A Truly Radical Proposal

...Influenced by the British historian E. P. Thompson, Americans such as David Montgomery and the late Herbert G. Gutman have focused their attention on working-class culture, as opposed to the former emphasis on trade unions, yet continue to contend that the aim of worker activism should be some kind of International of Labor...

...For one thing, he is highly critical of, and will probably be rejected by, just about every political persuasion...

...This explains his admiration for the Populists, who fought to save small business and the family farm from onrushing corporate capitalism...

...Unlike almost all others, Lasch believes the West went off course when it shifted to the factory system and wage labor from the better forms of production that were modestly scaled and proprietorial...

...Laschis convinced the effort is f ailing, but more important to him is its unworthiness compared with the traditions that rank ownership and satisfying work ahead of efficient output...

...It also explains his somewhat romantic belief that today lower-middle-class Americans are the last representatives of an older way of life based on family, church and neighborhood that favors communal vitality over individual success and emphasizes fortitude and honor...

...For most of his 58 years Lasch has been a Left-liberal...

...Lasch takes issue with both the first and the most recent generation of labor historians...

...In them Lasch blamed America's social and cultural deterioration variously on feminists, social workers and social scientists, individualism, imperialism, the mass media, new elites, and other villains...

...Lasch examines specific social issues that illustrate his larger themes...

...In The True and Only Heaven he abandons most of his old political baggage, making this study more consistent, more convincing and perhaps more truly radical...

...The clash between his political ideology and his growing anxiety about the decline of family life, satisfying work and personal responsibility accounts for much of what appears in some of his earlier books to be cranky and unpersuasive...

...the philosopher-poet points the way both to healthier social conditions and to a politics based on character...

...To some these angry books seemed more clever than convincing...

...Lasch urges the new historians to accept the implicit conclusion of their own research that workers have always held community above class and want most of all to save their autonomy as producers...

...Socialism now seems to Lasch the mirror image of capitalism, merely another collectivist system that reverses everything while everything remains the same—the worker is still a wage slave to be pacified with the fiction of ownership and the hope of greater security...

...There must be an end to wage slavery and the division of labor if we are to end the evil of great wealth and raise the moral tone of society...

...More ingeniously, he turns the new labor history against itself...

...Nevertheless, intellectually The True and Only Heaven triumphs...

...The result is a work bursting with fresh insights that challenge the reader to reconsider a large number of apparently settled questions...

...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...

...As Emersonsays: "Not only health, but education is in the work...

...For another, his desire to deconstruct industry goes against die grain of modem technology and economics, not to mention the consumerism that justifies them...

...rather, it is an exploration of the intellectual and social history of the past several centuries...

...Later he came to be looked upon more as a social critic than a historian, owing to his controversial Haven in a Heartless World (1977) and TheCulture of Narcissism (1979...

...To disguise the fact that hourly labor is indeed "wage slavery," the West developed a consumer-oriented ethic that is supposed to enable ever larger numbers of people to enjoy an ever growing quantity of goods...

...Lasch contends that the bulk of what ails us results from the idea of progress, of trying to satisfy insatiable human wants...

...Now it is clear that they were way stations on the road to The True and Only Heaven, a masterful analysis of Western civilization generally and in particular of an America Lasch sees as riddled with social problems and empty of moral content...

...angry and alienated blacks lacked the spiritual means that had been so effective in destroying legalized segregation...

...The earliest practitioners saw the Knights of Labor and similar associations as reactionary because their attachment to the "'Lincoln ideal' of a republic of producers"—that is, to a nation of independent artisans, small merchants and skilled workers—hindered the evolution of trade unions...

...To that false value, he says, we have sacrificed such things as civic virtue, the need to recognize limits, meaningful work, and a heroic conception of life...

...Emerson is Lasch's inspiration (though he is clearer about this in his notes than in his text...

...It failed in the North precisely because the sense of community had broken down in the urban ghettos...

...He argues, for example, that the civil rights movement succeeded in the South because local blacks were members of a self-respecting viable community and therefore could infuse their politics with "courage, tenacity, forgiveness, and hope...

...Although Lasch is highly critical of Hofstadter's ideas, he has the same sweep and daring and vigor that made Hofstadter's work so exciting...

...What Lasch calls for instead is a return to producerism, an economy based on small business, family farms and cooperatives...

...The major benefits of this approach are primarily spiritual (and ecological) because it restores the dignity of labor...

...The first task in the North, Lasch maintains, ought to have been the rebuilding of the ghettos where most blacks live, not busing, housing integration and other tactics that antagonize whites and, even if successful, benefit very few people...

...It should be ob vious that as a prescription for change Lasch's ideas are not likely to find very many takers...

...Rightly or wrongly—and there is much to be said on each side of the question— Lasch thinks these scholars were mistaken in defining industrial unionism as a higher form of organization than what it was replacing...

...No one who reads this book with an open mind will ever see America in quite the same way again...

...In support of his thesis the author has found, or reinterpreted, a great cast of characters and groups, from Thomas Carlyle, Georges Sorel and Ralph Waldo Emerson to little known movements like the National Labor Union of the 1860s, the Knights of Labor and guild socialism, plus the better known—but in his view misunderstood—Syndicalists and Populists...

...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" Christopher Lasch, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, has been familiar to the literate public since 1965, when his brilliant study The New Radicalism in America was published...

...It may fail to transform thenatureof work, yetnot since Richard Hofstadter has an American historian written a book comparable to this one...

...Lasch has read very broadly—indeed, one can only hint at the richness of his 532 pages of text—and he has thought deeply as well...

...He is equally unhappy with liberalism and social democracy, for in his view, they seek mainly to distribute the fruits of capitalism more fairly but leave all of its defects intact...

...Despite the grim assessment, this is not a jeremiad...