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By the end of the 1970s, several influential social critics suggested that this decade was a major turning point in the history of the modern age, and, thus, proposed different ways for defining it. Jean-François Lyotard famously argued in 1979 that the late 20th century should be considered as a postmodern era, a proposal which was widely adopted far beyond the academic circles. Still in France, Michel Foucault gave in 1978–1979 a series of lectures at the Collège de France, in which he focused on the neoliberal turn, which characterized, he argued, many of the biggest economies of the West. From a very different perspective, in the North American scene, some relatively conservative thinkers claimed that this era should be defined as what the journalist Tom Wolfe, called in 1976, the Me-Decade—a term which was widely used since. Equally influential was the historian Christopher Lasch who thought that in this Me-Decade narcissism became a major—and damaging—ideal in American culture, as well as a guiding principle in people's everyday lives. His book, The Culture of Narcissism, first published in 1979, became a main site of a debate over the cultural changes in America, at the very moment when others described it as postmodern or neoliberal; no wonder Lunbeck refers to it throughout her book.
The Americanization of Narcissism is a meticulous historical account on the emergence of the narcissistic discourse in the 1970s. Lasch's book, argues Elizabeth Lunbeck, “joined a discussion of affluence, needs and wants, persons and possessions, and productions and consumption at a particularly vexed point in the history of intellectuals' engagement with modern consumer culture” (p. 18). Lasch and other critics mainly opposed what they perceived as a replacement of some core American values—such as hard work and commitment to traditional models of femininity, domesticity, and community life—with an idealization of one's self, and preoccupation with the Me. The main characters,