When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965), by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals’ lives and their social location—or lack of it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered.

I had earlier that summer picked up and read a paperback edition of Daniel Aaron's Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (1951) that was similarly organized around a series of biographies of figures who were in fact more familiar to me than some of those in Lasch's book. But Aaron's was, by contrast, a very uncomplicated story of men who “observed the social ravages produced by the industrial age” and rightly proceeded to “protest what they felt was the betrayal of the republican ideal.”Footnote ¹

Although I did not realize it when I was reading Men of Good Hope, after reading Lasch I was struck by how little attention Aaron had devoted to the social history of those intellectuals. The line of progressivism was based on the reform impulse without much attention to the location of intellectuals in the society or polity over the long nineteenth century. Their benevolent aspirations made examination of their circumstances unnecessary; there was more or less a straight line from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker to Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams. Lasch, by contrast, made an argument that his intellectuals represented something new. “The rise of the new radicalism,” Lasch wrote in the book's opening paragraph, “coincided with the emergence of the intellectual as a distinctive social type.” When he referred to intellectuals as either a “status group” or a “social class” he was describing what he said was “a distinctively modern phenomenon, the product of the cultural fragmentation that seems to characterize industrial and postindustrial societies.”Footnote ²

Social history, as Lasch understood it, largely on the basis of conversations with William R. Taylor, who had been a teacher at Harvard when Lasch was a student there and was by this time at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was really a combination of social history as social structure and cultural history.Footnote ³ This was quite different from social history as it came to be understood in the 1970s and beyond: the study of particular understudied groups: women, enslaved people, workers, immigrants. It was concerned with the location of groups in the social order, particularly, in this case, intellectuals. As a critic, Lasch focused on the culture, but he understood the cultural manifestations he examined and criticized to be the product of the kind of society and social structures that had been fashioned in history.Footnote ⁴

There was something else: he did not really identify with the intellectuals he wrote about. He was learning from them, especially their weaknesses, even as he recognized their accomplishments and insights, particularly in the case of Jane Addams. His stance was detached, yet it seems clear in retrospect that among other things this book was a map that Lasch was drawing for himself. He was clearly drawn to Jane Addams, the portrait of whom was acute and sensitive, as well as to Randolph Bourne, who would be a significant reference in later work. And in Norman Mailer he showed how modern capitalist culture can seduce the susceptible intellectual to embrace the pursuit of celebrity at the cost of intellect—and integrity.

It was extraordinarily ambitious, with something of a family resemblance to Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, another second book that went far beyond a first book in ambition. In both cases the authors were consciously striving to achieve a literary quality; the writing was important to them. Hofstadter's book was not only marked by an exceptional literary grace and gift for fresh turns of phrase not evident in his first book, but there was also a detachment sustained by a comic sensibility. Lasch professed detachment and largely achieved it, but he had a deeper involvement with his subjects. His book was more about lessons to be learned about the vocation of intellect—offered to aspiring intellectuals, including himself.

Lasch turned to history as a foundation for political and cultural criticism. He was, to use a term used to describe leading British intellectuals, a public moralist.Footnote ⁵ He identified strongly with history as a discipline, but history as a profession had less appeal. He found in the past and in historical scholarship invaluable resources as a critic. A year after John Higham published an article in the American Historical Review encouraging his colleagues to move beyond “consensus” history to become “moral critics,” Lasch embarked on The New Radicalism in America, which on publication announced his arrival as a major critic.Footnote ⁶ For the 1963–4 academic year Lasch had secured a Social Science Research Council fellowship to write a book on progressive-era intellectuals. That enabled him to spend an academic year in England, during which he wrote the whole of The New Radicalism. He was able to do it because—as Robert Westbrook has shown on the basis of the substantial Lasch archives at the University of Rochester—he used research that he had already done for four other unfinished projects.Footnote ⁷ That opportunism on the matter of sources largely accounts for the somewhat miscellaneous grouping. He repeatedly disclaimed the representativeness of the figures in the book, and except for the broad assertion that they were part of a new intellectual class he does not claim that anything connected them as a group.

