The Agony of Christopher Lasch

Abstract

Jeremiads declaiming our depravity, decline from republican virtue, or, more recently, psychological sicknesses are staples of American culture. What then distinguishes Christopher Lasch's pronouncements of damnation from a host of others that have appeared recently? Why have Lasch's Haven in a Heartless World (1977) and The Culture of Narcissism (1979) rushed to the head of this parade, becoming required reading at the White House and attracting coverage from Time, Newsweek, and People? The answer, in part, lies in the way his fresh-sounding arguments about the decline of the family, paternal authority, and genuine individualism are linked to that hoary and perennial danger, Big Government. Here is old wine in an attractive new bottle. Cries about the decline of virtue and true individualism sound hackneyed when they come from an avowed conservative, but when a man of the left, who also takes great pains to insist on the importance of history, talks about narcissism as something new and terrible we are inclined to listen. While Lasch has attracted a large new audience, his old readership, the veteran radicals of the 1960s, reared on his criticisms of Cold War liberalism and beguiled by his exposition of an antiauthoritarian Socialist tradition, feel betrayed. With a few exceptions they have mourned the old Lasch, the author of The New Radicalism in America (1965) and The Agony of the American Left (1969), and have tried to bury his new arguments about the need for order and authority within the family and, by extension, within society at large. While some critics have tended to caricature his discussion of the family, they are certainly correct in seeing an almost Victorian longing for a heroic strength of character, or at least stability of character, as informing Haven in a Heartless World and The Culture of Narcissism. New admirers and detractors alike, however, have failed to see the strong continuities between his earlier and recent essays. Lasch's contentions about patriarchy, feminism, the cult of experience, and the dangers of social engineering which have made him the white crow of the American left were