In a 2018 lecture given at the Hauenstein Center, historian Eric Miller charts Christopher Lasch’s intellectual journey in search of a vision that could direct Americans toward the higher hopes and nobler purposes that might lead to a flourishing common life. This vision, which he tenaciously worked out within a frame of moral realism, resulted in ideological loneliness, as both the left and the right alternately claimed, rejected, and misunderstood him. Lasch’s later work sounded a note of hope, Dr. Miller explains, as he was heartened by movements away from dehumanizing consumerism and toward a participatory, civically minded localism. The title of this lecture is “Haven in a Heartless World: Christopher Lasch’s Democratic Hope.” It is featured here by permission of the Hauenstein Center. The recording of this lecture is introduced with excerpts from a 2005 interview with Miller and comments by Ken Myers.
57 minutes
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In this early article from First Things, historian Christopher Lasch poses the question of whether cultural conservatism is compatible with capitalism. If, as Lasch argues, conservatism is defined by a respect for limits — that human freedom has constraints imposed upon it by nature, history, human fallibility, and “original sin” — then the unrelenting and insatiable quest for ever-increasing standards of comfort that capitalism encourages is completely at odds with conservative values. Despite nineteenth-century attempts to bolster the family as the primary means of curbing the large-scale transfer of “private vices” to “public virtues” implied in liberal economic theory, the effects of twentieth-century capitalism have only underscored how vulnerable the family is when the integrity of its surrounding local institutions is destroyed. Also included in this article is an account of lower-middle class versus upper-middle class cultural values as well as the alternative — though now largely unheard of — economic approaches to liberal capitalism advanced by the distributists and syndicalists.
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