The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type

by Christopher Lasch

"Extraordinarily creative . . . an important and engrossing contribution to a complex and elusive subject."― Newsweek Around the turn of the century, the American liberal tradition made a major shift away from politics. The new radicals were more interested in the reform of education, culture, and sexual mores. Through vivid biographies, Christopher Lasch chronicles these social reformers from Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lincoln Steffens to Norman Mailer and Dwight MacDonald.

Genres: History, Politics, American History, Sociology, Philosophy, American, Ebooks

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1965

About the author

Christopher "Kit" Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.

Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.'

His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy published posthumously in 1996 were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Current Interest (paperback).

Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period are considered contradictory. They are sometimes denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. But as he explained in one of his books The Minimal Self, "it goes without saying that sexual equality in itself remains an eminently desirable objective...". Moreover, in Women and the Common Life, Lasch clarified that urging women to abandon the household and forcing them into a position of economic dependence, in the workplace, pointing out the importance of professional careers does not entail liberation, as long as these careers are governed by the requirements of corporate economy.

He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of people who read this book don't quite get what Lasch was aiming at here and thus they think his definitions don't entirely work. After his first book on liberals' response to the Russian revolution, Lasch's next three books are about the development of intellectuals and movements that lead to the contemporary left of the 1960s. This is the first of those books and it focuses on the "new radicals" who were mostly the children of the wealthy in the 19th century and become professional academics and public intellects into the middle of the 20th. While he criticizes the intellectuals for not being interested in politics as such, he does not mean that they did not have political opinions, but that their political opinions often were moral and cultural concerns that didn't directly influence their lives and that in the middle of the 20th century, celebrity radicalism itself eclipsed radical ideas. However, Lasch also attacks pragmatism as developed from Dewey to Sidney Hook, documenting callousness about war, concessions to the state at the expense of expressed ideals, and often incoherence. While the last chapter angered a lot of contemporary liberals--Richard Rorty was famously angered by the last chapter--the entirety of the book documents that US radicals were lost in how to respond to failures of World War 1 and how their tenuous connections to social movements often left them conceding to either the state or the dispair.

This book gives one an incomplete view of the problems of the American left, but as many of these people fade into the background and leftists' historiography in America tends to begin with the new left as the radical split, Lasch illustrates that the tendencies were there since the late 19th century. American parochialism has, ironically, led to American radicals ignoring their own history and leading US leftists to think that the ruptures of the 1960s came from nowhere. However, you have to read Lasch's new two books, The Agony of the American Left and World of Nations to fully grasp why.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't much care for this book. Lasch can write a good turn of phrase, and some of his character sketches or anecdotes are wittily assembled. His analytic framework doesn't work. He argues that new radicals of the twentieth century — intellectuals who agonized over their profession and cared about the poor and disenfranchised — were not much interested in politics. They focused on medicine, education, and other facets of society. I would argue that the individuals Lasch cites, such as Jane Addams, were very much invested in politics. Lasch's attitude toward women tends to be patronizing, and I just got tired of the book. This material has been reviewed and given more thorough treatment by Leslie Butler, Daniel Rodgers, and Jackson Lears, among other historians.

[John Sammis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets a bad rap for knocking progressive-era reformers. Not so. Some chapters, especially the ones devoted to Jane Addams and Randolph Bourne, are genuinely moving. By "radical", Lasch means middle-class intellectuals. Their radicalism was informed by an intellectual or aesthetic perspective; not from experience of injustice. Their politics was cultural in nature, focusing on childhood, education, and sex. Most suffered from neurasthenia and long stretches of immobility, followed by a desire to pour themselves into "the stream of experience". Such Victorian traits and personalities would not be unfamiliar to Henry James. Lasch has little patience for hagiography and submits them all to extreme scrutiny. A common symptom throughout is how easily these radicals were swept up into uncritical support of the state during the first world war --the same anti-democratic forces the radicals seemingly opposed (see John Dewey and Colonel House).

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lasch, who was my advisor in college, was a preeminent critic of American thought and its schools, following on from the work of his mentor Richard Hofstadter. An older but still incisive study of intellectuals and their discontents, not least the attempt to reach cultural and personal goals through politics. Conversely, the individualism of personal fulfillment meant that there was an inattention to real changes in the social structure. To be fair to the intellectuals, there were very few groups, including businessmen, who could resist the centrifugal effects of modern American society: things fall apart. I think the argument tails off after the essays on the Depression. By the way, is anyone still reading Mailer?

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the book an interesting study of how Liberalism and Intellectualism evolved in the United States and the world. In this book we learn about the people who influenced our way of thinking about society and responsilbilities to each other. A nice read.

[Spencer Willardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt as if I was reading a post-mortem for the post-Obama/Biden world and the radicalism of "wokeness" that defined the era. This is the second book I have read by Lasch and his incisive social and literary criticism has really been interesting. I highly recommend this book.

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

3½ stars.

This is a good book but taxing, comprised of nine chapters, plus introduction, totaling 103,000 words, not including 13,000 words in the 638 footnotes.

His last chapter, #9, in which he criticizes Sidney Hook and Norman Mailer, is the one that peeved Richard Rorty.

1/28/17