The Revolt of the Historian

"Miller attributes to Lasch a final philosophy rooted in reverence for life, but it is unclear that Lasch would have tolerated so simple a formulation. He could accept neither secular progressivism nor the consolations existential Christianity offered. Lasch was a spiritual pilgrim, reminding others of the unshared past they had lost but might be able to recover. He was a reformer in a society in which the most elemental of reforms, the democratization of economic life, has not been accomplished. When he died he was planning a book on class in the United States, which might have brought together some of the separate strands of his work: the failure of democratic citizenship, the miseries of emotional life in our commodity culture, the deformations of mass culture and the inadequacies of our educational institutions. Lasch was a distinctly American figure, yet he was a true contemporary of Jürgen Habermas, the German advocate of a new public sphere, and of Pierre Nora, the French historian who insists on the indispensable contribution of memory to civilized politics. That American culture could bring forth so relentless a critic is perhaps one of the reasons to still think well of it."

Norman Birnbaum in The Nation reviews Eric Miller's Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.