http://www.spiked-online.com/site/reviewofbooks_article/13398/
Scourge of the elites
Christopher Lasch was a fearless iconoclast who defied left and right labels. Love him or loathe him, you need to grapple with his ideas if you want to understand today’s big political and moral debates.
In his prime, there was no more incendiary intellectual in America than Christopher Lasch. A prolific historian and social critic, Lasch wrote with erudition and flair about a wide range of topics from the early 1960s until his death in 1994, striving ‘for nothing less than a full understanding of the modern condition’, as a fellow historian put it. Called a ‘Marxist’ and a ‘fascist’ and almost everything else in between, he busted out of the conventional ‘right’ and ‘left’ political boxes. His writings typically aroused angry and emotional responses from his opponents.
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He was raising a question that continues today: has the decline of the family been liberating for people? He argued no: the family has been unravelling, but alternative arrangements that have emerged in its wake, such as co-habitation, are accommodations to the family’s demise rather than positive and viable forms of commitment.
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