The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations/Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
Lasch, Christopher & Evans, Sara
appropriations were diminished and ten banishment of all members of the Ameri- ing, for instance: disco, drugs, professional percent of the large universities closed or can judiciary and the...
...by wondering in amazement why they are treated as sex objects...
...The book strongly underscores the importance of the current Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, both City for Israel and for world peace...
...A final chapter deals with the lessons to be drawn...
...Fetter replaced Ricardian differential rent with a "marginal productivity" concept of rent...
...the importance ofthe human factor and the element of surprise, the increasing significance of recognizance satellites for battlefield monitoring, and the Essential to an understanding of the situation in the Middle East incredible amount of material destruction.., cogent analyses of today, NO VICTOR, NO VANQUISHED gives a detailed this war and important implications for military planners #~ the account of the Yom Kippur War-the Arab surprise attack, the future...
...Both the New Left and women's liberation acted out the conservative-libertarian creed of the virtue of selfishness, though without quite realizing or owning up to it...
...Ludwig Lachmann provides an impressive exception to thistraditional treatment...
...He disrelishes Capitol Hill, almost has to be mentally deranged to believe the cussion about food with a group of schoolany Washington restaurant, and a seat on liberalmoonshine but that conservatism is teachers, he asked his hostess if she had a jet next ~to" a) a fat woman, b) a liberal not necessarily a sign of intelligence or ever eaten mud...
...Tyrrell likes most members of Congress...
...geration to make his book self-recommend- Most of the unsung women's liberation- Lasch is one of those rare traditionalists ing, though hardly self-validating...
...He concludes that the allure of the New Left was not practical social change, but selfadvertisement and self-dramatization~as Raymond Aron, Robert Brustein, and Morris Dickstein pointed out earlier...
...I, .for one, don't on what the Communist Party quaintly Just about everyone tastes Lasch's lash...
...Mansfield wants to The Spirit of Liberalism is that contempo- the presence of illibetalism...
...Her book, a doctoral dissertaists chronicled by Evans are unfamiliar names to me...
...That he Hotel, presumably because I stayed there...
...The trouble with male-female relations has indeed been the lack of love and friendship...
...Lasch acknowledges that the traditional family is a living STUDIES IN ECONOMIC THEORY Introducing a Distinguished New Book Series CAPITAL, INTEREST AND RENT: Essays in the Theory of Distribution by Frank A. Fetter Edited with an Introduction by Murray N. Rothbard This new collection of Fetter's essays systematically treats the fundamental problems raised by the Cambridgeneoclassical debate over distribution theory...
...But women's liberation has only made matters worse by assaulting the conditions that make love and significant friendship possible...
...It is amazing, moreover, that this "history" of women's liberation contains not one word about Diana Oughton, the attractive product of a very affluent Illinois family, who became dations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself...
...Zip 0 'Ballance minutely details the causes, preparation, strategies, and actual battles of the 1973 Arab-lsrae6 war...
...Lasch is perspicacious when he indicts advertising for institutionalizing envymsomething conservative foes of envy frequently overlookmbut what will insure that socialism will do anything more than collectivize it...
...Lasch thinks that contemporary narcissism can be understood by consulting the clinical psychiatric writings on the subject mwhich he proceeds to do, and which I find far from illuminating...
...However also excluded the mentally slow and in-Manhattan townhouse on March 6, 1970...
...mode," but fails to explain what she Sara Evans would not like Christopher bureaucratic liberalism, libertarian con-means in a way that protects the full Lasch...
...Instead of becoming more human it became more and more inhuman...
...Starchy conservatives will be upset to hear this but starchy radicals will be no more comfortDiscussing the male chauvinism of the early New Left, Evans tells us that "the decision to identify "totally" with women...
...It is a ism, junked her husband so she could ried the logic of individualism to the exclassic case of how to pad a dissertation declare herself a lesbian...
...He believes that axiom to explain his behavior...
...Name I A nonpartisan, authoritative and remarkably detailed account of [ Address the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict...
...He recognizes that"mental health" is the "modern equivalent of salvation" and yet complains that critics of narcissism "mistakenly condemn the psychiatric orientation as an opiate of the upper middle class...
