A good piece on Christopher Lasch

Family Man: Christopher Lasch and the Populist Imperative: "Where others saw progress, Lasch saw destruction. His own interpretation of the nation’s past, according to Miller, “was centered not on grand, heroic movement from authoritarian control to freedom, as most Americans supposed, but rather on the shift from one form of overweening social control to another.” A nefarious collaboration between market and state was transforming citizens into consumers, while intruding into the most intimate spheres of human existence. Rootlessness and chronic anxiety increasingly defined everyday American life, and individuals sought to fill the resulting void through compulsive efforts to satisfy unappeasable appetites. The marketplace proffered an array of solutions, usually chemical or technological, to “age-old discontents” such as “loneliness, sickness, weariness, [and] lack of sexual satisfaction.” Others pursued a different route of escape, attaching themselves, however tenuously or even vicariously, “to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma.”"

I remember CL when I was in Chicago during the 1960s. He was a friend-colleague of my brother in law George Fredrickson. We used to sit outside in an Evanston back yard and talk. Morose is the word that comes t mind. But even then making a mark as a young social critic. The above suggests that he saw more than many at the time. He was hardly alone but the critique got drowned out or rather bulldozed by the legions of sprawl and the sheer force of consumerism.


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