Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Perhaps this is the point to remind us of Tocqueville's warnings about "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear" by way of situating Lasch's work in a longer train of observations on America. Tocqueville's worst-case scenario has quite a bit to do with judging or, better put, no longer being able to discern the better from the worse, the excellent from the mediocre, slavishness from self-responsibility. Democratic despotism, according to Tocqueville, would have a "different character" from the tyranny of the Old World. "It would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them."(13) What Tocqueville saw was citizens withdrawing into themselves, circling around one another in pursuit of "the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls." The exercise of free choice becomes rarer, the activity of free will occurs "within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties."

The words Tocqueville uses to describe this state of things are "hinder ... restrain ... enervate ... stultify." Losing over time the "faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves," these citizens "slowly fall below the level of humanity." Now Tocqueville, no more than Lasch, talks about the collapse of the faculty of judgement in a specific sense, or the rise in instances of shameless in a quite concrete way, but these, surely, are at stake in the judgements each made, in his very different time and place, about America's perils and possibilities. Each would insist that knowing shame and being capable of judgement are central to, indeed constitutive of, a democratic capacity for self-governance. Each helps us to disentangle, analyze, separate, discern and, in so doing, locates us in the heart of a world of others--not apart but among our fellow men and women. The conviction of Lasch, Arendt, and all those who stress both our finitude and our capacity for judgement is that, from the complex processes of discernment, we will come to a recognition of limits that generates generous and decent hope. Arendt insisted that hope was the source of our capacity to act. Optimism may drive us but it invites unwarranted certainty and, over the long run, is a recipe for cynicism. That contemporary American culture generates cynicism about its own civic affairs and almost delirious optimism about its economy is a recipe for both recklessness and failure. But hope, ever fresh, kindles anew that spirit that, at its best, renews democracy and the human spirit.

Notes

(1) Obviously, this tradition is not cut from one piece of cloth. But the attempt to "cure" the universe and to protect a body politic from what Lasch might call the "ravages" of time is a powerful and oft-repeated theme.

(2) This in a Harper's Magazine forum.

(3) Cited from "The Illusion of Disillusionment," from "The Soul of Man Under Secularism," Harper's Magazine (July, 1991, pp. 19-22), p. 21.

(4) I here draw upon my discussion from Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 2041). The text in question is, of course, Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).