Christopher Lasch
Encyclopedia
Christopher Lasch (June 1, 1932, Omaha, Nebraska
– February 14, 1994, Pittsford, New York
) was a well-known American
historian
, moralist, and social critic.
Mentored by William Leuchtenburg
at Columbia University, Lasch was a professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.' His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), "The Culture of Narcissism
" (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), were widely discussed and reviewed. "The Culture of Narcissism
" became a surprise best-seller.
Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period led him to be denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His basic thesis about the family, which he first expressed in 1965 and explored for the rest of his career, was:
and journalist; in St. Louis he won a Pulitzer prize for editorials criticizing the Vietnam War. Zora Lasch, his mother, who held a philosophy doctorate, worked as a social worker and teacher.
Lasch was active in the arts and letters early, publishing a neighborhood newspaper while in grade school, and writing the fully orchestrated "Rumpelstiltskin, Opera in D Major" at the age of thirteen.
and Columbia
, where he worked with William Leuchtenburg. Richard Hofstadter
was also a significant influence. He contributed a Foreword to later editions of Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition
" and an article on Hofstadter in the New York Review of Books in 1973.
Lasch taught at the University of Iowa
and then was a professor of history
at the University of Rochester
from 1970 until his death from cancer in 1994.
He also took a conspicuous public role. Russell Jacoby
acknowledged this in writing that "I do not think any other historian of his generation moved as forcefully into the public arena". In 1986 he appeared on BBC television in discussion with Michael Ignatieff
and Cornelius Castoriadis
.
During the 1960s, Lasch identified himself as a socialist, but one who found influence not just in the writers of the time such as C. Wright Mills
but also in earlier independent voices such as Dwight Macdonald
. Lasch became further influenced by writers of the Frankfurt School
and the early New Left Review
and felt that "Marxism seemed indispensable to me". During the 1970s, however, he became disenchanted with the Left's belief in progress -- a theme treated later by his student David Noble
-- and increasingly identified this belief as the factor which explained the Left's failure to thrive despite the widespread discontent and conflict of the times.
At this point Lasch began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique - a syncretic
synthesis of Freud and the strand of paleoconservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism
and its effects on traditional institutions
.
Besides Leuchtenburg, Hofstadter, and Freud, Lasch was especially influenced by Orestes Brownson
, Henry George
, Lewis Mumford
, Jacques Ellul
, Reinhold Niebuhr
, and Philip Rieff
. A notable group of graduate students worked at the University of Rochester with Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and, for a time, Herbert Gutman
, including Leon Fink, Russell Jacoby
, Bruce Levine, David Noble
, Maurice Isserman
, and William Leach.
" had abandoned their former commitments to economic justice and suspicion of power, to assume professionalized roles and to support commoditized lifestyles which hollowed out communities' self-sustaining ethics. His first major book, The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type, published in 1965 (with a promotional blurb from Hofstadter), expressed those ideas in the form of a bracing critique of twentieth-century liberalism's efforts to accrue power and restructure society, while failing to follow up on the promise of the New Deal. Most of his books, even the more strictly historical ones, include such sharp criticism of the priorities of alleged "radicals" who represented merely extreme formations of a rapacious capitalist ethos.
Lasch's most famous work, The Culture of Narcissism
(1979), sought to relate the hegemony of modern-day capitalism to an encroachment of a "therapeutic" mindset into social and family life similar to that already theorized by Philip Rieff
. Lasch posited that social developments in the 20th century (e.g., World War II and the rise of consumer culture in the years following) gave rise to a narcissistic personality structure, in which individuals’ fragile self-concepts had led, among other things, to a fear of commitment and lasting relationships (including religion), a dread of aging (i.e., the 1960s and 1970s "youth culture") and a boundless admiration for fame and celebrity (nurtured initially by the motion picture industry and furthered principally by television). He claimed, further, that this personality type conformed to structural changes in the world of work (e.g., the decline of agriculture and manufacturing in the U.S. and the emergence of the "information age"). With those developments, he charged, inevitably there arose a certain therapeutic sensibility (and thus dependence) that, inadvertently or not, undermined older notions of self-help and individual initiative. By the 1970s even pleas for "individualism" were desperate and essentially ineffectual cries which expressed a deeper lack of meaningful individuality.
