Christopher Lasch Historian

Gender: Male
Citizenship: United States
Born: Jun 1, 1932
Died: Feb 14, 1994

Christopher Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic.

Mentored by William Leuchtenburg at Columbia University, Lasch was a 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, 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.

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories. hope & politics

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics. politics & religion

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. age

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction. society

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family. family

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice. politics

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. success

Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes. family

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business. business

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs. experience & society

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types. family

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values. society

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button. smile

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change. change

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system. family

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection. nature

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage. marriage

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction. family

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life. family

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left. politics & religion