Lasch, Christopher (1932–1994)

Despite launching a sustained assault on the very foundations of the American way of life, Christopher Lasch is now considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lasch was a historian but did not confine his inquiry to the annals of history. Rather, he utilized a deep understanding of historical processes to address contemporary Western culture as it unfolded. Lasch addressed issues as diverse as public morality, the family, the rise of feminism and liberalism in the postwar era, and the growth of the market and its gradual domination of social life and in doing so displayed a perspicacious ability to grasp the essence of postwar America as it abandoned its brief flirtation with social democracy and returned to its founding principles of existential and economic freedom. Lasch offered a detailed and incisive critique of both the political left and right, but we can basically sum up his intellectual approach as an amalgamation of socialism, with its traditional concern with the power of capitalism to corrupt public culture and everyday life, and conservatism, inasmuch as he was deeply suspicious of the onward march of twentieth-century liberalism and what he considered the thoughtless deconstruction of traditional social institutions.

Lasch was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1932, the son of progressive and intellectual parents. Lasch's mother held a PhD and taught philosophy at the universities of Nebraska and Missouri, and his father studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and eventually became a noted journalist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorials that criticized American involvement in Vietnam. Lasch eventually received his doctorate in history from Columbia in 1961 and took up a post at the University of Iowa as Assistant Professor in History in that same year. After a number of other moves, Lasch eventually arrived at the University of Rochester in 1970 as Professor of History where he spent the rest of his career.

Lasch was a prodigious writer and it is impossible to offer a comprehensive digest of his work here. He wrote ten books in total, with the last two published posthumously after Lasch succumbed to cancer in 1994. Perhaps the most celebrated of Lasch's books is The Culture of Narcissism. The core thesis of this book is perhaps even more pertinent today than it was at the time of its first publication in 1979. In this book, Lasch charts the broad range of social pressures that have destabilized the traditional family and led to a rise in narcissistic personality types. For Lasch, the onward march of liberal humanism, coupled with developing forms of capital accumulation centered on competitive consumerism, have led to a marked increase in narcissism. Lasch offers a scathing critique of the liberal projects of the sixties that sought to free the individual from constraining social structures. This narcissistic focus on the needs and desires of the individual threatened the well-being of the collective ways of life on which modern civilization was structured.

We can only guess at what Lasch would have made of the rise of global neoliberalism, the branding of the everyday life and the solipsistic identity projects that make up an increasingly important part of public culture. It seems unlikely that he would have found anything positive to say about the apparent instrumentalization of community, the media nature of contemporary (post) politics, and the increasingly [Page 836]desperate scramble to accumulate and display (Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). Ever the historian, it is likely that Lasch would have detailed the deep historical and ideological roots of liberalism, roots that continue to shape American economy and culture and structure both the political left and right. He would have argued that this American ideology has prepared the ground for a new and evermore socially corrosive advanced market capitalism, an economic system that seeks to draw all into an aggressive battle for cultural significance that sustains the consumer economy but has profound implications for psychic well-being and social order. Given the recent challenges to global capital and the apparent inability of the left to construct a realistic alternative to it, it is perhaps time we revisited the work of Lasch and reconsidered how his brand of conservative egalitarianism might benefit contemporary social and cultural analysis.

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