Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
The Prophet
By Alan Ryan
Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism
by Christopher Lasch, edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Norton, 196 pp., $23.00
It was hard to believe that Christopher Lasch was only sixty-one when he died in early 1994. He had long occupied what seemed a permanent as well as a distinctive place in American cultural and intellectual life. It has been more than thirty years since many of us found our way into the checkered history of reforming American intellectuals through the essays in The New Radicalism in America and The Agony of the American Left. His best-known book, The Culture of Narcissism, published in 1979, was a best-seller that added a much-needed phrase to the American language. The book has come to mark a lasting, perhaps a permanent, division in American culture. On one side—Lasch's own side—stand those who cannot stomach what Lasch calls 'the therapeutic state,' and on the other stand the gathered ranks of social workers, family therapists, the authors of New Age, psychological cookbooks, and inspirational self-help tracts, and their employers, clients, and readers.
Review, 5980 words
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