The book brought him immediate recognition as a significant intellectual. He had already been reviewing books in some newspapers and magazines, particularly The Nation, but now he began his long run as one of the most prolific contributors to the New York Review of Books, with eleven articles—all quite substantial—from 1965 through 1968.Footnote ⁸ He was a major figure on the intellectual landscape of the United States from then until his death. He challenged Cold War liberals but was equally critical of the new left. He believed himself to be a man of the left, but he could not quite find his place there. The works that made him one of the most widely read and recognized American intellectuals also brought him opprobrium from substantial parts of the left, particularly from feminists.Footnote ⁹ But it would be wrong to label him a conservative, as many did. He had a conservative sensibility, but he was a committed democrat, a critic of US interventionist foreign policy, and an advocate of policies that would reduce inequality.

Lasch was not a simple person. In addition, he was always rethinking the way to describe the world he wished to change. His independence is partly what made him important, but it is a challenge for a biographer. Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, Eric Miller's deeply researched, smart, and careful biography, enables us to learn how these always-evolving positions came together to produce a major social critic and a powerful teacher, who left his mark on his students.

There does not seem to have been any Oedipal drama, but it is important that his parents were standard-issue liberal intellectuals. These Midwestern progressives were well-educated professionals. His mother, Zora Schaupp Lasch, had a PhD in philosophy, and his father, Robert Lasch, was an editorial writer for major Midwestern newspapers—Omaha World-Herald, Chicago Sun, and St Louis Post-Dispatch. One of the great strengths of Miller's biography is his effective use of the correspondence between Lasch and his parents.Footnote ¹⁰ From the point when Lasch, an aspiring novelist, departed for Harvard, where his roommate was another ambitious writer, John Updike, these frequent letters—both familial and political—document Lasch's feelings and ideas. As the parents outlived the son, the letters continued until “Kit's” death.

His youth in Omaha and suburban Chicago seems quite important. Except for a year teaching at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he avoided cities: he taught in suburban Evanston, Illinois, Iowa City, Iowa, and Rochester, New York. But even at Rochester, he lived not in the city but in a smaller nearby town, Avon, that Miller comments could “very well have served as the inspiration for Frank Capra's Bedford Falls, in It's a Wonderful Life.” While he seems to have found Harvard stimulating and agreeable, graduate school at Columbia in New York City was apparently a metropolitan nightmare for him. In a letter to Naomi Dagen, an Oberlin student he had been dating, he wrote: “In spite of your high recommendation of New York, I am bound to say I dislike the place more and more. Detest would not be too strong a word.” Even more brutal was his comment that “any hick college has more culture than New York.”

So much for culture, but daily life in middle-class Manhattan was equally unsettling to him. Used to the easygoing Midwestern neighborhoods of his youth, he was disturbed by the way in which Manhattanites dealt with the proximity of so many others by practicing mores of privacy that seemed unneighborly or unfriendly to outsiders. To Lasch it was a pathological self-imposed isolation. “Everyone,” he wrote, “has a furtive look as if he were likely at any moment to run into a friend. The man without friends is lucky. He just has to avoid strangers.” He found it unnerving that someone living “within two or three blocks” of a friend would be hesitant about dropping by without prior arrangement.Footnote ¹¹ This reaction echoes in a deeply personal way the ideas of Ferdinand Toennies, Georg Simmel, Robert Park, Louis Wirth, and other commentators on community decline and the modern metropolis. Modern urban life seemed to dissolve community. This experience—or Lasch's understanding of it—is important, and I think it provides an important key to Lasch core values.Footnote ¹²

The Columbia experience was not a positive one either. The doctoral program, he later recalled, was “rigorously professional.” He claimed to have had no discussions with fellow graduate students about “politics and international affairs.” Miller captures Lasch's disappointment, saying that he had gone to graduate school for the experience of “grappling with ideas,” but “training for life in a guild was what he got.” It is odd, as Miller points out, that while the Morningside Heights campus was the academic residence of some of the most visible American academic intellectuals—Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, with Reinhold Niebuhr across the street at Union Theological Seminar—Lasch took no course work from any of these intellectuals during his two years in residence. He seems to have been untouched by the famous uptown intellectual world they represented.Footnote ¹³

