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Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch was a leading intellectual of the twentieth century. His work consistently probed the nations political and cultural terrain, considering the unruly thrust of Americas history and the possibilities of a better way. Hope in a Scattering Time is the first and only full biography of this towering intellectual figure.
Miller plumbed Lasch's published writings, his correspondence, and interviews and correspondence with his friends, students, and colleagues to create this comprehensive biography. In these pages Eric Miller captures the evolving nature of Lasch's understanding of the world and his fight for clarity and insight in a muddled age.
Christopher Lasch's sharp, prophetic stance caused many in his time to rethink what they thought they had understood, and to consider the world anew. Fifteen years after Lasch's death, the time is ripe to once again follow his lead and to reassess how we view and understand our world.
420 pages, Hardcover
First published April 16, 2010
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190 people want to read
About the author
Eric Miller
4 books6 followersEric Miller is Professor of American History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (2010) and coeditor of Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation (2010).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 4, 2018
This is one of the most thoughtful and interesting biographies I've ever read. If you're not already familiar with Lasch, the book offers a wonderful introduction to one of the 20th century's brilliant minds. Miller's writing style is clear and precise, helping the reader to grasp both a portrait of a man as well as a vision for something grander than what we experience. It is an inspiring blend of cultural criticism, clever writing, and a thoughtful challenge for how we might better understand the world.
August 2, 2020
Miller's book is a great telling of Lasch's intellectual journey, one I identify with. Miller describes Lasch as "a genuine seeker" (99) raised in a midwestern background to progressive parents. Yet far from his parents' ideology, he largely rejected the tenets of progressive liberalism. Miller strikes a good balance between describing his early/personal life and his professional life, something biographers often struggle with. Miller draws the arc of Lasch's life in a very readable fashion.
Lasch's critiques of society evolved over time; he wasn't always the post-liberal populist he was at the end of his career. But his stances always reflected what Miller (to paraphrase) calls a contemplative silence. Lasch was gifted with the ability to think through inconsistencies, engage in dialogues, and walk into all sorts of ideological debates. This left a lasting character to his phases. His true incorporation of a faith tradition into his work was a relatively late development, responding to the inability of rationalism to convey the disillusionment he felt. But signs of it appeared throughout his career, especially as he saw religion with growing importance. His embrace of Freud in the 1970s (works I haven't been as interested in reading tbh), reflected a stopping point in this search for a better framework, despite the fact that Freud was falling out of fashion and that it proved too theoretical for his ideas on populism. However, the importance of psychoanalysis remained to Lasch in a more subtle way. At one point, Lasch embraced and then fell out of love with Marxism, even seeking to form a new political party around a whole new leftist program (142). However, he ended up disillusioned both with the student movement's revolutionary mindset and with Marx's historical determinism. Yet he kept the framing of class at the top of his mind, even as late as in "Revolt of the Elites".
Remarkably, Lasch evades easily labels. Miller notes that he's something like a Canadian red tory (169), also referring to him as a proponent of old-school populism and finally, "not a conservative, not a liberal, but a radical" (328). For his enigmatic complexity, Lasch garnered praise and sharp criticism from left and right alike. He dabbled with ideas on both sides while rejecting that binary, as Miller states, "refusing to genuflect before such pieties" (345). This endears me to him, as somebody who through similar processes lost respect for the hedonistic new left while remaining skeptical of a conservative movement embedded in hardcore neoliberal capitalism.
And yet there's a stunning persistence in Lasch's going against the grain. Miller reveals a fundamental continuity--a love of tension, respect for forgotten voices, a desire for renewed intellectual vigor, and the search for deeper meaning than liberal progressivism can provide. I've always relished in challenging left and right alike, and Lasch gave me the framework for a trenchant critique. It's little wonder his ideas carry so much weight in heterodox political circles, left and right. Upon arriving at Lasch's masterpiece/coda (The True and Only Heaven), Miller breaks it down into something digestible. Indeed, Lasch settled on the need for a balance between liberal progressivism and Burkean conservatism. A balance struck by the populist tradition Lasch weaves a winding narrative of. This parallels the lessons I drew from the work, and Miller displays an impeccable understanding of the man and his ideas. Dismissed at various times as a pessimist, Lasch emerged with a keen sense of hope in the face of limits. He wasn't always successful and his later work fell on deaf ears in many circles, leaving him a "soldier in search of an army" (298). But there's so so much for us to take from his life for the current moment, and it overjoys me to see the revitalization of Lasch's ideas. "Hope in a Scattering Time" is a good place to start that project.
Lasch's critiques of society evolved over time; he wasn't always the post-liberal populist he was at the end of his career. But his stances always reflected what Miller (to paraphrase) calls a contemplative silence. Lasch was gifted with the ability to think through inconsistencies, engage in dialogues, and walk into all sorts of ideological debates. This left a lasting character to his phases. His true incorporation of a faith tradition into his work was a relatively late development, responding to the inability of rationalism to convey the disillusionment he felt. But signs of it appeared throughout his career, especially as he saw religion with growing importance. His embrace of Freud in the 1970s (works I haven't been as interested in reading tbh), reflected a stopping point in this search for a better framework, despite the fact that Freud was falling out of fashion and that it proved too theoretical for his ideas on populism. However, the importance of psychoanalysis remained to Lasch in a more subtle way. At one point, Lasch embraced and then fell out of love with Marxism, even seeking to form a new political party around a whole new leftist program (142). However, he ended up disillusioned both with the student movement's revolutionary mindset and with Marx's historical determinism. Yet he kept the framing of class at the top of his mind, even as late as in "Revolt of the Elites".
