No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
THE HISTORIAN AS PUBLIC MORALIST: THE CASE OF CHRISTOPHER LASCH
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2012
Extract
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.
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
References
1 Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Aaron, Daniel, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressivism (New York, 1961; first published 1951), xiGoogle Scholar.
2 Lasch, New Radicalism, ix, x, xi.
3 Lasch always gave credit to Taylor for helping him understand what a social history of intellectuals might be, something Taylor had done with brilliance in Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961).
4 Analysis of such a society, Lasch believed, involved all the human science disciplines—“literature, sociology, psychology, and anthropology, economics and political science.” Quoted in Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time, 46.
5 My reference is to the broad usage of the phrase by Stefan Collini in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991).
6 Higham, John, “Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic,” American Historical Review 67 (1962), 609–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is no evidence of a link between Higham's call and Lasch's act.
7 Westbrook, Robert B., “The New Radicalism and the Vocation of Intellectuals,” Reviews in American History 23 (1995), 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 That is almost three articles per year. By my count, omitting a few short responses to critics, he published thirty-two articles, on a wide range of topics, all showing considerable homework, between 1965 and his last contribution in 1988.
9 They were also rejected by his publisher, Knopf; he then switched to W. W. Norton.
10 In fact, Lasch's life is extremely well documented, perhaps the most of any twentieth-century academic yet studied. The almost weekly exchange of letters with his intellectually engaged parents are a rich resource, but more generally the Lasch archives at the University of Rochester seem to have copies of a very high proportion of Lasch's professional correspondence. Former students and others have also done important interviews with him.
11 Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time, 163, 42.
12 He engages these writers directly in True and Only Heaven, where he also contests my argument that there can be a more mixed reading of all of these save Wirth, one that allows for Gemeinschaft as well as Geselleschaft, that the two are relational, not sequential. See True and Only Heaven, 147n, 164–7.
13 Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time, 47n.
14 There is nothing about the Commager connection in Miller's account, and apparently there was no intellectual engagement between the two historians. When the Lasches visited, it seems that Commager, who always took on more journalistic work and lecturing than he could manage, especially as he got older, was always up in his study on deadline. See Jumonville, Neil, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 160–61Google Scholar. This account of Commager's desperate grasping of every available minute at his desk contrasts with Lasch's very different, more family-oriented way of working and entertaining.
15 Blake, Casey and Phelps, Christopher, “History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch,” Journal of American History 80 (1994), 1317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, “Richard Hofstadter,” in Cunliffe, Marcus and Winks, Robin, eds., Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (New York, 1969), 280Google Scholar.
17 Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians (New York, 1969), xivGoogle Scholar.
18 Lasch, , The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1978), 168nGoogle Scholar. A key book for Lasch on this theme was Reiff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Use of Faith after Freud (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.
19 Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 7. The discussion of “The Therapeutic Sensibility” is at 7–13. The important and pertinent point he makes in a footnote at 168 does not show up at this crucial point.
20 Lasch, , Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977), xx–xxiGoogle Scholar.
21 Cf. Alan Wolfe, “Jeremiah, American Style,” New Republic, 13 May 2010, 30–34.
22 In a letter to Barbara Ehrenreich, Lasch makes a reference to the impact on him—when he was a Harvard undergraduate—of Perry Miller's rendering of the Calvinism of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time, 289. For Perry Miller's brilliant evocation of this Puritan faith see Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939)Google Scholar, chap. 1.
23 Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), 391Google Scholar, 393. In a television interview by Richard D. Heffner distinguishing “optimism” from “hope” Lasch described optimism as “a state of mind of people who believe in progress,” as a “certain reading of history.” Hope is not an “assessment of the direction of historical change.” It is a “temperamental quality, almost a character trait.” It is a “state of mind of people who believe in the goodness of life, and in some kind of underlying justice in the universe in spite of evidence to the contrary . . . It's a religious quality,” very much like “faith,” but it does not “need to be attached to a creed.” Open Mind, 2 February 1991, available at www.thirteen.org/openmind/history/pursuit-of-progress/807, accessed 15 June 2011. This is roughly equivalent to what Perry Miller, New England Mind, 18, called the “cosmic optimism” of the Puritans.
24 Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
25 Lasch, Christopher, “Lewis Mumford and the Myth of the Machine,” Salmagundi 49 (Summer 1980), 127–51Google Scholar.
26 On this point see Thomas Bender, “The Making of Lewis Mumford,” Skyline, Jan. 1982, 12–14.
27 Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 147n, 164–7; Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 130n.
28 Brown, David S., Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Quoted phrase in Brown, Beyond the Frontier, xiv.
30 Each of these historians is the subject of a chapter, but several other historians are discussed.
31 Quoted in Schlesinger, “Richard Hofstadter,” 279.
32 The reference is usually attached to Turner's famous essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (1894), 199–227. See Parrington, Vernon L., Main Currents of American Thought, 3 vols. (New York, 1927–30)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; and Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942)Google Scholar. On the postwar cosmopolitanism of liberals, see Hollinger's, David A. “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly 27 (1975), 133–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 I also claim Beard as a New York intellectual in my New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Town Time (New York, 1987), chap. 8. If Beard is by Brown's accounting a Midwesterner, one might make an equal if bizarre claim for Hofstadter as one. There are parallels. Beard was raised and educated through college in Indiana, and that was the case with Hofstadter in Buffalo, plausibly the easternmost Midwestern city. Both then went to graduate school at Columbia, later becoming members of the faculty.
34 Other examples are Fox, Richard, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Brown, David S., Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time, 313.