...Lasch proclaims (his usual mode of communication) that, "All but the most rigid and dogmatic of socialists have now admitted the justice of...
...That ended the discussion, cleric, or c) some popinjay full of advanced even decency...
...Yet he cannot bring himself to call for the revival of the traditional patriarchal family--like religion, it supposedly has no future...
...simon-pure...
...The liberationists advertise their sexual availability by demanding birth control for the unmarried, free abortions on demand, and freedom to sleep around and shack up~and then they play dumb (surely they' re not that dumb, Sara...
...In contrast to Fetter's incisive treatment, neoclassical theory has confused the determination of the rate of discount (interest rate) with the determination of that which is discounted (rents...
...dependence on experts," find a basis for "a new capacity for self-government," and perhaps even do away with "the need that gives rise to a governing class in the first place...
...David W. Littlefield, Library of Congress, in Library Journal Blow-by-blow account of the October War...
...Work is his favorite therapy, and this ends the review...
...Women's liberation too was founded on self-obsessionmin this case, of upper-middle-class females...
...both have prospered as a likes women, suspects most men, and almost every month and stays either at the consequence of Jimmy's service...
...believe that intellectuality puts women at a used to call the "woman question...
...Lasch reminds me of no one more than the proverbially virtuous young lady from Kent Who said that she knew what it meant When men took her to dine, Gave her cocktails and wine...
...Lachmann approaches his subject by combining the work of Carl Menger, Frank Knight, and Friedrich Hayek...
...Nobody cared about anybody else...
...Publishers Weekly [ State...
...and Newsweek and a book was written recent Haven in a Heartless World, it is Evans gives much attention to the alleged about it--and it too cries out for explanagenuinely important because it penetrates oppressiveness of the male' s ',intellectual tion...
...She is what of happiness to the dead end of a narcissisgossip and trivia...
...Recommended...
...There is enough truth assertions she makes in it do nothing to ideologues of all varieties for not being in this characteristically Laschian exag-encourage me in this conviction...
...156 Pages, Index $15.00 Cloth, $4.95 Paper ($5.50 in Canada) 3 0 T h e American Spectator May 1979 reality only in the working class and that women's liberation is a form of bourgeois culture-rape: "As working-class women begin to assert their rights or at least to listen to feminist ideas, their husbands see in this turn of events another blow to their own self-respect, the crowning indignity heaped on the workingman by a middleclass liberalism that has already destroyed his savings, bused his children to distant schools, undermined his authority over them, and now threatens to turn even his wife against him...
...He thinks America will ly benign marks him as a generally civiNew York, the National Gallery, the Caf6 always suffer culturally until it adopts lized man...
...is called a "political lesbian," one whose lesbianism is the result not of psychosexual disposition but of a deliberate poh'tieal tic preoccupation with the self...
...loathes the advocates of almost any cause, New York Athletic Club or the Algonquin Tyrrell relishes travel, but Once he has particularly women's liberation...
...Lasch laments the breakup of the traditional family...
...it is a phenomenon that cries out for explanation, able with Lasch: He faults them for wasting their time assaulting "the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary Dale Vree is Executive Editor of the New yet Evans ignores it...
...His favorite causes are the can experience about which he knows noth- would be 99 years old...
...IS] depiction...
...That line appears in a footnote, and it is I| OOeeOOeOeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeOe astonishing that a socialist, who should be looking to the working class for his political bearings, can glibly announce that the decline of such a venerable working-class institution as the traditional family is irreversible...
...Lasch would like to "diminish...
...A balanced I[ vI Paymentencl or MC VI Visa V! Am...
...He provides an exacting and penetrating examination of capital resources as heterogeneous factors, intricately interrelated to form an economy's capital structure, and continually being reshuffled in response to the dynamic productive process...
...he deviates from Correct Thought servatism, and countercultural trendiness...
...His summation $14.95 ISBN: 0-89141-0171 provides critical lessons...
...In this sense, the New Left was but a mirror reflection of the self-obsession of the surrounding bourgeois culture which continues to find its paradigm in capitalist advertising...
