A Skeptic and a Democrat

Lasch’s career was, in one sense, a running argument with the Enlightenment and its modern representatives: “progressive” intellectuals. It was—let there be no mistake—a family quarrel. The authoritarian conservatism of, say, T.S. Eliot or Russell Kirk, who rejected the Enlightenment root and branch, held no appeal for Lasch. No theological dogma or aristocratic hierarchy ever won from him an expression of sympathy, or even a wistful glance. He was a skeptic and a democrat, first and last. Nevertheless, he set his face against what most of the Enlightenment’s heirs have called, usually in reverential tones, Progress. Perhaps Lasch will seem merely quaint some day, as the Sermon on the Mount would have seemed to Tiberius or William Morris’s News from Nowhere to Margaret Thatcher. Eric Miller’s intelligent and sympathetic biography is honest enough to settle for wistfulness in assessing Lasch’s legacy. Miller succeeds, at any rate, in persuading us to join him in saluting Lasch’s “unyielding attempt to force us to revisit our confident conclusions about our world and seize our one moment of responsibility for it.”