Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven

...syndicalists and guild socialists who wanted the workers to run industry themselves, dispensing with both capitalist and state managers...

...Cole, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Christian moralists worried about the corruptions of luxury and affluence...

...Nevertheless, in addition to its historical scope and depth, The True and Only Heaven provides valuable new understanding of the curious political interregnum that now prevails in fin de siècle America...

...Although he may not appreciate the comparison, there are striking similarities between Lasch's general argument and that of Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology thirty years ago...

...Left-wing newclass theories, on the other hand, go in for the reverse operation...

...In his introductory chapter Lasch gives an account of his own political history—his Midwestern Progressive and pro-New Deal background, his movement to the left in opposition to the cold-war stasis of the 1950s, his disillusionment with the "revolutionary histrionics" of the New Left...

...q George Sdalabba DEFENDERS OF MARXISM 308 • DISSENT...

...Lasch thinks that damage to the natural environment puts an end to the prospect of perpetual material progress, but if so, it also rules out continued population growth, which has obvious and weighty implications for the traditional roles of women...

...Lasch was critical of these movements and their intellectual allies for failing to maintain a consistent and realistic opposition to capitalism, identifying himself with the assault on "corporate liberalism" of the then-ascendant New Left...

...Lasch makes a distinction between hope as basic trust in the possibilities of life and optimism, which he links to belief in progress and the lack of a sense of tragedy in history...

...denunciation of the family as the seat of all oppression...

...Bell limited the end of ideology to the West and noted the continuing appeal of revolutionary apocalypticism in the underdeveloped countries...

...The experience of parenthood, he claims, led him in the mid-seventies to studies of the family and socialization and eventually turned him against a liberalism that "now meant sexual freedom, women's rights, gay rights...

...He identifies these values with "populism," a label he is anxious to salvage by ridding it of its vague and usually pejorative overtones...

...Lasch thinks the crisis of the environment negates the belief in progress still affirmed by both left and right...

...Although Lasch nowhere so much as mentions the collapse of communism, it clearly strengthens his case against progress toward a "true and only heaven" that will completely transcend the past...

...Both men admire and say they have learned from Reinhold Niebuhr...

...He perceptively criticizes the neoconservatives, however, for striving to deflect blame for the hedonistic "permissiveness" they denounce from consumer capitalism by charging it to a "new class" of intellectuals whose influence they grossly exaggerate...

...celebrants of individual heroism and striving for excellence fearful of the enervating effects of the conformist pressures of urban society...

...Their very language is often identical...

...he even speaks up for "the wise Locke," as Rousseau called him, noting that recent Locke scholarship has shown that Locke himself had severe reservations about boundless acquisitiveness and big as opposed to small capitalism...

...nineteenth-century agrarian populists affirming individual proprietorship and bitterly opposed both to the "wage system" and the manipulations of money men...

...I was one of the first critics of the end-of-ideology thesis, arguing that a sense of limits needed to be balanced by recognition of the indestructibility of hope...

...The values of hard work, self-discipline, frugality, personal independence, family loyalty, and local pride have a long history and were not always peculiarly characteristic of the lower-middle class...

...In the face of the almost universal contempt expressed by intellectuals for the petty bourgeoisie, Lasch's claim resembles that of E.P...

...He rightly observes that the blatant anti-Americanism of the movement protesting the Vietnam War may have had the effect of strengthening support for the war among people who might otherwise have opposed it...

...He is aware that his defense of right-wing protest movements, though qualified, brings him close to the standard neoconservative polemic against liberal intellectuals...

...Indeed, in a valuable early chapter Lasch treats nostalgia as the counterpart to belief in progress, the substitution of a self-indulgent fantasy of a past that never was for serious consideration of the bearing of the past on the present and future...

...Nor does Lasch overlook the excesses of the resistance to liberal social policies, remarking of the antibusing movement in Boston that it "seldom rose above the level of resentment, self-righteousness, and self-pity...

...the "new labor historians" since the 1960s who have discovered that independent artisans offered stronger revolutionary resistance to early capitalist exploitation than proletarians—all are included in Lasch's story...

...Sixties radicals are part of this trend: it is easy to imagine Lasch recoiling in disgust after hearing just one too many callow graduate student pronounce that millions of his plebeian fellowcitizens are victims of "false consciousness" (today it would be "hegemonic ideology...

...Lasch concludes his immensely long book with the insistence that "Limits and hope: these words SPRING • 1991 • 307 Books sum up the two lines of argument I have tried to weave together...

...early critics of wage labor as a form of slavery...