Most explicitly in The True and Only Heaven, Lasch developed a critique of social change among the middle classes in the U.S., explaining and seeking to counteract the fall of elements of "populism." He sought to rehabilitate this populist or producerist
alternative tradition:
By the 1980s, Lasch had poured scorn on the whole spectrum of contemporary mainstream American political thought, angering liberals with attacks on progressivism and feminism. Liberal journalist Susan Faludi
dubbed him explicitly anti-feminist for his criticism of the abortion rights movement and opposition to divorce. But Lasch viewed Ronald Reagan's conservatism as the antithesis of tradition and moral responsibility. Lasch was not generally sympathetic to the cause of what was then known as the New Right
, particularly those elements of libertarianism
most evident in its platform; he detested the encroachment of the capitalist marketplace into all aspects of American life. Lasch rejected the dominant political constellation that emerged in the wake of the New Deal in which economic centralization and social tolerance formed the foundations of American liberal ideals, while also rebuking the diametrically opposed synthetic conservative ideology fashioned by William F. Buckley, Jr.
and Russell Kirk
. Lasch also was surprisingly critical and at times dismissive toward his closest contemporary kin in social philosophy, communitarianism
as elaborated by Amitai Etzioni
. Only populism satisfied Lasch's criteria of economic justice (not necessarily equality, but minimizing class-based difference), participatory democracy, strong social cohesion and moral rigor; yet populism had made major mistakes during the New Deal and increasingly been co-opted by its enemies and ignored by its friends. For instance, he praised the early work and thought of Martin Luther King as exemplary of American populism; yet in Lasch's view, King fell short of this radical vision by embracing in the last few years of his life an essentially bureaucratic solution to ongoing racial stratification.
In his last months, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1994, and to finalize his intentions for the essays to be included in Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, which was published, with his daughter's introduction, in 1997.
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
– February 14, 1994, Pittsford, New York
Pittsford (village), New York
Pittsford is a village in Monroe County, New York, United States. The population was 1,418 at the 2000 census. It is named after Pittsford, Vermont, the native town of a founding father....
) was a well-known American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, moralist, and social critic.
Mentored by William Leuchtenburg
William Leuchtenburg
William E. Leuchtenburg is William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is the author of more than a dozen books on 20th century history ,...
at Columbia University, Lasch was a professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.' His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), "The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch exploring the roots and ramifications of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and...
" (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), were widely discussed and reviewed. "The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch exploring the roots and ramifications of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and...
" became a surprise best-seller.
Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period led him to be denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His basic thesis about the family, which he first expressed in 1965 and explored for the rest of his career, was:
- When government was centralized and politics became national in scope, as they had to be to cope with the energies let loose by industrialism, and when public life became faceless and anonymous and society an amorphous democratic mass, the old system of paternalism (in the home and out of it) collapsed, even when its semblance survived intact. The patriarch, though he might still preside in splendor at the head of his board, had come to resemble an emissary from a government which had been silently overthrown. The mere theoretical recognition of his authority by his family could not alter the fact that the government which was the source of all his ambassadorial powers had ceased to exist.
Early Life
Christopher Lasch came from a highly political family rooted in the left. His father, Robert Lasch, was a Rhodes ScholarRhodes Scholarship
The Rhodes Scholarship, named after Cecil Rhodes, is an international postgraduate award for study at the University of Oxford. It was the first large-scale programme of international scholarships, and is widely considered the "world's most prestigious scholarship" by many public sources such as...
and journalist; in St. Louis he won a Pulitzer prize for editorials criticizing the Vietnam War. Zora Lasch, his mother, who held a philosophy doctorate, worked as a social worker and teacher.
Lasch was active in the arts and letters early, publishing a neighborhood newspaper while in grade school, and writing the fully orchestrated "Rumpelstiltskin, Opera in D Major" at the age of thirteen.
Career
He studied at HarvardHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he worked with William Leuchtenburg. Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University...
was also a significant influence. He contributed a Foreword to later editions of Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition
The American Political Tradition
The American Political Tradition is a 1948 book by Richard Hofstadter, an account on the ideology of previous U.S. presidents and other political figures...
" and an article on Hofstadter in the New York Review of Books in 1973.
Lasch taught at the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
and then was a professor of history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
at the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
from 1970 until his death from cancer in 1994.
He also took a conspicuous public role. Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author, and critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history specifically the history of intellectuals and education...
acknowledged this in writing that "I do not think any other historian of his generation moved as forcefully into the public arena". In 1986 he appeared on BBC television in discussion with Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011...
and Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.-Early life in Athens:...
.
During the 1960s, Lasch identified himself as a socialist, but one who found influence not just in the writers of the time such as C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
but also in earlier independent voices such as Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.-Early life and career:...
. Lasch became further influenced by writers of the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
and the early New Left Review
New Left Review
New Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...
and felt that "Marxism seemed indispensable to me". During the 1970s, however, he became disenchanted with the Left's belief in progress -- a theme treated later by his student David Noble
David F. Noble
David Franklin Noble was a critical historian of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science, and the department of Social and Political Thought. at York University in...
