A Crash Course on Christopher Lasch

Dear readers,

Due to recent travel, and a more ambitious turn I am taking on my upcoming essay on the Covid, I have slightly modified my short-term plans and am offering you a brief introduction to the thought of Christopher Lasch, adapted from the little book I published a few years ago in French. With the multiplication of references to Lasch recently, and the very Laschian tone of Limits and Hope, I thought it would be useful for you all to have a short, but comprehensive presentation of his work as a resource material.

As the professional managerial class continues its turn toward grotesque authoritarianism, Lasch’s brilliant 1994 Revolt of the Elites has never been as often cited or quoted, but there are many other dazzling parts of Lasch’s work which provide invaluable keys to understanding the situation we find ourselves in. The following essay attempts to highlight the relevance of Lasch’s full work beyond the magistral Revolt of the Elites.

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Reading, or rereading Christopher Lasch's work now is an imperative at a time when each passing day reveals more and more of liberal modernity’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  Regarded by many as America’s “premier social critic", Lasch boxed in the category of thinkers like George Orwell, Simone Weil, or Günther Anders. Impossible to ideologically pigeonhole, Lasch’s thought reconciled an American civic tradition which is "culturally conservative, politically radical and proposing a complex religious vision of existence" and Marxist schools of thought such as the Frankfurt School or Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’s tradition of English Marxism. This detonating blend of influences brought us an implacable diagnosis of the field of ruins left to us by progressive beatitudes, and an invaluable guide for a true reformist action based on the hope that can be drawn from a restoration of Man’s practical engagement with the world. Three essential and intertwined aspects dominated Lasch’s prophetic work: the critique of Progress, the culture of narcissism and the revaluation of a civic tradition glorifying small scale production and a “tragic understanding of life.”

Lasch went to great lengths to trace the origins of the idea of Progress, the authorship of which belongs to the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, in particular Adam Smith. Lasch emphasized that, in Adam Smith’s thought, Progress was a conceptual weapon against liberalism’s competing tradition of civic humanism, which carried a much more demanding conception of freedom than liberalism’s freedom from interference. Civic humanism posits that individual freedom can exist only in self-governed communities populated by citizens dedicated to nurture those civic virtues essential to the survival of the city. According to this worldview, insatiable appetites led to corruption, decay and ultimately to invasion by militarized powers.

In a few strokes of the pen, Smith destroyed the idea of civic virtue. Not only did he absolve insatiable appetites from any moral condemnation, but he turned the insatiability of desires into the engine of a never-ending expansion of productive forces that would free humans from the yoke of nature and the verdict of time. Where civic humanism cultivated a sense of moral perfectibility based on a sense of limits, Smith built a system of unlimited material progress on ordinary ambition, vanity, greed, and a morally misplaced respect […] for the “vain and empty distinction of greatness.” In other words, Smith postulated that the very virtues forming the cornerstone of civic humanism, were precisely those which would forever subject individuals to the yoke of tradition and lock-up humanity in the narrow communities of the family, the village, the clan, the tribe etc. In preaching a liberation from civic virtue, Smith displaced local, concrete attachments in favor of an abstract love for humanity premised on the idea of universal sympathy, which alone could forge a universal community organized in a world of strangers too busy in the limitless pursuit of their insatiable desires to indulge in their warring instincts.

The tool prescribed by Adam Smith to forge a humanity freed from the shackles of tradition is the construction of an anonymous market on an ever-increasing scale. Making the endless satisfaction of all our desires an earthly possibility, this quasi-divine market would generate a limitless progress of the arts and sciences without a defined horizon.

Alas, explains Lasch, the grand narrative of Progress, which was supposed to usher in a limitless world, has become a worse kind of determinism than the world of traditions it was supposed to displace. Materially, Progress has delivered mixed results with extraordinary levels of comfort associated with extreme levels of ugliness, obscene inequalities, and at the cost of the destruction of the natural world that is propitious to the flourishing of human life. In anthropological terms, however, the world produced by Progress and capitalism is a full-fledged catastrophe. Far from generating a humanity of demi-gods, Progress and capitalism have generated a world populated by narcissistic individuals who are incapable of empirical knowledge and are fundamentally dependent, for the very definition of their desires, on forces over which they have no control (the consumer market, the almighty State, the industrial-military complex, the public health apparatus, the corrupt pharmaceutical industry, etc.). Instead of supremely skilled and independent individuals living plain and full lives dedicated to contemplation and artistic creation, Progress has generated a world of weak and dependent consumers, “surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies [, who] live in a world that has no objective or independent existence” outside of them and “seems to exist only to gratify or thwart [their] desires.”

