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Christopher Lasch

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Born: May 31 1932

Died: 1313 02 19941994

Christopher "Kit" Lasch was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history 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 , Haven in a Heartless World , The Culture of Narcissism , and The True and Only Heaven , and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy published posthumously in 1996 were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Current Interest .

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 are considered contradictory. They are sometimes denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. But as he explained in one of his books The Minimal Self, "it goes without saying that sexual equality in itself remains an eminently desirable objective...". Moreover, in Women and the Common Life, Lasch clarified that urging women to abandon the household and forcing them into a position of economic dependence, in the workplace, pointing out the importance of professional careers does not entail liberation, as long as these careers are governed by the requirements of corporate economy.

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.

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Christopher Lasch

Christopher Lasch

Books from Christopher Lasch

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times

Haven in a Heartless World

Plain Style

Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism

The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type

La culture de l'égoïsme

The Baffler No. 20

Κοινοί Τόποι (Τεύχος 1)

The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918

World of Nations

Plain Style: A Guide to Written English

The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture

The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution

The World Of Nations; Reflections On American History, Politics, And Culture