23 Facts About Christopher Lasch

Robert Christopher Lasch was an American historian and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.

Christopher Lasch sought to use history to demonstrate what he saw as the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities.

Christopher Lasch's books, including The New Radicalism in America, Haven in a Heartless World, The Culture of Narcissism, The True and Only Heaven, and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy were widely discussed and reviewed.

Christopher Lasch was always a critic of modern liberalism and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time, his political perspective evolved dramatically.

Christopher Lasch's writings are sometimes denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of a traditional conception of family life.

Christopher Lasch eventually concluded that an often unspoken, but pervasive, faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments.

Christopher Lasch's father, Robert Lasch, was a Rhodes Scholar and journalist who won a Pulitzer prize for editorials criticizing the Vietnam War while he was in St Louis.

Christopher Lasch was active in the arts and letters early, publishing a neighborhood newspaper while in grade school and writing the fully orchestrated "Rumpelstiltskin, Opera in D Major" at the age of thirteen.

Around this time, Robert Christopher Lasch moved the family to the Chicago suburbs after he was offered an editorial position at the Chicago Sun.

Christopher Lasch earned a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard University, where he roomed with John Updike.

Christopher Lasch then received a master's degree in history and doctorate from Columbia University, where he worked with William Leuchtenburg.

Christopher Lasch contributed a Foreword to later editions of Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition and an article on Hofstadter in the New York Review of Books in 1973.

Christopher Lasch taught at the University of Iowa and then was a professor of history at the University of Rochester from 1970 until his death from cancer in 1994.

Christopher Lasch became further influenced by writers of the Frankfurt School and the early New Left Review and felt that "Marxism seemed indispensable to me".

Christopher Lasch was a professor of history at Northwestern University from 1966 to 1970.

At this point Christopher Lasch began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique: a syncretic synthesis of Sigmund Freud and the strand of socially conservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism and its effects on traditional institutions.

Besides Leuchtenburg, Hofstadter, and Freud, Christopher Lasch was especially influenced by Orestes Brownson, Henry George, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Philip Rieff.

In 1956, Christopher Lasch married Nellie Commager, daughter of historian Henry Steele Commager; the couple had four children.

The Culture of Narcissism won a National Book Award in 1980, but Christopher Lasch was not comfortable with the honor, saying that publishing awards reflected "the worst tendencies" of the industry.

Christopher Lasch was not generally sympathetic to the cause of what was then known as the New Right, particularly those elements of libertarianism most evident in its platform; he detested the encroachment of the capitalist marketplace into all aspects of American life.

Christopher Lasch was critical and at times dismissive toward his closest contemporary kin in social philosophy, communitarianism as elaborated by Amitai Etzioni.

In Women and the Common Life, Christopher 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, so long as these careers are governed by the requirements of corporate economy.

Eric Miller's biography Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch was published by William B Eerdmans Publishing Company in 2010.