 6.This quotation is from Casey Blake and Christo-pher Phelps, “History as Social Criticism: Conver-sations with Christopher Lasch,” Journal of Ameri-can History (March 1994), 1310-32. This informa-tive interview—the best ever conducted withLasch—is another source of many of the bio-graphical details reported here. 7. For an appre-

ciative but critical account of the importance ofWilliams from a contemporary thinker, one whoproceeds from a perspective not unlike Lasch’s,see Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: TheRealities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 23-31. (Historian JohnLukacs, with whom Lasch shared a podium on atleast one occasion, was much less enamored ofWilliams, to say the least: see his “WilliamAppleman Williams,” included in RememberedPast: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Histori-cal Knowledge—A Reader [Wilmington, Del.,2005].) Another writer that apparently led Laschto Marx was Dwight Macdonald (and, to completethe circle, Macdonald was a good friend ofLukacs’s). 8. Before 1970, Genovese and Laschwere friends, even coauthoring an article on themodern university in the New York Review ofBooks in 1969. But for primarily personal reasons,at least in Lasch’s mind, the relationship soonsoured. In the Blake-Phelps interview, Laschclaims, “By the time I arrived in the fall of 1970,...[Genovese] had already alienated most of hiscolleagues, and the department was hopelesslydivided.” Lasch’s own difficulties with Genovese“began immediately.” It wasn’t long beforeGenovese and Lasch were no longer speaking,and Genovese was becoming increasingly iso-lated in the department. The situation is de-scribed as quite ugly (Interview with Mark Malvasi,March 2003). However, in the Blake-Phelps inter-view, Lasch says that by the late 1970s he andGenovese had “arrived at a kind of precarious

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truce. Even though I often found myself at oddswith him, I continued to admire his work. Weagreed, moreover, in our opposition to the kind ofcultural radicalism that was becoming more andmore prevalent on the Left. Our differences werepersonal more than political.” 9. Lasch had pub-lished four books before 1970: American Liberalsand the Russian Revolution (New York, 1962), TheNew Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intel-lectual as a Social Type (New York, 1965), TheSocial Thought of Jane Addams, which he edited(Indianapolis, 1965), and The Agony of the Ameri-can Left (New York, 1969). A collection of essays,The World of Nations; Reflections on AmericanHistory, Politics, and Culture, appeared in 1973(New York). 10. Two Lasch books have appearedposthumously. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn edited acollection titled Women and the Common Life:Love, Marriage, and Feminism (New York, 1997), acollection Lasch had himself been working on foryears but was unable to finish. Most recently, theUniversity of Pennsylvania Press has brought outPlain Style: A Guide to Written English (2002), whichLasch wrote for departmental use at the Univer-sity of Rochester as a guide for his haplesslyundereducated graduate students. 11. Revolt ofthe Elites, 246. 12. For a bibliography of Lasch’swritings, see Robert Cummings, “The Writings ofChristopher Lasch: A Bibliography-in-Progress,”at www.lib.rochester.edu/rbk/LaschBib.HTM. 13.In the book’s foreword, Lasch writes that he doesnot deal with conservative arguments “because Iam convinced that most Americans who thoughtabout these matters at all were unable, in the end,to accept such a position” (xii). This posture ofdismissiveness toward the conservative traditionwould finally dissipate in the 1980s. 14. NewRadicalism in America, ix. 15. Ibid., xi. 16. Bothquotes in this paragraph are from New Radicalismin America, 147. 17. Ibid., 111. 18. World of Nations,xii. 19. Both quotes in this paragraph are from TheCulture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of

Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1979), xiii.20. Lasch took these terms from Philip Rieff. SeeRieff’s “Reflections on Psychological Man inAmerica,” first published in 1960 and collected inThe Feeling Intellect, edited by Jonathan B. Imber(Chicago, 1990), 3-10. 21. Culture of Narcissism, 32.22. Ibid., 141. 23. Ibid., 53. 24. Ibid., 232. 25. Ibid.,235. 26. See the interview with Lasch titled “HisCritical Mind ‘Ranges Freely’” in the Rochester,New York, Democrat and Chronicle (July 14, 1991),1B, 6B, 7B. 27. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survivalin Troubled Times (New York, 1984), 19. 28. Ibid.,27. 29. See Kunstler’s June 7, 2004, entry in his blogat http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary10.html.30. Minimal Self, 177. 31. Ibid., 240. 32. Ibid., 257.33. Ibid., 20. 34. Ibid., 32-33. 35. Ibid., 38. 36. Trueand Only Heaven, 22. 37. Ibid., 39. 38. Ibid., 54. 39.Ibid., 45. 40. Ibid., 53. 41. Ibid., 48. 42. Lasch,“Conservatism against Itself,” First Things (April1990), 22. 43. Lasch, untitled contribution tosymposium, New Oxford Review (October 1987),25-26. See also Lasch, “What’s Wrong with theRight,” Tikkun 1, no. 1 (1986), 23-29; Lasch, “HillaryClinton, Child Saver,” Harper’s (October 1992),74-82. 44. This quotation is taken from Lasch’scontribution to a New Oxford Review symposiumtitled “Transcending Ideological Conformity: Be-yond ‘Political Correctness,’ Left or Right” (Octo-ber 1991), 21. 45. New Radicalism in America, 297.46. Ibid., 332. 47. Ibid., 330. 48. Ibid., 306, 307. 49.“On the Moral Vision of Democracy: A Conversa-tion with Christopher Lasch,” Civic Arts Review 4(Fall 1991). 50. These arguments are included inLasch’s remarkable “Notes on Gnosticism” seriesof articles, published in New Oxford Review in fiveparts: October 1986, 14-18; December 1990, 4-10;January–February 1991, 10-15; March 1991, 20-26; April 1991, 8-13. 51. The friend is Dale Vree,who tells the story in his moving “ChristopherLasch: A Memoir,” New Oxford Review (April1994), 2-5.