You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Lasch's work has the resonance of Parrington's (1927) seminal work but from a different era. Parrington was a midwestern and western progressive looking at the American experience as a literary critic, while Lasch is a historian—a one time Marxist embedded with a novel and original perspective of psychoanalysis outside the mainstream of drive theory and into object relations. He was a Kleinian in his previous works: The Culture of Narcissism (1979); The Minimal Self (1984); Haven in a Heartless World (1977).
The True and Only Heaven is an important contribution to social and political criticism but is, at times, circumstantial and in need of a good editor. Most readers without a historical and political background will learn quite a bit of the roots and tensions of many American dilemmas.
Lasch gives us a history of progress versus boundaries. He holds out for hope but not optimism and a trust of life without denying its tragic character and a realization of natural limits. He pays attention to a new class in the older lower middle class with its strength, foibles, and self serving determinism. Several progressive critics, such as Lasch and Christopher Jencks (1992) have examined the texture of older American lower middle-class life which became “culturally conservative.” The petty bourgeois life based on artisans, small business, small farms, and proprietorships, during the 20th century, has been swamped and drowned by corporate capitalism and consumer fetishism as a basic current theme in American political society. What was a democratic group has been attracted to a populism based on resentment, racism, deprivation, and the ambiguities, and strengths of “family values.” In Europe, the petty bourgeois in France turned to Poujadism and movements of the right and to neo-fascism in the 50s. Now there is LePen. Similar lower middle-class reaction is occurring in Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, and in the United States. The