Christopher Lasch
Story Stream
The Ghost Who Haunts the MAGA Revolt May 29, 2024
Over the past half-decade, few intellectuals have undergone a renaissance like Christopher Lasch — and few renaissances have been quite as startlingly heterodox. After the 2016 election, Lasch’s posthumous 1994 book Revolt of the Elites was cited as ...
Narcissism for All April 01, 2024
On my last visit to the National Gallery in London in October 2022, during Frieze Week, the wall beneath Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers still displayed noticeable palm-sized daubs of unmatched gray paint. The day before, Just Stop Oil protestor...
Searching for Personality in a Sea of Identities November 10, 2023
Narcissus, having spurned the love of the nymph Echo, falls in love with the beauty of his own unrecognised reflection, seeks to embrace it, and drowns. It is easy to see this ancient fable as a simple moral warning against excessive self-love and it...
Christopher Lasch’s Forgotten Utopia May 10, 2023
When discussion turns to Christopher Lasch and his diagnosis of Western narcissism, his later work is often neglected. And this is a shame, for it is here that he offers an antidote: a physical community designed to combat the malaise of modernity.La...
Seer of the Selfie February 23, 2023
Near the center of Edinburgh stands the tomb of the unread writer. It lies a stone’s throw from the castle with its orbiting birds, high on an extinct volcanic crag; the Old Town with its wynds and tenements; and the pleasant public gardens that repl...
The Enduring Appeal of Christopher Lasch January 04, 2023
hy do we keep coming back to Christopher Lasch? There are political reasons why commentators on both the Left and the Right find it useful to return to his books and renew his criticisms of American society, or else simply filch them at their own con...
The Hopeful Dystopian January 02, 2023
Why do we keep coming back to Christopher Lasch? There are political reasons why commentators on both the Left and the Right find it useful to return to his books and renew his criticisms of American society, or else simply filch them at their own co...
What Christopher Lasch Got Wrong November 03, 2022
Christopher Lasch’s posthumous comeback began around the same time Donald Trump was elected. In the years since, his inter-connected critiques of contemporary humanity’s narcissism and our globalised elite have turned him into a prophet of the populi...
20 Political Reform Books for 2020 December 31, 2020
Because of the holidays, this issue is going to be a little different from the usual fare. Rather than doing a link round-up, this issue is instead going to round up political reform books (broadly considered) from 2020. In fact—20 books from 2020! (...
Christopher Lasch, Populist Prophet January 11, 2019
No American intellectual shaped the terms of post-1960s cultural criticism quite like Christopher Lasch. Heir to a dominant liberalism that promised all things to all peoples, he struck instead a pessimistic pose denouncing the noxious alchemy of cap...