-- and increasingly identified this belief as the factor which explained the Left's failure to thrive despite the widespread discontent and conflict of the times.
At this point Lasch began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique - a syncretic
Syncretic politics
Syncretic politics or spectral-syncretic refers to a form of politics outside of the conventional left-right political spectrum, this term is especially used by some scholars to describe the political nature of fascism...
synthesis of Freud and the strand of paleoconservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and its effects on traditional institutions
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
.
Besides Leuchtenburg, Hofstadter, and Freud, Lasch was especially influenced by Orestes Brownson
Orestes Brownson
Orestes Augustus Brownson was a New England intellectual and activist, preacher, labor organizer, and noted Catholic convert and writer...
, Henry George
Henry George
Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land...
, Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
, Jacques Ellul
Jacques Ellul
Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. He wrote several books about the "technological society" and the interaction between Christianity and politics....
, Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world...
, and Philip Rieff
Philip Rieff
Philip Rieff was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992. He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund Freud and his legacy, including Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of...
. A notable group of graduate students worked at the University of Rochester with Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and, for a time, Herbert Gutman
Herbert Gutman
Herbert Gutman was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history.-Early life and education:...
, including Leon Fink, Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author, and critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history specifically the history of intellectuals and education...
, Bruce Levine, David Noble
David F. Noble
David Franklin Noble was a critical historian of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science, and the department of Social and Political Thought. at York University in...
, Maurice Isserman
Maurice Isserman
Maurice Isserman is James L. Ferguson Professor of History at Hamilton College and an important contributor to the “new history of American communism” which reinterpreted the role of the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s. His books have also traced the...
, and William Leach.
Ideas
Lasch's earliest argument, anticipated partly by Hofstadter's concern with the cycles of fragmentation among radical movements in the United States, was that American radicalism had at some point in the past become socially untenable. Members of "the LeftLeft-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
" had abandoned their former commitments to economic justice and suspicion of power, to assume professionalized roles and to support commoditized lifestyles which hollowed out communities' self-sustaining ethics. His first major book, The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type, published in 1965 (with a promotional blurb from Hofstadter), expressed those ideas in the form of a bracing critique of twentieth-century liberalism's efforts to accrue power and restructure society, while failing to follow up on the promise of the New Deal. Most of his books, even the more strictly historical ones, include such sharp criticism of the priorities of alleged "radicals" who represented merely extreme formations of a rapacious capitalist ethos.
Lasch's most famous work, The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch exploring the roots and ramifications of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and...
(1979), sought to relate the hegemony of modern-day capitalism to an encroachment of a "therapeutic" mindset into social and family life similar to that already theorized by Philip Rieff
Philip Rieff
Philip Rieff was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992. He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund Freud and his legacy, including Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of...
. Lasch posited that social developments in the 20th century (e.g., World War II and the rise of consumer culture in the years following) gave rise to a narcissistic personality structure, in which individuals’ fragile self-concepts had led, among other things, to a fear of commitment and lasting relationships (including religion), a dread of aging (i.e., the 1960s and 1970s "youth culture") and a boundless admiration for fame and celebrity (nurtured initially by the motion picture industry and furthered principally by television). He claimed, further, that this personality type conformed to structural changes in the world of work (e.g., the decline of agriculture and manufacturing in the U.S. and the emergence of the "information age"). With those developments, he charged, inevitably there arose a certain therapeutic sensibility (and thus dependence) that, inadvertently or not, undermined older notions of self-help and individual initiative. By the 1970s even pleas for "individualism" were desperate and essentially ineffectual cries which expressed a deeper lack of meaningful individuality.
Most explicitly in The True and Only Heaven, Lasch developed a critique of social change among the middle classes in the U.S., explaining and seeking to counteract the fall of elements of "populism." He sought to rehabilitate this populist or producerist
Producerism
Producerism, sometimes referred to as "producer radicalism," is a right-wing populist ideology which holds that the productive members of society are being exploited by parasitic elements at both the top and bottom of the social and economic structure....
alternative tradition:
"The tradition I am talking about ... tends to be skeptical of programs for the wholesale redemption of society... It is very radically democratic and in that sense it clearly belongs on the Left. But on the other hand it has a good deal more respect for tradition than is common on the Left, and for religion too.and said that
"...any movement that offers any real hope for the future will have to find much of its moral inspiration in the plebeian radicalism of the past and more generally in the indictment of progress, large-scale production and bureaucracy that was drawn up by a long line of moralists whose perceptions were shaped by the producers' view of the world"
By the 1980s, Lasch had poured scorn on the whole spectrum of contemporary mainstream American political thought, angering liberals with attacks on progressivism and feminism. Liberal journalist Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi
Susan C. Faludi is an American feminist, journalist and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee thought showed the "human costs of high finance".-Biographical...
dubbed him explicitly anti-feminist for his criticism of the abortion rights movement and opposition to divorce. But Lasch viewed Ronald Reagan's conservatism as the antithesis of tradition and moral responsibility. Lasch was not generally sympathetic to the cause of what was then known as the New Right
New Right
New Right is used in several countries as a descriptive term for various policies or groups that are right-wing. It has also been used to describe the emergence of Eastern European parties after the collapse of communism.-Australia:...
