Christopher Lasch 20

Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope.

What about Lasch’s analysis of limits? I have in mind two contemporary cultural developments, the rise of technocracy and our extreme aversion to risk, that seem to challenge certain aspects…

Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Recently, Tablet Magazine published a lengthy essay by Eric Kaufmann, heralding the revival of "left-conservative" thinking, which the author defined as "a conservative view on…

One of the articles which recently crossed my desk was an interactive online presentation from Georgetown University’s Centre on Education and the Workforce, highlighting which college majors are the most…

Having read several books on American history recently, including Colin Woodard’s book American Nations, itself based partly on David Hackett Fischer’s four-nation thesis in Albion’s Seed and sociologist William Graham…

[Cross-posted to In Media Res] This past weekend, at the annual Front Porch Republic gathering (this year held at SUNY-Geneseo), three scholars reflected upon the writings of the historian and…

Hidden Springs, VA. Recently Ross Douthat commented on Rod Dreher’s new book in a column devoted to the rising incidence of suicide and the problem of loneliness. In a follow-up…

It is predictably American for Americans to obsess over an object used to perpetuate a crime, rather than examine the perpetrator and consider the people surrounding the perpetrator. The massacre…

The most important political conversation Americans need to have is about how the old conversations no longer matter. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party—called the one-and-a-half party system by…

As the first of the presidential debates approaches, it is helpful (though not necessarily heartening) to turn to Christopher Lasch, whose understanding of American democracy was profound. The following paragraphs…

Events may soon conspire to force a conversation about the common good and the limits of power. Until that happens, gridlock may be the best option.

If Lasch couldn't express a way for leftists and localists to speak the same language, perhaps no one can.

How's that for a triple play? Andrew Bacevich reviews Eric Miller's new biography of Christopher Lasch.

Hamilton, Ontario. When remembering a family-owned grocery store in rural Virginia, a first image comes to mind, even though I did not actually witness it. This is my boss, a…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS. No one, I think, has ever summed up the longing for a life with front porches--the localist longing which is this blog's raison…

Devon, PA.  If you have not encountered Eric Miller's savage indignation elsewhere, here is a fine place to start: his review of David S. Brown's Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern…

The following is excerpted from Paul Gottfried's Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, recently published by ISI Books. I met Christopher Lasch for the first…

  I delivered a version of the following text as a lecture at Augustana College last Tuesday, April 28 (all errors of fact and interpretation should be ascribed to my…

FPR readers should certainly check out the American Conservative today.  First, they have a new essay up by Dermot Quinn on the relationship of Wilhelm Ropke's ideas to the current…