Yet the picture Miller paints may be too dark. Across the street from Columbia at Barnard College he found his future wife, Nell Commager, daughter of Henry Steele Commager, a widely known historian and liberal stalwart.Footnote ¹⁴ He had a good relationship with his mentor, William E. Leuchtenburg, and he benefitted in various ways from Hofstadter, who hired him as a research assistant and encouraged him as a writer. Lasch later recalled that Hofstadter's example justified his literary ambitions, for he was “living evidence” that one could combine the “literary imagination” with the “historical” (46). Lasch and Hofstadter shared an interest in the relation of intellectuals to American society. At the time Hofstadter was finishing his own study, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and he encouraged Lasch's work on the New Radicalism. Lasch regularly apprised Hofstadter on his progress, and Hofstadter facilitated a contract with Knopf. In one of the interviews Lasch gave in the last months of his life, he told former students Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps that Hofstadter “remained the dominant figure on my intellectual horizon” for his “reengagement with the progressive tradition.” But he was uneasy about Hofstadter's comic sensibility, which for Lasch amounted to a “disdain for the hopelessly muddled thinking of ordinary Americans.”Footnote ¹⁵ Still, long after Hofstadter's death Lasch wrote an excellent introduction to a reissue of The American Political Tradition.

A quick look at the similarities and differences that united and divided Hofstadter and Lasch illuminates the approach of both to politics and their ways of being historians in public. Both focused their political analysis and critique on culture rather than on the mechanics of politics. Lasch was more inclined than Hofstadter to stress the historical formation of modern culture as the product of industrialization, managerial capitalism, and the rise of a therapeutic regime in the West. For Hofstadter, too, capitalism was foundational, although he was less interested in direct engagement with the subthemes that were so important to Lasch. Their practice as historian critics was, however, different. Hofstadter was energized by his engagement with historiography;Footnote ¹⁶ his critiques of the large framing narratives he inherited and the new narratives he constructed escaped historiography and entered into contemporary political discourse. In some ways, his whole career was the playing out of a love–hate relationship with the progressive historians—and by extension progressivism generally. He referred to his last complete book, The Progressive Historians (1969) as a “parricidal foray.”Footnote ¹⁷

Lasch's career, too, was framed by a critique of the liberalism identified with American progressives, but his approach was quite different. He more openly began with the contemporary condition, and he drew upon historical scholarship (and other disciplines as needed) to operate in public as a social critic. But like Hofstadter, his weapon of choice was ideas. Neither was an activist. Both believed that intellectuals contribute ideas; others organize political movements. They believed in the power of ideas.

Ironically, the books that made Lasch famous in the larger public arena, including an invitation to the White House from President Jimmy Carter to expound on the condition of contemporary America, were his most problematic books: Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977) and The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978). To many the former seemed to be a direct attack on the feminist movement, a view strengthened, perhaps, by its being published by Basic Books, a publisher with a reputation at that time for being particularly welcoming to conservative and neoconservative writers. The Culture of Narcissism was read and admired by Carter, but, according to Lasch, misunderstood by the president, who incorporated Lasch's ideas (as he understood them) in a notable address in July 1979. The address was prompted by the energy crisis that produced high gas prices and long lines at filling stations. Though the speech outlined a major energy initiative, Carter insisted that the issue was deeper, a matter of values, and he criticized consumerism and selfishness. Known as the “malaise” speech, although he did not use that word, the speech was a political disaster for Carter, who seemed to be blaming the victims. And it was frustrating for Lasch. After the speech, Lasch wrote to one of Carter's aides explaining that the main point of the book was in fact a critique of the source of the psychological problem: “the managerial and professional elite that gets most of the social and economic advantages from the distribution of power.” What he hoped for was a new politics, “composed of citizens, rather than clients and consumers” (244, 243).