After writing early works dedicated to the study of the American left and radicalism, Lasch produced, in the 1970s, what would truly establish him as a major thinker with his trilogy of books on the culture of narcissism: Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations (1979) and The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984). To paraphrase George Scialabba, Lasch’s disaffection with the 1960s new left, after it degenerated in the counterculture, led him to turn not rightward, as many disaffected intellectuals, but inward. The central thesis behind Lasch’s books on narcissism is that the grand narrative of Progress and capitalism generates a kind of dominant personality perfectly adapted for its purpose. As capitalism transitioned from a capitalism based on production to one based on consumption, that dominant personality shifted from the kind of rugged individualism celebrated in American 19th century literature (the American Adam) to the narcissistic self. Contrary to what is commonly understood, the narcissistic self is not a strong self. It is actually the exact opposite: a weak and dependent self, a minimal self as Lasch put it, the self of a fundamentally dependent being who internalized in his psyche the abstract rationality of capitalism and who is essentially obsessed by its own psychic survival in a world that looks like a gigantic illusion.  

Lasch found the perfect analogy to describe the inhabitant of our contemporary world in Freud’s description of primary narcissism. Clinically, primary narcissism is the pathological continuation into adult life of the pre-genital phase when the infant does not yet distinguish between himself and his surrounding world. Like the infant who temporarily develops strategies of denial after the discovery of his separation from the world around him, Narcissus is characterized by a pathological denial of limits and the development of fantasies. Like the toddler who attributes quasi-magical power to his parents to satisfy or frustrate his desires, Narcissus believes in technology and the government’s enchanting powers to make sense of a world made up of sprawling bureaucracies and mass-produced commodities which defy his practical understanding.  Uncertain of the contours of his own individuality, Narcissus seeks above all a "total cessation of all tensions" and tries either to remake the world in his image (technological utopia), or to blend into his environment (New Age Gnosticism).

Of a characteristic immaturity and superficiality, cultivating self-referential irony, disloyalty, and ingratitude at the same time as having a preference for commitments that commit to nothing, and incapable of emotional identification with the generations that preceded him, Narcissus conceives of history, before the arrival of television, as an interminable period of darkness, boredom and oppression. But far from living in a constant state of felicity, Narcissus is a fundamentally anxious individual. Having lost almost all primal engagement with the world and dependent on a constant stream of prefabricated images and myths, Narcissus lives in a state of constant awareness of the collapse of the world around him. But instead of questioning the unmanageable complexity of the world that surrounds him or the inhuman scale of the organizations that structure his existence, Narcissus attributes his sense of collapse to the repressive conditions of the past and to the unfinished work of emancipation from the yoke of tradition.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that Narcissus is a being freed from all superego.  Deprived of traditional figures of authority with whom he could at least identify, he lives in the grip of an archaic, severe and punitive superego. Instead of fatherly figures, Narcissus integrates directly into his psyche the figure of the almighty State as a representation of authority, and the nourishing consumer market as the representation of love. Even more disturbingly, this distant, severe, and abstract superego summons a violence once locked in rituals, as illustrated by the phenomenon of mass murders by figures such as Anders Breivik, Adam Lanza, and too many others.

Lasch's developments on narcissism are the necessary prelude to a reflection that permeates all his work on the question of democracy. Lasch goes so far as to wonder, in his last book, The Revolt of the Elites, whether democracy still deserves to survive. According to him, the construction of an anthropological type of supreme consumer, unfit for questioning pre-given significations, is the culmination of both the homogenization of the universal market and the total axiological neutrality of liberal society. By founding a society indifferent to the citizen’s "character", liberalism has invalidated all formerly celebrated virtues other than “tolerance”, making it impossible to publicly question the intrinsic qualities of a citizen in a democracy. Barred from the possibility to judge the citizen’s character, our contemporary societies are therefore left with a minimal conception of freedom reduced to the dimension of freedom of choice. In the “fantastic world of commodities”, dominated by the imaginary of consumption, freedom is reduced to a consumer’s choice between interchangeable and commodified ways of life.

