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Remembering Christopher Lasch

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Christopher Lasch, one of the leading American social critics of the last half-century, would have celebrated his eighty-second birthday this weekend, were he still alive. Lasch succumbed to cancer in 1994, at the heartbreaking age of sixty-one, but his intellectual legacy lives on.

A few weeks ago on the Baffler blog, Catherine Tumber wrote an impassioned defense of (and remembrance of) Lasch, in response to Elizabeth Lunbeck’s flawed arguments in The Americanization of Narcissism. Tumber explains Lasch’s “social invasion of the self” theory, in which individual autonomy is systematically undermined by, among other things, baffling bureaucracies and vapid corporate consumerism.

“It is worth recalling why some of us tasked with entering adulthood in the late 1970s found Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism to be a steadying tonic, an indispensible aid to bullshit detection,” Tumber wrote in her piece, “Dispatch From the Narcissism Wars.” She declared that it was the perfect time “to revisit Lasch, ever alive to the tang of nonsense after all these years.”

If you would like to do just that, a great place to start would be this excerpt of Christopher Lasch’s never-published satirical novel. As Lasch later told an interviewer, he considered his novel while he was writing it “a devastating, witty send-up of American politics,” but his publisher didn’t agree, and soon enough he abandoned the project to the drawer. It sat in Lasch’s archives until we published a portion of it in Issue 20 of The Baffler, and we’re putting it up online for the first time now.

This section, taken from the first chapter, introduces the novel’s protagonist, Harold Fox:

I see myself, then—I hope without illusions, with neither false modesty nor false pride—as a skilled surgeon presiding at the birth of a new American culture, a culture more advanced, more mature, stronger and healthier than the old culture, which was stunted by puritanical repression and the harsh work of taming a virgin continent. From the time of its founding, it has been widely assumed that America would be the womb of a new race of men; but it is only in our time that the new man is finally beginning to emerge—all the rest has been a long and difficult preparation, a four-hundred-year pregnancy. If it has been my privilege to assist at the delivery, it is a peculiar conjunction of circumstances, much more than my native abilities, that has made this possible. I happened, Harold Fox, to be in the right place at the right time. The part I played could have been played by hundreds of others; fortune alone assigned it to me.

Read more from Lasch’s Life and Times of a Libertine here.