"'He Seemed to Stand, Above All, for Clarity of Thought'"

"The writer with whom Lears has the closest affinity is the late historian Christopher Lasch. The two have the same frame of historical reference—broad, but with its focal point at the turn of the twentieth century—and the same inclination to embed intellectual history in social history. Lears apparently senses this, too, because one of the most probing essays in this book is 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1995), a long study of Lasch's work published the year after he died. Like Lears, Lasch was a hopeful liberal who, in mid-career, found liberals' interest in the common man to be on the wane. Unlike Lears, Lasch veered sharply to what one would then have called the left, immersing himself in Freud and Marx, before emerging with a populist vision of American life that defended the family against the state and struck a lot of intellectuals at the time as right-wing. Lears was one of these. When Lasch wrote, 'We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good,' Lears confessed that it 'makes me wonder if we lived on the same planet.'"

Christopher Caldwell at The American Conservative reviews T.J. Jackson Lears's Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians: The Off-Modern in American History.