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Review
Cultural history at its best. . . . Provokes, startles, and keeps the reader arguing with himself as well as with the writer. . . . A book of fundamental importance.--Bruce Mazlish, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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The book quickly became a bestseller. This edition includes a new afterword, "The Culture of Narcissism Revisited."
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First Sentence
The Waning of the Sense of Historical Time As the twentieth century approaches its end, the conviction grows that many other things are ending too. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The Waning of the Sense of Historical Time As the twentieth century approaches its end, the conviction grows that many other things are ending too. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Keen social insight despite some rhetorical excess,
This review is from: Culture Of Narcissism (Paperback)
Lasch's overall argument here is that late capitalism, with its advanced division of labour and its therapeutic welfare state, undermines sturdy self-sufficiency and genuine relations with others. Instead it promotes a general social condition of anxiety, self-presentation, inability to truly relate to others accompanied by a neurotic need for social approval. His writing style is both brilliant and sweeping. His description of the social ills seems dated - it draws on the specific cultural trends of the 1970s - but I think his overall argument stands very well in the age of Facebook.Lasch examines the 'crisis of confidence' that seems to have befallen the United States and the advanced capitalist world more generally in the 1970s. For Lasch, this crisis represents the intellectual bankruptcy of bourgeois liberalism, accompanying its political exhaustion. This social impotence extends to the natural and social sciences, which had previously given such power and confidence to the forces of progressive modernity. This demoralization also appears in the humanities, which began to embrace a narrow particularism in the place of a general critical engagement, or even to actively deny their discipline's very claims to practical social wisdom. Lasch hopes that amongst this elite despair a disaffected populace will revolt against dysfunctional experts and bureaucratic institutions, and turn towards self-reliance and a reconstitution of local civic participation. The book psychoanalytically describes the terminal stages of competitive individualism, a period of ruthless war of all against all, in which the individual is anxiously preoccupied with his or her own survival, despairing of meaningful relationships and meaning more generally, ever more narrowly focused on him- or herself, the present moment and its transient desires. For Lasch, the anti-authoritarianism of the 60s is obsolete, for it is no longer repression but a radical individualism which threatens society and individual with anxiety, self-absorption and isolation. The narcissistic individual emerges as detached but restlessly driven by unending desire, permissive but unfulfilled, tolerant of difference but stripped of belonging to any group other than the impersonal institutions of market and state, thirsting for approval but afraid of the violent engagement of competition, divorced from the past and only superficially interested in the future. The past appears only as nostalgia ' a stock of antique preoccupations and bygone fashions ' but this unnecessarily devalues what can serve as source of strength, wisdom and inspiration. Lasch seeks to draw on the past to inform the present and orient society towards the future.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting,
This review is from: Culture Of Narcissism (Paperback)
It is true that Lasch relied a lot on psychoanalysis in his intellectual barrage against the American culture, but his point of view is certianly worth considering. To start with, the book makes an attempt to be comprehensive which is not crime except that many of the issues he touched upon would require further elaboration within a much broader theoritical framework. He borrows extensively from Freud, criticises Fromm and squeezes Horeny in, thus sacrificing many other branches of social sciences to place psychoanalysis at the forefront. It is not a great book and one should not be lured by the big words, but it does have its interesting moments.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Despite its Freudian defects, this book is brilliant.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Culture Of Narcissism (Paperback)
Some critics called this book overheated, but I do not believe that Lasch's style was faulty. His arguments ring true and are very persuasive. His insights into American culture are impressive, and he demonstrated sound knowledge of all the social sciences. The book is extremely well-written, never redundant, and always entertaining. This is a definitive indictment of American society, and is still valid twenty years later.
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