In a footnote in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch observed that while there have been critiques of the therapeutic professions that were weakening the human capacity of Americans, they failed to see—and Lasch wanted his readers to see—that this development was a symptom, not a cause, of the problem, which was “the rise of modern management or the degradation of work.”Footnote ¹⁸ If one followed the larger arc of Lasch's critique of contemporary life in the United States, his point should have been clear. But he did not consistently (or insistently enough) connect his critique of the therapeutic sensibility with the political economy that, in his view, produced it. For example, at his first mention of the therapeutic in The Culture of Narcissim he writes,

But anyone who read reasonably closely Haven in a Heartless World or the Culture of Narcissism should have understood the larger framing. It is quite explicit in Haven in a Heartless World: “The history of modern society . . . is the assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals or their families.” Early on, he writes, “capitalists took production out of the household,” locating it in factories, which produced a de-skilling, shifting the power toward management in ever-larger industrial corporations. “Finally they extended their control over the worker's private life as well, as doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, guidance experts, officers of the juvenile courts, and other specialists began to supervise child-rearing.” Modernity, to Lasch, had been a complex sequence: “socialization of production” followed by the “socialization of reproduction.” This sequence was not, in his view, a natural or inevitable aspect of modernity. He sought to demonstrate that the contemporary condition was “the product of human agency, not of abstract social ‘forces.’” Humans, he insisted, made their own modern world—and could change it.Footnote ²⁰

History did not seem to be going Lasch's way. His philosophical understanding of history depended upon a non-creedal religious perspective. It enabled him to make sense of the history being made in his time. Miller rather effectively argues that religion, or, better, a religious sensibility without a creed, was at the core of Lasch's person and work. That faith was surely important to Lasch's understanding of history, and in the form of hope it enabled him to swim up-current, which he mostly did.Footnote ²¹ At the core of that sensibility was a notion Lasch learned as an undergraduate—the sustaining power of what Perry Miller attributed to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay: “Augustinian pessimism.”Footnote ²² That, it seems, protected him from disillusionment and despair; it enabled him to keep going against odds he knew were enormous, but not hopeless. Lasch's last major book, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), has a key section on “Hope without Optimism.” Playing off Martin Luther King, whom he deeply admired, Lasch contrasted “optimism,” which assumes a direction in history, with “hope,” which makes no such claim but assumes that ultimately the universe is “basically friendly” and that justice is possible. He identified with a faith he associated with Lincoln and King: a “mixture of hope and fatalism that is alien to liberalism.”Footnote ²³

Quite directly related to this religious-like faith were the rejections it implied, particularly an understanding of history as naturally progressive rather than contingent or historicist. He rejected Enlightenment rationalism as the foundation of the modern idea of progress as well as the origin of modern universalist or cosmopolitan thinking. Moreover, Enlightenment ambitions underwrote liberal optimism, industrialization, Weberian bureaucratization, and the rise of the therapeutic professions that seemed to diminish the human spirit rather than enabling it to flourish.

There is also a subtheme in Lasch's criticism, one that is always there but becomes more prominent in his last completed work and in a posthumously published collection of essays.Footnote ²⁴ This line of thinking culminates in his populist vision of small-scale communities and participatory democracy in his most learned and most ambitious book, True and Only Heaven. Here he is far from Hofstadter, the urbane metropolitan intellectual and harsh critic of populism.

Not long before beginning work on True and Only Heaven Lasch seems to have found in Lewis Mumford a soul-mate.Footnote ²⁵ A romantic hostile to Enlightenment rationalism, the machine, the military–industrial complex, and metropolitan gigantism, Mumford imagined smaller, lively communities regionally distributed around a central city. Like Lasch, he also practiced the anti-metropolitanism he preached, leaving cosmopolitan New York for tiny Amenia, near the New York–Connecticut border. Yet Mumford long held to a double vision—regions with a central city and a circle of small towns.Footnote ²⁶ Lasch may have been moving in this direction. One of the marks of Lasch's writing is that he often does his thinking in long footnotes, and some of his thinking on this point emerges there in his last two books. He is skeptical about whether this is possible, but keeps pondering it, saying no each time.Footnote ²⁷