, particularly those elements of libertarianism
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
most evident in its platform; he detested the encroachment of the capitalist marketplace into all aspects of American life. Lasch rejected the dominant political constellation that emerged in the wake of the New Deal in which economic centralization and social tolerance formed the foundations of American liberal ideals, while also rebuking the diametrically opposed synthetic conservative ideology fashioned by William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
and Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
. Lasch also was surprisingly critical and at times dismissive toward his closest contemporary kin in social philosophy, communitarianism
Communitarianism
Communitarianism is an ideology that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. That community may be the family unit, but it can also be understood in a far wider sense of personal interaction, of geographical location, or of shared history.-Terminology:Though the term...
as elaborated by Amitai Etzioni
Amitai Etzioni
Amitai Etzioni is a German-Israeli-American sociologist.-Biography:In 1933, Amitai Etzioni was only four years old when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. He was separated from his family but reunited with them by the year 1947...
. Only populism satisfied Lasch's criteria of economic justice (not necessarily equality, but minimizing class-based difference), participatory democracy, strong social cohesion and moral rigor; yet populism had made major mistakes during the New Deal and increasingly been co-opted by its enemies and ignored by its friends. For instance, he praised the early work and thought of Martin Luther King as exemplary of American populism; yet in Lasch's view, King fell short of this radical vision by embracing in the last few years of his life an essentially bureaucratic solution to ongoing racial stratification.
Death
After seemingly successful cancer surgery in 1992, Lasch was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in 1993. Upon learning that it was unlikely to significantly prolong his life, he refused chemotherapy, observing that it would rob him of the energy he needed to continue writing and teaching. To one persistent specialist, he wrote: "I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament."In his last months, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, published in 1994, and to finalize his intentions for the essays to be included in Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, which was published, with his daughter's introduction, in 1997.
Books
- 1962: The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution
- 1965: The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual As a Social Type
- 1969: The Agony of the American Left
- 1973: The World of Nations
- 1977: Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged
- 1979: The Culture of NarcissismThe Culture of NarcissismThe Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch exploring the roots and ramifications of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and...
: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations - 1984: The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times
- 1991: The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
- 1994: The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy
- 1997: Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism
- 2002: Plain Style: A Guide to Written English
Articles
- "The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man," Journal of Southern History 24 (August 1958): 319-31.
- "American Intervention in Siberia: A Reinterpretation." Political Science Quarterly 77 (June 1962): 205-23.
- "Introduction." In The Social Thought of Jane Addams, ed. Lasch, pp. xiii-xxvii. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
- "Resistance to Slavery." Civil War History 13 (December 1967): 315-29. Coauthor with George M. Fredrickson.
- "Religious Contributions to Social Movements: Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel, and Its Critics," Journal of Religious Ethics 18 (Spring 1990): 7-25.
- “Liberalism and Civic Virtue”. Telos 88 (Summer 1991). New York: Telos Press.
- "The Culture of Consumption," in Encyclopedia of American Social History, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, vol. 2, pp. 1381–90. 3 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993.
- "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch." Journal of American History 80 (March 1994): 1310-32. Interview
- Robert Cummings, "The Writings of Christopher Lasch: A Bibliography-in-Progress," (2003) online
Further reading
- Beer. Jeremy. "On Christopher Lasch," Modern Age, Fall 2005, Vol. 47 Issue 4, pp 330–343 online edition, conservative viewpoint
- Hartman, Andrew. "Christopher Lasch: Critic of liberalism, historian of its discontents," Rethinking History, Dec 2009, Vol. 13 Issue 4, pp 499–519
- Mattson, Kevin. "The Historian As a Social Critic: Christopher Lasch and the Uses of History," History Teacher, May 2003, Vol. 36 Issue 3, pp 375–96
- Miller, Eric. Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (2010) 394pp; scholarly biography
External links
- Important quotes from Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism
- The Historian As a Social Critic: Christopher Lasch and the Uses of History a scholarly review of Christopher Lasch's thinking
- 1991 interview on the Daily Motion
- The writings of Christopher Lasch : a bibliography-in-progress / compiled by Robert Cummings (last updated 2003)
- Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, by Eric Miller