Fickle Ears

Christopher Lasch The World of Nations (1973) Ch. XVIII, "Birth, Death, and Technology: The Limits of Cultural Laissez-Faire"...

Christopher Lasch The World of Nations (1973) Ch. XVII, "The Social Thought of Jacques Ellul" According to The Technologi...

Once we have achieved the right form for a type-object, it should keep that form for the next generation, or for the next thousand years. ...

[Prefatory note: I struggled mightily with this final installment of the series, so much so that what should have been a centerpiece became...

Christopher Lasch The World of Nations (1973) Ch. X, "After the New Left" The mystique of participation has had a profound...

Christopher Lasch The World of Nations (1973) Ch. VIII, "Is Revolution Obsolete?" The issue of "law and order" ...

Christopher Lasch The World of Nations (1973) Ch. I, "Origins of the Asylum" The humanitarian reformers [e.g. Samuel Tuke...

Here is the Sol LeWitt article referred to by Lasch in Chapter IV of The Minimal Self . Some choice cuts:

Here is the article by Philip Roth which launches Chapter IV of The Minimal Self . Several passages are of interest despite (in some c...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) The fundamental importance of the distinction between self and not-self—the source of all o...

I Most everything Lasch has to say in The Revolt of the Elites about the dangers of "refer[ring] everything to a plurality of e...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) Total institutions—the death camps above all—have made us aware of the banality of evil, in ...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) In the visual arts at least, the celebration of selfhood, as exemplified by abstract express...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Socialism, as [Oscar] Wilde understood it, was simply another name...for the eliminat...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) Everyday life has come to present itself as a succession of crises not necessarily because it ...

Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self (1984) The antidote to instrumental reason is practical reason, not mysticism, spirituality, or the ...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Psychoanalysis and religion were even more deeply at odds than Freud's explicit r...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) The therapeutic discovery of shame finds its political expression in remedial program...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) The great weakness in [Horace] Mann's educational philosophy was the assumption t...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) The upper middle class, the heart of the new professional and managerial elites, is d...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) [84] Dewey's exchange with Lippman raises the disturbing question of whether ...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Meritocracy is a parody of democracy. It offers opportunities for advancement, in...

Christopher Lasch The Revolt of the Elites (1995) According to Walter Lippman...the "omnicompetent citizen" was an anachro...

Evidently this has been making the rounds: Rittenhouse When I look at this image, I see a concept made perfectly transparent and rendere...