Lasch and other Midwestern anti-cosmopolitans populate the pages of David S. Brown's Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing. This is a topic that surprisingly has missed the notice of historians, and it is worth attention. Brown, who recently published a biography of Richard Hofstadter, has thus addressed both the cosmopolitan and the anti-cosmopolitan.Footnote ²⁸ He defines the Midwestern historian/intellectual as populist (“critical of unrestrained capitalism”), anti-cosmopolitan, and a critic of imperialism.Footnote ²⁹ Put differently, he counterpoints (to the point of tedium) the Midwestern progressive historians who are his primary focus (Turner, Beard, W. A. Williams, and Lasch) with the bad guys in the East, and especially New York liberal historians.Footnote ³⁰ For both Brown and Miller, Hofstadter is the representative figure most often mentioned as the “opposite” of these Midwesterners, with the suggestion that there is a broad regional contest over the meaning of America. Yet Hofstadter surely qualifies as a critic of unrestrained capitalism and imperialism. So the distinction may come down to anti-cosmopolitanism. But there is also a suggestion that such eastern Liberals are elitist, compared with the Midwestern democratic populists. Such is the basis of the regional war Brown sees.

Surely there was a difference in the ways of life between the Midwest and the Northeast and especially New York City that doubtless affected historical writing as it affected literature, at least at certain times. Hofstadter, in fact, commented in an interview that while Beard excited him, Turner did not. “I'm too much of an Easterner,” he commented.Footnote ³¹ This may be worth probing more broadly and deeply. The shift from “western” interpretations of American history and literature (Frederick Jackson Turner and Vernon L. Parrington) before World War II to the urban and cosmopolitan ones identified with Richard Hofstadter and Alfred Kazin after the war is important.Footnote ³²

While there is much interesting biographical material in Brown's chapters, the concept of Midwest as he uses it is not very rigorous. The criteria for inclusion and exclusion are mysterious. Brown claims Beard for the Midwest, while Hofstadter identifies him, in the quote in the paragraph above, with the East.Footnote ³³ Why are Becker and Arthur Schlesinger the elder, who left the Midwest, not among the cast of Midwesterners? Kenneth Stampp went west to California. Yet in Brown's geography he remains a Midwesterner, as does Beard, who went east. The anomalies can be extended.

His strongest Midwestern case is narrower but more coherent: The University of Wisconsin's History Department does seem to have distinct multigenerational history that fits his themes. But even then we find complexities that may require thinking about networks as well as geography, connections as well as divisions. Merle Curti, for instance, plays a large role in the stories Brown tells about Madison, but he spent at least half of his career in the East, at Smith and Columbia after his Harvard studies. And he was on the Columbia faculty (and Richard Hofstadter's adviser) when he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Growth of American Thought (1943), perhaps the most democratic intellectual history of the United States ever written.

The sections of Brown's book that deal with the teaching and writing of history at Madison are quite rich and they suggest a way of enriching biographies of academic intellectuals. Too many of these biographies, even quite good ones, read a bit like the biographical subject was a reading and writing machine, never leaving the study.Footnote ³⁴ From the biographers of academics we too often get little more than explications of texts read and interpretations of texts written. But there is an institutional history missing. These intellectuals work in huge institutions; they teach students with lectures and in seminar discussions, especially those for graduate students where there is serious intellectual exchange that may be more influential on their thinking in a given week than is their reading.

How do they work? Certainly they work with editors. Yet in Miller's biography we get no sense of the interaction with editors. Lasch's writings in the New York Review of Books were almost always linked to his current book projects. He was working with one of the most important editors in the English-speaking world. What kind of intellectual exchanges did they have—either in person or by mail? And of course there is the social and intellectual community in which one works. We learn in Miller's book that Lasch was very sensitive to different History Department cultures; he declined pursue an opportunity at Madison (too big). He left Northwestern because he found no intellectual community, and he almost left Rochester, though he stayed and learned to live with Eugene Genovese as chair and colleague. And he later shaped the department or the Americanist part of it in something like his own image and drew a very specific body of talented students there. The world he thus created was important to him, as one begins to understand at the end of the book, when the students and his family and neighbors all come together at the Lasch residence with Lasch cooking and playing the piano. The party in Avon that Miller describes tells us a great deal about the politics and culture Lasch envisioned in The True and Only Heaven.Footnote ³⁵