...If the cultural class war has often twisted these values into ugly forms of racial bigotry and intolerance, it may also have deformed the antitraditionalism of the liberal intelligentsia, which has hardly been politically ascendant in recent decades...

...He says he was surprised to find that more moderate left-wing intellectuals were still, after all the terrible events of this century, believers not only in material but in moral progress...

...Lasch reviews an immense range of thinkers, political movements, and ideological currents critical of the major trends of industrial capitalism over the past two and a half centuries while remaining clearly distinct from its socialist opponents...

...Both writers begin by claiming that old political ideologies are "exhausted...

...But this came after the embourgeoisement controversy among sociologists, superseding the briefly revived Marxism of a large segment of the postwar intelligentsia...

...The books that established Lasch's reputation as a social critic, Haven in a Heartless World, The Culture of Narcissism, and The Minimal Self, drew on Freud and the culture and personality tradition in sociology and anthropology to buttress rejection of the anxious hedonism of contemporary American life...

...These qualities are, Lasch maintains, particularly characteristic of "the sensibility of the petty bourgeoisie," although he repudiates Marxist and sociological reductionism that treats culture and morality as mere reflections of economic interest or social position...

...For example, he lumps together contributors to the theme of the embourgeoisement of the working class in the 1950s, ignoring the sharp debate between liberal supporters of the Keynesian–welfare state consensus and socialists who still regarded the workers as a potentially radical force...

...Lasch asks on the first page of his opening chapter, "Who would have predicted, twenty-five years ago, that as the twentieth century approached its end, it would be the left that was everywhere in retreat...

...Bell thought that the experience of world wars and totalitarian regimes must necessarily moderate the intensity of ideological conflict...

...Lasch extols what he calls "producerism" over the passive "consumerism" of contemporary capitalism, which promotes "the shift from a work ethic to a consumption ethic...

...the sociological tradition of communitarianism afflicted with what Lasch dubs Gemeinschaftsschmerz...

...Both men deplore the sacrifice of the living to utopian visions of the future...

...Lasch's own intellectual heroes—Emerson, James, and Niebuhrwere hardly of petty-bourgeois origins...

...111/ut if the neoconservatives obfuscate a political disagreement in identifying as their adversary a vaguely defined new class, is not Lasch guilty of a similar error in socially grounding the morality he wishes to defend in the petty bourgeoisie...

...They were part of a general bourgeois outlook with roots in Puritanism and even earlier peasant traditions before the transformations that have shaped contemporary capitalism...

...The revolt against liberalism and the Democratic party at the polls and in some lower-middle- and working-class communities represents a defense of a way of life threatened by politicians, bureaucrats, and professionals who do not themselves experience the effects of the policies they devise...

...The disdain for the petty bourgeoisie of which Lasch makes so much owes a 306 • DISSENT Books lot to this disposition of bourgeois intellectuals to romanticize classes that are still lower in status than those just below them...

...LeMasters, and Herbert Gans and the journalists J. Anthony Lukas and Kevin Phillips...

...Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class in wishing to rescue certain social groups and political movements from "the enormous condescension of posterity...

...Doubtless there is a sense in which H.L...

...Lasch would clearly welcome a new populist revolt in American politics centered on the economic interests of the hard-pressed lower-middle and working classes while bypassing the divisive cultural issues...

...After a fairly conventional analysis of the ambiguity of the concept "middle class," he reviews the "cultural class war" over patriotic symbols, busing, abortion, affirmative action, pornography, homosexuality, and other so-called social issues...

...nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism and all the other evils often cited by liberal critics...

...However, in contrast to Thompson's preoccupation with SPRING • 1991 • 305 Books nascently class-conscious manual workers, Lasch wants to defend the small producers who lost out to the emerging industrial order...

...Unlike Kevin Phillips, however, he wisely declines to predict the occurrence of such a revolt...

...In his Preface Lasch insists, "I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of lower-middle class culture...

...This has by now become a fairly familiar diagnosis...

...The continuity between these views and the decentralist, antibureaucratic communitarianism of the early New Left is obvious...

...And, of course, they saw their own political and cultural beliefs as enlightened anticipations of the future, thus entitling them to make use of such nondemocratic agencies as the courts and the federal bureaucracy to implement policies unlikely to win popular support...

...That people should have as wide a range of choice as possible in personal and family life may as a principle lend itself both to abuse in practice and to conversion into a smug nihilistic relativism that preens itself on its superiority to those who live by more restrictive codes...

...Lasch draws on the useful work of such sociologists as Jonathan Rieder, Kristin Luker, Lillian Rubin, E.E...

...denunciation of 'working-class authoritarianism.' " But Lasch did not become a conservative rhetorically upholding "traditional values...