Such a minimal definition of freedom carries massive consequences about how individuals conduct their existence in the private and public sphere. Once viewed as the necessary conditions to usher in a classless society, the ideals of participation of everyone in public life and of a world of omni-competent citizens capable of self-government have given way to a democracy based on the distribution of essential goods and services. Formerly characterized by the moral aptitude for self-government, social success has given way to upward social mobility, which presupposes a separation of knowledge and ordinary life. Central in this drama is the institution of wage labor, which organized all economic activity around that separation. For that very reason, opposition to wage labor throughout the nineteenth century was, justly, perceived not as an economic question, but like slavery, as an issue of citizenship.

This separation between knowledge and ordinary life has sealed a class separation between a "civilized minority," who views itself as the repository of knowledge, and a class of subordinates. To legitimize that separation, liberalism has promoted a therapeutic vision of democracy as the democratization, not of the kind of intelligence required to build and maintain self-governed communities, but of "self-esteem".  Increasingly, the new elites, resembling the mass man identified by Ortega y Gasset at the beginning of the twentieth century, have entrenched themselves in a "world of abstract concepts and symbols", specializing more and more in the manipulation of information and in manufacturing the masses’ consent to a project decided away from their sight. Increasingly, as the memory of the shared prosperity of the great years of social democracy fades, this civilized minority “seeks not so much to impose its value on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or ‘alternative’  institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.” This has become even more obvious in the past few years with the grotesque elevation of experts to a status of quasi-priesthood.

Having exposed the debilitating effects of Progress and capitalism on the individual and the reduction of the freedom of the citizen in a democracy to a mere consumer choice, Lasch set out, in his magnus opus, The True and Only Heaven (sub-titled Progress and its Critics), to formulate a philosophy of hope through the rediscovery of the American tradition of "plebeian radicalism," embodied in those 19th century popular movements which meaningfully tried to resist the unstoppable march of Progress and showed that “only an arduous, even a tragic, understanding of life, can justify the sacrifices imposed on those who challenge the status quo.” In The True and Only Heaven, Lasch summoned the memory of the movements of small and independent producers (farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, etc.) threatened with extinction who, alone, have mounted a true challenge to capitalism, by concentrating their struggle on the fundamentals (the very concept of wage labor, the factory system, the concentration of credit, the invasion of experts in all areas of existence, the dumbification of work etc.), as opposed to the organized socialist and social democratic movements, which obsessed over wages, working hours and retirement.

One central preoccupation in the plight of these popular movements was the defense of small ownership, particularly of their threatened skills. Their struggles explains why "a small but universal ownership" is "the true foundation of a stable and firm Republic". Understanding very well that small ownership is a guarantee of participation in the political process, the actors engaged in these movements desperately fought to halt the process of proletarianization initiated by the emergence of a permanent class of salaried workers. To them, simply asking for better wages and working conditions — or for the right to indulge, in old age, in an orgy of consumption of debilitating tranquilizers and mediocre mass-market entertainment — equated to acquiescing to a state of serfdom. They had anticipated by more than a century the Great Reset’s program of “you’ll own nothing and be happy”, against which the French Gilets Jaunes, the Canadian truckers, the Dutch, Spanish and German farmers are mounting a meaningful resistance.

Interestingly, it is Lasch’s growing disaffection with the new left that led him to seek inspiration in the 19th century movements of those small producers threatened by the forces of progress. According to Lasch, initially at least, the new left asked the right questions — entirely unaddressed by the dominant political traditions — when it questioned the alienating dead-ends of instrumental reason and industrial technology. By making “the personal” an object of political consideration according to the famous slogan “the personal is political”, the early militants of the new left critically challenged “the assertion of social control over activities once left to the individuals and their families.” However, the new left largely condemned itself to irrelevance because of its incapacity to identify the origins of the evil of the industrial world and of its continuation, the information society, which lies not in “the pathology of purposefulness,” but in the confusion of practice with technique. For the same reason, it even became an active agent of the rationalizing forces’ onslaught against decent life.

In particular, Lasch thought that the new left’s assimilation of all purposive intelligence to technique rendered it incapable of understanding man’s singular relation with Nature and, as a consequence, of mounting a serious challenge to the industrial worldview, which consists precisely in its “instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity” :

Industrial societies conceive of the extension of human powers only as the replacement of human labor by machinery. As work and politics lose their educative content and degenerate into pure technique, the very distinction between technique and practice becomes incomprehensible. Industrial societies have almost completely lost sight of the possibility that work and politics can serve as character-forming disciplines. These activities are now understood strictly as means of satisfying material needs. Moral ideas, meanwhile, lose their connection with practical life and with the virtues specific to particular practices and become confused instead with the exercise of purely personal choices and the expression of personal prejudices and tastes, which can neither be justified nor explained and which should therefore not be regarded as binding on anyone else[…]

