The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type

by Christopher Lasch

Book Overview

Argues that from 1900 the American liberal tradition began to develop in a new direction. In this study, Christopher Lasche chronicles the lives and causes of those new radicals, connecting history... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393303195
• ISBN13: 9780393303193
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

The Roots of Cultural Criticism

Lasch's "The New Radicalism in America," published in 1965 tells the history of radicalism in America through a series of portraits of well-chosen individuals. Some, such as Jane Addams and Walter Lippmann are still relatively well known, others such as Mabel Luhan Dodge, Lincoln Steffens, Colonel House, and Randolph Bourne as less well-remembered. Part of the appeal of this approach is the how Lasch positions and contrasts these leading and lesser lights within the context of the social and cultural movements they led, followed, or reported upon. Lasch, the son-in-law of the liberal American historian Henry Commager, belonged to the post WWII generation of historians which searched for more objective ways to tell history than the progressive historians and writers such as Parrington and Croly, and the generation immediately afterwards, for example, Commager. Best known for his "The Culture of Narcissism," the "New Radicalism in America" is the work of a young historian attempting a critique of the grand, sweeping style of earlier generations, and to tell a story of a rise of a new class of personage on the public stage in America: the intellectual. The intellectual in America rose out of the ashes of Victorianism. Its earliest avatars came from the bourgeoisie, appalled at the stifling, stunted one-dimensional roles assigned to their parents: the father as breadwinner, the predatory male who proved his fitness in the Spencerian business world, the mother who stayed home to create a haven in a heartless world for her husband and children, and who, as such was the arbiter of Victorian genteel culture and the inculcator of the social graces. For the daughters of the last generation of Victorians, such as Jane Addams and Mabel Dodge, the urge to strike through the pasteboard mask of the cult of Victorian womanhood was an almost physical necessity. Addams, observing a bullfight in Spain during a grand tour of Europe, was moved to finally act upon her sense of the emptiness of her position, and taking a cue from the early example of the settlement movement, went back Chicago and set up Hull House. Mabel Dodge, a banker's daughter from Buffalo, set up a salon in Greenwich Village and played the Grande dame to the era's intellectuals, socialists, union organizers, and writers. Going through husbands at a fairly rapid clip, she eventually moved to Taos, New Mexico and managed to get D.H. Lawrence and his wife to come to stay at her retreat. Narcissistic to the core, she embodies the free sexuality of the "new woman," who used the parlor as Victorians would never have used it: as a ring for clashing ideas. Randolph Bourne, who frequented Dodge's salon along with cultural critics such as Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dos Passos, and Walter Lippmann, wrote about the Young Americans who believed that they could create a new world starting with the new model of public education proposed by John Dewey. He eventually fell out with Dewey over

Worthy of another reading

In light of the "cultural turn" in the human sciences which has so frazzled many of us who subscribed to the "old" distribution of intellectual labor in the university, Christopher Lasch's early study of the "left"--in many ways the book which began his lifelong engagement with issues pertinent to the proper and actual character of the Progressive cause--provides a new depth to what has so self-consciously flaunted its "newness," its "Post-whateverness." His thesis is that around the turn of the century the "radical" developed a new self-consciousness, and that this posture manifested itself in "cultural" radicalism whose politics was no longer confined to political economy, but which psychologized social issues and personal "artistic" experience. His biographical-vignette approach is especially effective at driving forward the themes, though it weakens his own argument--weak of the whole on what the ancients called "refutatio." I think his periodization is a little too cute and pat. The importance of 1963 is clear; 1889 is never satisfactorily developed and the reader must accept this date as if a revelation. This arbitrariness aside, Lasch has a keen descriptive eye--his dissections of Schlesinger and Mailer are particularly droll--and clean prose style throughout. For all its flaws, this book earns itself a hearty recommendation.