...All of them valued individual responsibility, devotion to work, the primacy of the concrete, moral realism about human nature, a sense of limits, anti-utopian skepticism...

...Mencken and his admirers in the twenties, New Deal social planners, the foundation-sponsored research of such social scientists as Robert Lynd and Gunnar Myrdal, political psychotherapists diagnosing "authoritarianism," the Camelot mythologists of the Kennedy years, student radicals of the sixties, the "suburban" neoliberalism of the seventies and eighties, and judicial supporters of busing and affirmative action share a common "elitism" and belief in progress...

...He also subjects a number of individual thinkers to detailed examination in a sympathetic spirit: Jonathan Edwards, William Cobbett, Tom Paine, Orestes Brownson, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Georges Sorel, G.D.H...

...Both consumer capitalism and the educated classes (whether or not they constitute a truly new class) are jointly responsible for our plight, in Lasch's view...

...By the end of the sixties, to be sure, the New Left had for the most part dismissed the working class as politically indistinguishable from the despised lower-middle class...

...He telescopes together earlier and later tendencies and overlooks the ferocious controversies within and between them: power elitists against pluralists, Marxists against liberals, cold-war supporters against peace advocates...

...Bell chose as an epigraph to his title essay Machiavelli's statement, "Men commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes...

...Lasch's wide scholarship in intellectual history joined to his social criticism endows The True and Only Heaven with its distinctive flavor...

...In The True and Only Heaven Lasch returns to intellectual history, going back as far as the eighteenth century to seek out ancestors who repudiated the idea of progress and were dubious about the supposed benefits of technology without becoming nostalgic reactionaries mourning the disappearance of some ancien regime...

...Underlying the obvious diversity of the movements and thinkers surveyed, Lasch finds some common emphases...

...denunciation of `patriarchy...

...Although he does not say as much, a good deal of old-fashioned isolationism has always been part of his political makeup—foreign policy has never been one of his strong points...

...The inveterate elitism of the intellectuals is an additional expression of increasing acceptance of universal dependence on professional experts and commodities marketed by large enterprises relying on advertising...

...Obviously, the query applies also to the Third World, where faith in state-directed rapid modernization has largely waned...

...Nostalgia, he notes, was originally coined to describe a psychological disorder with such physical symptoms as irregular breathing and gastroenteritis...

...But Lasch paints with too broad a brush...

...He also wants to associate their outlook with the present values of the lower-middle class, including those of blue-collar workers who have experienced embourgeoisement, against their liberal and socialist detractors...

...Bell may have overestimated the stability of the transitory consensus of the 1950s and failed fully to anticipate the brief revival of radicalism in the sixties, but he was right about the long-run trend, as he argued in a new Afterword to a reissue of his book two years ago...

...Populists view with suspicion not only big business but also the cultural elitism of liberal intellectuals, the historical vanguardism of Marxists, and the centralizing thrust of social democrats eager to extend the welfare state...

...In general, Lasch alludes too infrequently to the chief countertendency to the elitism he condemns: the idealization of oppressed groups, whether workers, blacks, or Third World peasants, imputing to them primitive vigor, innocent virtue, and natural solidarity...

...Feminism has produced its share of rigid ideologues, but it is surely an idea whose time has come...

...He finally turns to a consideration of these negative qualities in his last chapter, "Right-Wing Populism and the Revolt Against Liberalism...

...Lasch often includes feminist beliefs in the roster of "enlightened" liberal attitudes that he condemns, although he never directly confronts feminism...

...Lasch observes, however, that these writers have often presented "a caricature of liberalism...

...The politics of the civilized minority," as he entitles his penultimate chapter, both reflects and helps create this new passivity...

...Perhaps all values assume unattractive dogmatic forms when they are selectively upheld by different classes and social groups locked in bitter political and ideological conflict...

...Lasch himself recognizes that new-class intellectuals, though a diversified group, share an admirable critical, empirical, and cosmopolitan outlook that need not degenerate into snobbery and cynicism...

...Without abandoning his earlier criticisms of "coldwar liberals" and "technocrats," he assimilated the New Left to the broadly elitist and self-serving assumptions shared, in his view, by all progressivist intellectuals...

...It did not take Lasch long, however, to discern in the New Left itself all the faults of its predecessors writ large...

...Nor does he neglect the positions taken by their political and intellectual adversaries...

...Seeking a historical lineage for populism, he was influenced by the tradition of "republican virtue" recently revived by a few theorists anxious not to cede the entire heritage of the Enlightenment to the "possessive individualism" of bourgeois liberalism...