Bourgeois Values, No Bourgeoisie? The Cultural Criticism of Christopher Lasch

Christopher I.asch’s two recent books, Haven in a Heartless World (Basic Books, 1977) and The Culture of Narcissism (W. W. Norton, 1979), amount to an extended moral denunciation of contemporary American life, its frantic hedonism, vulgar opportunism, and pervasive hollow anxiety. Such jeremiads are scarcely in short supply these days, although Lasch brings to his task uncommon gifts of psychological penetration, historical perspective, and literary eloquence. If at times he sounds a bit like Harriet Van Horne keening in midtown Manhattan over the lost graces of life, he more often recalls the best work of Erich Fromm, David Riesman, Paul Goodman, and other outstanding practitioners of the genre that came to be known in the 1950s as “social criticism.” Indeed, Lasch acknowledges his intellectual debt to these writers at the same time that he criticizes the datedness of many of their observations in the light of more recent cultural tendencies c...