Word: lasch
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...Lasch grounds his initially biographical approach on the Hegelian premise that "history is the record of consciousness" (anybody's consciousness) and on a mass of largely unexplorel family records: the Bourne and Addams papers. But as the opportunities for original research decrease a complex and rather obliquely stated thesis emerges. In the late 19th century, when most of the early reformers were growing up, the American family as an instrument of repression was almost extinct, leaving the young intellectuals with no firm social structure to rebel against. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because Jane Addams was not the daughter...
...Lasch is not knocking his subjects for their naive assessment of human nature, although this charge is implicit in any discussion of Dewey and Deweyites. He raps them on a more basic matter: for their incomplete participation in the revolution in standards and for developing a brand of moral relativism that was constitutionally incapable of taking a stand against the encroachments of power. "The new radicals were torn between their wish to liberate the unused energies of the submerged portions of society and their enthusiasm for social planning, which led in practice to new and subtler forms of repression...
This is a hasty summary, and I have extrapolated where Lasch's occasionally disorganized remarks leave the reader guessing. But it should be seen that The New Radicalism in America is a work of derogation, something of a native La Trahison des Clercs-far subtler than the original, it should be noted, since the author has no overt interest in recriminations, but still committed to puncturing the American self-consciousness where it hurts. Mr. Lasch intelligently sidesteps the more frequently trodden paths: stories of the dispossessed who mooned in Europe with Harold Stearns, then returned to claim their inheritence with...
...well as being arrogant, Steffens was a drastically uncultured man, and I suspect Mr. Lasch uses "culture" as nothing more than the definiendum of That-which-identifies-the-intellectual...
...Lasch skips over the '30's in a few pages, in pleasant contrast to Daniel Aaron's agonizing redundancies in Writers on the Left. C. Wright Mills and Benjamin Ginzburg are praised for defending the autonomy of culture against the depredations of those who called for Commitment. But Mr. Lasch is far more interested in the failings of the '40's and '50's, and perhaps it is here that he is most illuminating. He notes that the post-Marxist "realist" school of political analysis, fathered by Niebuhr on Kennan, Morgenthau, Charles Osgood, Louis Halle, and John F. Kennedy...