Remarkably, Lasch evades easily labels. Miller notes that he's something like a Canadian red tory (169), also referring to him as a proponent of old-school populism and finally, "not a conservative, not a liberal, but a radical" (328). For his enigmatic complexity, Lasch garnered praise and sharp criticism from left and right alike. He dabbled with ideas on both sides while rejecting that binary, as Miller states, "refusing to genuflect before such pieties" (345). This endears me to him, as somebody who through similar processes lost respect for the hedonistic new left while remaining skeptical of a conservative movement embedded in hardcore neoliberal capitalism.
And yet there's a stunning persistence in Lasch's going against the grain. Miller reveals a fundamental continuity--a love of tension, respect for forgotten voices, a desire for renewed intellectual vigor, and the search for deeper meaning than liberal progressivism can provide. I've always relished in challenging left and right alike, and Lasch gave me the framework for a trenchant critique. It's little wonder his ideas carry so much weight in heterodox political circles, left and right. Upon arriving at Lasch's masterpiece/coda (The True and Only Heaven), Miller breaks it down into something digestible. Indeed, Lasch settled on the need for a balance between liberal progressivism and Burkean conservatism. A balance struck by the populist tradition Lasch weaves a winding narrative of. This parallels the lessons I drew from the work, and Miller displays an impeccable understanding of the man and his ideas. Dismissed at various times as a pessimist, Lasch emerged with a keen sense of hope in the face of limits. He wasn't always successful and his later work fell on deaf ears in many circles, leaving him a "soldier in search of an army" (298). But there's so so much for us to take from his life for the current moment, and it overjoys me to see the revitalization of Lasch's ideas. "Hope in a Scattering Time" is a good place to start that project.
October 20, 2010
Other reviewers can fill in the details, but what I got out of this book was that there was a man, with his own personal history and set of experiences, standing behind the body of work that Lasch produced. That should be a given, obviously, but the impersonal tone of his writing tends to obscure the deeply personal nature of his corpus. Plus, he went to Barrington HS, his family spent time in Springfield, IL (my home town), and his mom rejected Bertrand Russel's marriage proposal (due, in part, to the fact that he was already married to someone else, I'm sure) - facts all new to me. Anyone deeply affected by Narcissism, et. al., would do well to visit this biography, as it gives much needed context, provides a welcome degree of perspective, and helps to humanize what is already a deeply humane (if jaded) interpretation of our modern predicament.
December 15, 2015
I read this a while ago, and neglected to put it up on Goodreads. It is a wonderful biography, of both a man--the historian and essayist Christopher Lasch--and also of an idea, or a rather a constellation of ideas, of which Lasch was constantly charting and re-charting, thinking through, rejecting, re-articulating, and then thinking through again. Pretty much everyone who gives any credence at all to localist, communitarian, or populist ideas needs to struggle with the provocative questions and challenges which Lasch asked throughout his life, and this book is a great introduction to them.
October 26, 2014
A great survey of Lasch's work, and his shifts toward and away from Marx and Freud, attached to a kind-of-perfunctory biography about Lasch the human being. That's a particularly unfortunate oversight here—given Lasch's devotion to the idea of the family it seems like there would be much more to know about his wife, who mostly disappears after their wedding.
But the work (and the increasingly befuddled reception it met with) is extremely well-represented.
Sidebar 1: The author uses the word "illumine" much more than a charitable editor should have allowed.
Sidebar 2: The Kindle version of this book is a mess—I am not convinced a single person looked it over after it was converted. I'm happy to have it, but the typographical issues were consistently frustrating.
But the work (and the increasingly befuddled reception it met with) is extremely well-represented.
Sidebar 1: The author uses the word "illumine" much more than a charitable editor should have allowed.
Sidebar 2: The Kindle version of this book is a mess—I am not convinced a single person looked it over after it was converted. I'm happy to have it, but the typographical issues were consistently frustrating.
May 31, 2016
I was introduced to Christopher Lasch in a Political Science class in college. He taught history at the University of Rochester for many years and wrote a number of books that examined American culture. His most famous book is The Culture of Narcissism, which is what I read in college. This book presents the progression of Lasch's thought through an exploration of the books that Lasch wrote. I highly recommend it as a way into understanding a great social critic and writer.
April 4, 2013
A very satisfying biography of a very important, but sadly neglected, cultural critic of our time. We should remember Lasch if for no other reason than his coining of the immensely useful phrase "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness" (in The Culture of Narcissism).
January 9, 2013
Fantastic book, both because of the subject and the author. Will review more fully at Fors Clavigera.
October 24, 2025
Could’ve used less on Marx and more on TOH, and maybe less personal background, but pretty solid as far as intellectual bios go
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews