"'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 The two have the same frame of historical reference—broad, but with its focal point at the turn of the twentieth century—and the same inclination to embed intellectual history in social history.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.

"A World in Which the Abandonment of the Struggle Against Social and Economic Exploitation Shifted Politics Towards a Contest Between Competing Confessional Groups Each Publicly Affirming the Righteousness of Their Own True Path to Salvation"

"This shift made the self just another market to conquer, with self-help coaches, new age gurus, energy healers, food counsellors, alternative therapists and lifestyle brands all trying to profit off of this turn inwards. Politics, as Christopher Lasch would write, would 'degenerate into a struggle not for social change but for self-realization'. But, contrary to what Lasch thought, the rising 'therapeutic sensibility' he observed didn't become an 'anti-religion', based on 'rational explanation' and 'scientific methods of healing', but would deploy its own confessional techniques, endlessly re-presenting social questions as personal ones."

Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora at The Guardian call to "Blame Michel Foucault" for the "rise of confessional politics."

"The Talented Retain Many of the Vices of Aristocracy Without Its Virtues"

"Yet whereas conservatives at the time saw the market as the solution, Lasch often viewed it as a problem, capitalism being in symbiosis with radicalism. By encouraging instant gratification and the ephemeral, especially when it came to jobs, the market undermined the family, which he called 'a haven in a heartless world'. The very things that radicals attacked—'the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order'—have already been 'weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself'."

Ed West at UnHerd calls Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites "the most prescient work of the age."

President Crass

"Growing up in a blue-collar family that had supported FDR and Truman, I remember well that my family and our blue-collar friends shared the broader disdain that many Americans felt for 'the egghead Stevenson, as opposed to the Republican candidate, the more down-to-earth Dwight Eisenhower. One of the favorite refrains in our blue-collar milieu about men like Stevenson and other 'eggheads' was that they never got their hands dirty.
"In 2016 Trump benefitted from a deep strain in the American character. It was influenced by our frontier experience and contempt for the 'tenderfoot,' by the spread of Jacksonian democracy and populism, by the free-wheeling capitalism of the Gilded Age, by our respect for practical men like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindberg, for common sense and 'the school of hard knocks' as opposed to book-learning and being 'overly educated.'"

Walter G. Moss at History News Network argues that "[u]nfortunately, the crassness and anti-intellectualism of President Trump are not aberrations in our culture, but a reflection of our darker side."

"Make Concern for the Future"

"Lasch considered himself a man of the left, and saw his attack on liberalism as coming from that perspective. But he also admitted that he was not entirely sure of his own viewpoint, and so he dived into social theory, reading Marx, Weber and the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), among others. As we learn, this would become a typical pattern: when confronted with doubt and intellectual obstacles, he upped his reading and expanded into new areas. Indeed, he was far from the typical academic historian: he reached far afield into sociology, psychology and other areas, wherever his explorations would lead him."

Sean Collins at Spiked reviews Eric Miller's 2010 book, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

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.

"At Home Everywhere and Nowhere"

"From the 1930s, other sociologists had written about the social effects of mass media and mass consumption, and The Lonely Crowd's other-directed type bore some resemblance to Erich Fromm's 'marketing personality' (Fromm had been Riesman's analyst). But The Lonely Crowd made more of the way in which an older industrial culture of production and saving had given way to one of services, sales, and consumption—what Daniel Bell, a decade later, would call a 'postindustrial' society."

In The Chronicle Review, Rupert Wilkinson revisits David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, upon the book's sixtieth anniversary.

The Professor of History Should Also Be a Historical Protagonist?

"The liabilities of this subjectivist approach became clear in the 1980s and 1990s, as 'alternative' became a marketing technique employed to sell commodities that also were supposed to 'speak to' personal identity, and radical historians grew little closer to understanding their opposition. In the Age of Reagan the movement was never stronger in personnel, nor weaker in ideological achievement. Alan Brinkley, writing in the American Historical Review in 1994, faulted the movement for its formulas of commitment. 'New Left scholarship, which attacked the consensus with great effectiveness for ignoring or marginalizing the Left, had relatively little to say about the Right. That was in part because of the way much of the New Left celebrated, even romanticized, "the people." Having repudiated the liberal suspicion of "mass politics" and embraced instead the concept of "participatory democracy," scholars of the Left had difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.'"

John Summers in The New Republic reviews Carl Mirra's The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970.

Carl Mirra and Staughton Lynd respond, and John Summers answers back.

The Populist Persuader

"But it is not as though answers are impossible to find in Lasch’s oeuvre: he wanted to see jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced…and he wanted, to every degree possible, this done in a manner which did not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey–another Progressive!–here) 'the local homes of mankind' (Revolt, p. 84). Complicated? Obviously."

Russell Arben Fox at Front Porch Republic ponders Christopher Lasch.

"The Triumph of Feminism over Socialism"

"To be sure, attacking feminist criticism as being the extended whine of a privileged, educated upper class is as old as … well, as bell hooks’s 1984 critique of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique: '[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.' It’s a point that keeps having to be made, though. And hooks’s list doesn’t even include the legions of colorless office jobs that most women endure, 'real' jobs that trap them from eight to five in a cramped cubicle under hideous lighting. During the course of a Sex and the City workday you’re likely to encounter Mr. Big, but at a 'real' job you’re far more likely to be thrown in with the pimply, fright-wigged characters of Dilbert or with Dwight Shrute from The Office, the show whose name is synonymous with tedium, idiocy, and despair."

Sandra Tsing Loh reviews Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work … And Get a Life, Before It’s Too Late and Neil Gilbert's A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life in The Atlantic.

Liberal Religion

"Moreover, as Christopher Lasch once noted, following the 1960s the left made the politically suicidal choice of cultural radicalism, which succeeded, over political and economic radicalism, which failed. Quoting Peter Steinfels, Dionne noted, 'American liberalism has shifted its passion from issues of economic deprivation and concentration of power to issues of gender, sexuality, and personal choice.... Once trade unionism, regulation of the market, and various welfare measures were the litmus tests of secular liberalism. Later, desegregation and racial justice were the litmus tests. Today the litmus test is abortion.'"

In The Nation, Eric Alterman notes the importance of connecting liberalism and religion.