The crowning indictment of industrial civilization is not merely that it has ravaged nature but that it has undermined confidence in the continuity and permanence of the man-made world by surrounding us with disposable goods and with fantastic images of commodities. [i]

Worse, it is this outright condemnation of all forms of purposefulness which made the new left so prone to fall for the technological utopia preached by the technocratic elites, to the point that it became their favored instrument of legitimization. By repudiating “all forms of purposeful action in favor of playful, artistic pursuits, which it misunderstands, moreover, as activities without structure or purpose,” the new left wound up merely reversing industrial ideology and it ultimately degenerated in the purely performative “counterculture”, preaching all and its contrary. The most blatant example is how the new left preaches at the same time a fusional return to nature and the glorification of technological means to operate that return. This also explains why a powerful thinker like Herbert Marcuse could end up arguing that the liberation of Eros demands the technological abolition of work, making him the patron saint of the “anti-work crowd”, to paraphrase Rhyd Wildermuth.

Horror at the Heart Circle

Against this fate, Lasch urges the revaluation of Aristotelian practical reason, emphasizing "the need to restore the intermediate world of practical activity, which binds man to nature in the capacity of a loving caretaker and cultivator, not in a symbiotic union that merely denies man’s separation from nature”. Thus, Lasch calls for an "ecological ethic [which] ought to affirm the possibility of living in peace with nature while acknowledging that separation."

This ethic should be based on hope, which requires trust in “the goodness of life and some kind of underlying justice, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.” In other words, it is only through “character-forming” activities that the individual grows, because they put him directly in contact with a reality outside of himself, a “world beyond your head” as Matthew Crawford put it. Only through such a direct engagement with the world can men acquire the “painful awareness,” constitutive of selfhood, of “the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations.” Until his last breath, Lasch would defend this “curious position” as he called it at the end of one of his rare television interviews, on the TV program The Open Mind, in front of the baffled interviewer. It was the only way, argued Lasch, one would stop confusing “Progress” with “The True and Only Heaven.”

To Go Further

Nothing is more important than reading Lasch himself, starting with the five books constituting the core of his work:

• Haven in a Heartless World: the Family Besieged, NY, Basic Books, 1977

• The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, NY, Norton, 1979

• The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, NY, Norton, 1984

• The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, NY, Norton, 1991

• The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, NY, Norton, 1994

A particularly interesting book entitled Women and the Common Life, Love, Marriage and Feminism came out a few years after his death, edited by his daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. Lasch had always dreamed of publishing a History of Women, but fate decided otherwise. The next best thing to this unwritten work is this wonderful collection of essays on women with a very touching introduction by his daughter:

• Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage and Feminism, edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, NY, Norton, 1997.

His earlier works, before his disaffection with the new left, are also very well worth a read, if only for his implacable judgment on the bankruptcy of the liberal left of Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ.

• The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution, NY, Columbia Univ. Press, 1962

• The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, NY, Knopf, 1965

• The Agony of the American Left, NY, Knopf, 1969

• The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics and Culture, NY, Knopf, 1973

Eric Miller authored a great biography with a beautiful title:

• E. Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2010

The most comprehensive essays about Lasch’s work in English are two essays of George Scialabba:

• G. Scialabba, “No in Thunder!”: Christopher Lasch and the Spirit of the Age; A Whole World of Heroes, in What Are Intellectuals Good For? Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba, Boston, Pressed Wafer, 2009.

For French readers, I would like to reference, in addition to my own book, an excellent recent book by my friend Laurent Ottavi:

• L. Ottavi, Christopher Lasch Face au Progrès, Paris, Première Partie, 2022

• R. Beauchard, Christopher Lasch, Un populisme Vertueux, Paris, Michalon, 2018.

And finally, for different reasons, I find that the works of Matthew B. Crawford (for his passionate argument in favor of practical reason) and Thomas Frank (for his revaluation of the American 19th century populist tradition) are two excellent companion reads to Christopher Lasch.

• M. B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, NY, Penguin, 2009

• M.B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015

• M.B. Crawford, Why We Drive, Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, NY, Harper Collins, 2020

• T. Frank, The People No, A Brief History of Anti-Populism, NY, Henry Holt, 2020.

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[i] C. Lasch, The Minimal Self, NY, Norton, p. 255 (1984).