...7 I I 000O0QQOI0oD00I000000I00o00IO0.0IgIOI0O000O0Q0D0IOIO000OQ0QsO0OOa0og0OO.O0O0OO0OOO0eDQQ0oOeOg0@~@~~@~@~~~~@~~@~@~ BOOK REVIEW 7 he Culture of Naraissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations Christopher Lasch / Norton / $11.95 Personal Politias: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left Sara Evans / Knopf / $10.00 Dale Vree Christopher Lasch is a cultural tradi-intellectual mode" that dominated it part of the women's liberation and Weathtionalist, a socialist, and an enemy of "operated to exclude women as lead-ermen scenes, only to blow herself up in a government bureaucracy...
...Sara Evans' hymn to women' s liberation is surely a case-in-point of bourgeois selfexhaustion...
...At least the libertarians should be congratulated for being clear about what they are doing and why~which is just another way of saying that when it comes to self-delusion, the Left has it all over the Right...
...9 journalist, lecturer, indefatigable researcher, and respected [ At your bookstore, or order from authority on the Middle East-combines meticulous research of [ Presidio Press, Box 978 SP, Edison, NJ 08817 official records and documents with on-the-spot briefings with [ ~ No Victor, No Vanquished the participants...
...He visits New York elected in 1980...
...Inasmuch as that mode no doubt makeshift bomb factory in an expensive a schizophrenic with three faces...
...Liberalism," he says, "has fact, it was once a-revolutionary doctrine, against the assault of those secular priests one that opposed high-mindedness in who arrogate authority and undermine Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the politics and priestly authority in'matters of liberty in order to pursue schemes of social American Enterprise Institute...
...Religion he dismissesas an illusion without a futuremwhich is why this book, whicla brilliantly diagnoses our ills, offers no remedy...
...How many other such censorship, the work ethic, and other founOxford Review, and author of On Synthesizing Marxism and Christianity (Wiley) and The Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution (forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...Lasch can say some mean things about bureaucrats, capitalists, middle-class "experts," and their culture of narcissism, but in the end, after a book-length spasm of bitching, he finally throws himself into that culture's embrace...
...individual conscience, and that passionate- justice--schemes they have persuaded I'R I"~ F .%.% NO VICTOR, NO VANQUISHED Edgar O'Ballance An interesting basic work on the Yom Kippur War...
...Evans wouldn't want to admit that, but her book clearly bears witness to the fact...
...IfI were alive today I lanta, Georgia...
...If there is an original idea or creative thought in the 232 pages of text, I couldn't find it...
...sagas did Evans overlook...
...The occupants of the offices of HEW won't be comfortable with Lasch either-,-The welfare state is for him the The American Spectator May 1979 "therapeutic state," a capitalist invention designed to pacify the citizenry...
...Boo klis t [. Number Expires The American Spectator May 1979...
...Lasch "Bourgeois society," he says, "seems competitive disadvantage, though both the is eclectic and independent-minded, and it everywhere to have used up its store of quality of the Evans dissertation and the will be his reward to be dismissed by constructive ideas...
...She did not come treme of a war of all against all, the pursuit with unexamined slogans and high.grade out of the closet or woodshed...
...It is refreshing to hear Lasch announce that the Left "has always attracted more than its share of lunatics...
...He believes that one while enduring a particularly painful disClub...
...Marriage, fidelity, family, and children constitute the only sure context in which love and significant friendship can ever amount to anything more than a fleeting and self-centered passion...
...He is subthe Golan Heights, Kitty Hawk (North public life renders idiotic almost anyone dued in the company of bores, yet once, Carolina), and the library of the Cosmos who participates in it...
...But we get only silence from Evans...
...He understands that women's liberation "goes hand in hand" with the sexual revolution, both being responsible for that breakup...
...No, Lasch.is not ers...
...At the end of the book Lasch makes some sweet allusions to socialism, which, however attractive, is just one more political evasion of the issues of the inner life...
...The solution to sexual exploitation was not "free love" (not having anything to do with love, it only intensified the problem), but rather commitment...
...Fetter had argued against capital as "proc~uced means of production" and for an accounting concept of capital...
