Had nature taken a more typical course, Christopher Lasch would still be with us. Only sixty-one years old when on Valentine’s Day, 1994, he succumbed to cancer in his Pittsford, New York, home, Lasch died while still in his intellectual prime. The book for which he may be remembered longest, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, had appeared just three years earlier. And he had just finished, with the aid of his daughter Elisabeth, the manuscript of The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, a book in which he attempted to bring into focus the problems posed for authentic democracy—the health of which, as we shall see, was always Lasch’s overriding concern—by the detachment of the new privileged classes, both physically and ideologically, from common men and women.

In The Revolt of the Elites Lasch foretold the political divide that would preoccupy political commentators a decade later. “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’” he warned, “imagined by them to be technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.”¹This would seem to be the lament of a cultural conservative, and in fact, by the end of his life Lasch wore that label fairly comfortably. But he had once been closely associated with the political Left, and part of what made, and continues to make, Lasch’s analysis so arresting is that he never entirely disavowed such influences as progressivism, Marx, Freud, and the Frankfurt School. Unlike the Left’s other postwar exiles, he never underwent a Damascene ideological conversion, but rather gradually and reluctantly came to shed certain leftist presuppositions and preoccupations. Lasch never became a Cold Warrior, in contrast to those of his peers who migrated from Partisan Review to some form or other of neoconservatism. Nor did he ever blunt his critique of economic and political centralization and the technological rationality that sustained them: unlike Irving Kristol, he was not prepared to muster even one cheer for capitalism. It might be said that Lasch did not so much repudiate his mentors on the Left as combine their insights with those of others—including, to name just a few, Orestes Brownson, Henry George, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Philip Rieff—to create a very original and potent critical brew. It might also be said that his work confirms the truth of T. J. Jackson Lears’s observation that “the most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism.”²

That is one reason, perhaps, that it seems Lasch’s popularity is now on the rise, especially among those for whom the partisan narratives of the culture wars have lost much of their credibility.³Certainly, to turn to Lasch’s oeuvre today is to be struck forcefully by its refreshing independence. Lasch managed to be at once both democratic and antiliberal. Negatively, his criticism was founded on a theoretically rich, psychologically informed understanding of the interrelated histories and effects of class, consumer capitalism, therapeutic culture, and technology. Positively, it was based on a respect for—and an ardent wish to defend—the unenlightened, traditional values and preferences of the petit bourgeois: family, hard work, loyalty, craftsmanship, voluntary association, ethnicity, sport, moral clarity, and faith. It all added up to, in his words, a thoroughly “unclassifiable political equation.”⁴

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Robert and Zora (Schaupp) Lasch, both born in Nebraska, were impeccably progressive intellectuals. Robert, some nine years younger than Zora, attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from 1928 to 1930 and went on to work for most of his life as an editorialist at Midwestern newspapers, including the Chicago Sun and Sun-Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.⁵Zora took her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1925. She spent most of her career as a social worker but later taught logic at Washington University and a couple of other schools. Good logician that she was, Zora, as her son recalled, “had a no-nonsense approach to ideas, which it took me some time to learn to appreciate.”⁶

Robert and Zora’s first child, Robert Christopher Lasch, was born on June 1, 1932. The Omaha, Nebraska, household into which he arrived was not only highly political and intellectual but, in his own recollection, militantly secular. Young Christopher used to enjoy unsettling the sons and daughters of his Republican neighbors by poking fun at their religious beliefs and “flaunting” his atheism.