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 carrying us, in his view, even further into decadence.

Haven in a Heartless World focuses on the family, particularly the attacks on the traditional bourgeois family purveyed at least since the 1920s by psychiatrists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and legal reformers. The ringing declarations of independence from the nuclear family, sexual repression, male dominance, and the possessiveness of the marriage tie that filled the air in the ’60s and still echo around us simply pushed to further extremes what had already been central themes of psychiatric and sociological commentary 30 or 40 years earlier. It is a sad reflection on the ahistorical blindness of the social sciences embracing even their own disciplines that it takes a professional historian to point out the lack of novelty in the fashionable calls to “liberation” of recent years, which were, as Lasch insists, mostly pushing at unlocked doors.