The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
About Christopher Lasch
Robert Christopher Laschwas an American historian, moralist and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester. He 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.
More quotes from Christopher Lasch
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.
American historian (1932-1994)
Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
American historian (1932-1994)
Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
American historian (1932-1994)
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
American historian (1932-1994)
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
American historian (1932-1994)
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don’t mix. This is the stock response of the left.
American historian (1932-1994)
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
American historian (1932-1994)
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
American historian (1932-1994)
Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.
American historian (1932-1994)
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
American historian (1932-1994)
A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.
American historian (1932-1994)
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
American historian (1932-1994)
George Orwell’s contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.
American historian (1932-1994)
The conservative revival cannot be dismissed.
American historian (1932-1994)
A child’s appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.
American historian (1932-1994)
Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don’t already want to buy.
American historian (1932-1994)
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
American historian (1932-1994)
Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.
American historian (1932-1994)
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.
American historian (1932-1994)
The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.
American historian (1932-1994)
It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
American historian (1932-1994)
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
American historian (1932-1994)
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
American historian (1932-1994)
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
American historian (1932-1994)
Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.
American historian (1932-1994)
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
American historian (1932-1994)
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
American historian (1932-1994)
Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.
American historian (1932-1994)
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
American historian (1932-1994)
Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.
American historian (1932-1994)
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
American historian (1932-1994)
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
American historian (1932-1994)
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
American historian (1932-1994)
Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.
American historian (1932-1994)
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
American historian (1932-1994)
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.
American historian (1932-1994)
Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left has lost the common touch.
American historian (1932-1994)
A society that has made “nostalgia” a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
American historian (1932-1994)
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
American historian (1932-1994)
The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.
American historian (1932-1994)
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.
American historian (1932-1994)
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left has come to regard common sense – the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community – as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
American historian (1932-1994)
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
American historian (1932-1994)
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.
American historian (1932-1994)
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
American historian (1932-1994)
The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.
American historian (1932-1994)
The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.
American historian (1932-1994)
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
American historian (1932-1994)
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
American historian (1932-1994)
The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.
American historian (1932-1994)
Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.
American historian (1932-1994)
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
American historian (1932-1994)
In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God’s gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God’s gift to the collective.
American historian (1932-1994)
Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom.
American historian (1932-1994)