Tag: Christopher Lasch

Localism without Nostalgia

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.

Limits, Risk Aversion, and Technocracy

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 of Lasch’s thinking.

From the Editor–Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch

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 critic Christopher Lasch.

Left (not Liberal) Conservatism (or Communitarianism, if you Prefer): A Restatement

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...

In (Partial) Defense of the Liberal Arts Degree

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...

Does North American Cultural History Provide for a ‘Third Option’?

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...

Christopher Lasch and the Lasting Dilemma of Localism

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...

The Limits of Place

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...

The Culture of Guns? What About the Culture of Narcissism?

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

The Dangerous Alliance of Big Government and Big Business

The most important political conversation Americans need to have is about how the old conversations no longer matter. The Democratic Party and the Republican...