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Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

"Limits and hope," wrote Christopher Lasch, "these words sum up the lines of the argument I have tried to weave together." Lasch insisted that much of what makes up "the texture of daily life" is an "experience of loss and defeat," and he went on to cite Orestes Brownson, "Are there no calamities in history? Nothing tragic?" With these words in mind, I want to take up the challenge Lasch's work presents to political philosophy, an enterprise that has often defined itself as an "anti-tragedy" that recognizes precious few limits to human projects and generates unwarranted optimism rather than hopefulness. With notable exceptions, of course, political philosophers in the great tradition have seen as their task a way to secure and to solidify a set of arrangements that would insulate a polity--if not each and every individual within it--from the experience of loss and defeat. If we just do it right, the argument goes, a polity may come with a many lifetimes warrantee. Such projects requires a person of a certain sort--a human nature appropriately modified, even denatured (if you will) and prepared, in Rousseau's words, to substitute "justice" for "instinct" in the heart of man himself. (I say "man" advisedly, for it is not always so clear where women fit in the great scheme of things as articulated in Western political thought--but the gender question is not, for the purpose of this essay, the most interesting and important one.) By contrast "historical consciousness" of hope with limits embodied in the writings of Christopher Lasch offers a necessary and vital corrective to the "philosophical consciousness" as embodied in the great tradition of Western political thought.(1)

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A few preliminary words to situate Lasch before I turn to what lessons he might bring to contemporary political thought. Lasch's voice is peculiarly American. Unlike the work of so many academic writers whose prose appears to have emerged out of a generic container of some sort, Lasch's prose style and his thoughts and his roots were American. Although he turned to Freud and certain Freud commentators and made suggestive forays into the roots of Christian thought at the end of his career, his concerns were primarily, if not exclusively, American as were the bulk of his sources. What made Lasch fascinating was his ongoing attempt to crystallize an American counter-tradition, those voices that were not caught up in the dominant story America likes to tell about herself--a story of optimism and unboundedness and the arrogance that all too often accompanies such triumphalism.

The optimistic, progressivist teleology in its specific American incarnation that Lasch challenged holds that the more we change, and the more we have, the better things are bound to become. Lasch's insistence on limits, by contrast, speaks a recognition of human vulnerability and finiteness as well as does his insistence that an ever-expanding culture of productivity must eventually spiral downward into a terrible cultural entropy. For the more we produce, the more we consume; the faster we run, the sooner we will exhaust ourselves and the natural world upon which we depend. How, then, would Lasch urge us to cultivate that upon which we depend? What habits of mind must we construct and cherish in order that limits be acknowledged and a genuine rather than a false and illusory political hope be kept ever fresh?

Take one brief example as a lead-in to a longer meditation on limits and that hope that can emerge only within an awareness of limits: Lasch shocked many people when he delivered himself up of the view that divorce should be made very difficult, if not more or less forbidden? This prompted cries of outrage from a number of the participants in a published forum. What Lasch's critics failed to understand was that the point he was here making, in his characteristically forthright style, was that perhaps we Americans should have greater patience learning to live with our choices and that we might, in fact, discover--with persistence--that a huge choice like whom to marry might not have been such a mistake after all. We need to judge relationships over the long-haul, a narrative rather than a snapshot. For he feared that Americans had lost a sense of perspective and persistence. That we had become quick on the trigger and short on the ability to realize that the current moment will not last forever; that, perhaps, the habit of living with one another over time, over the long haul, will build layer upon layer of attentiveness and respect that current unhappiness and inconvenience cannot even imagine. And it is only patience that sustains marriages, communities, and even polities. In our avid enthrallment with the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy's dock in Fitzgerald's classic we denude ourselves of the textured richness of what it means to perdure. That this is a lesson well lost on the vast majority in a culture as driven and individualistic as our own was a recognition not lost on Lasch: it helps to account for his occasional gloominess about our prospects, moments when he lost sustaining hope.

Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

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