...One woman exclaimed to Evans' tape recorder: "These terrible communes...
...These cultists have at least addressed themselves to genuine problems...
...Kirkus Reviews massive Israeli retaliation, the battles and the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering...
...But liberal- restore liberalism to its former vigor, to rary liberalism lacks spirit--that it is down isLa, he says, has not always been weak...
...But the working class has not admitted it...
...dignity of womanhood...
...This datum is more than gossip...
...appropriations were diminished and ten banishment of all members of the Ameri- ing, for instance: disco, drugs, professional percent of the large universities closed or can judiciary and the public flogging of sports, movies, camping, the cosmos of TV, turned into housing projects...
...With Leonid coping, astrology, and the self-improvechildren, dogs, and an occasional light Brezhnev he wants to see Jimmy Carter ment and personal growth movements...
...and by finally aligning himself with women's liberation (which even Evans admits is an upper-middle-class phenomenon) Lasch reveals himself to be I I I I BOOK REVIEW The Spirit of Liberalism not much more than a bourgeois socialist...
...The failure of Lasch's overall vision is that he yearns for the traditional culture we have lost, but cannot bring himself to see that the loveliness that is tradition grew out of the rich soil of our J udeo-Christian heritage...
...distressingly sketchy his book is at times, competent, the implications of this careless This was no trivial incidentmit made Time and however much it recapitulates his statement are devastating for womankind...
...He hates every square foot of At- There are vast ranges of modern Ameri- is his book, not mine...
...Capital, Interest, and Rent now provides the missing systematic treatment...
...She knew what it meant--but she went...
...Although the Cambridge-neoclassical debate on distribution theory has raised many important issues, neither approach has successfully resolved the fundamental problems...
...Harvard University Press / $13.50 Stephen Miller The main point of Harvey Mansfield's become hardly more than a trembling in ly defended liberty...
...In defend liberal principles aggressively in the mouth...
...arrived in any city he likes to bar the door follows a moral code of strict hypocrisy is His favorite places on this earth are the to his quarters and read...
...However, there is no ironclad de Flore, the Piazza Navona, an outpost in European caf~ sociology...
...Public Nuisances thoughts...
...Lasch decries the "poverty of the narcissistic inner life," and he indicts the Left for having nothing to say about that life and then succumbing, in the 1970s, to every self-fulfillment quack who meandered into our Sproul Plazas and Marin Counties...
...His sight-seeing obvious, but that his hypocrisies are usualPrado, Trader Vic's in San Francisco and is always nocturnal...
...Lasch won't allow that psychiatry is actually an essential part of the "me" phenomenon...
...Capital and Its Structure details capital formation and adjustment as a continuous transformation immensely complex in its combinations and heterogeneous flow, and capable of coordinating the ever-changing plans of individual participants...
...V1 | eeoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeBeeoeeeee'eeeeeeeeeeeeo, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr...
...408 Pages, Index $12.00 Cloth, $4.95 Paper ($5.50 in Canada) For free catalog please write: Cato Institute Department AS 1700 M~ntgomery Street Sall Francisco, California 94111 CAPITAL AND ITS STRUCTURE by Ludwig M. Lachmann Generally, economists have treated capital as a homogeneous aggregate "stock" or "fund," whose component parts are merely units of money value...
...feminist criticism...
...But I happen to know one of the interviewees, and I find it curious that Evans neglects to tell us that this beautiful who can decry the devaluation of the past while understanding that the debauch of culture we witness today is not fundamentally the work of nefarious collectivism, but tion in "Women's Oral History," is long on narration and celebration, but short on female, who had a manly but gentle husband entirely supportive of her feminrather of free-enterprising competitive individualism," which in its decadence has caranalysis, theory, and imagination...
...It would do Lasch some good to grapple with Paul Vitz's new book, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self Worship...
...but their solutions only compound the problems, for they advise us "not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, and to live for the moment--the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place...
...and shatters many of the tired cliches of...
...Edgar O'Ballance-noted British author, F...
...In addition, he argued that time preference rather than the marginal productivity of capital determines the interest rate...
...He bout with influenza...
...These gross situations of people trying to sleep around...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
