Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Lasch was searching for secular sources that would offer occasion for the stories of human sin and redemption, the coming to grips with evil in oneself and the world generally, the possibilities of grace, awe, and hope found in religion or, to be more precisely, in the Christian narrative. His turn to Freud can be understood, in part, in this way. For Freud is a thinker who restlessly and ceaselessly insisted on limits to enlightenment, limits to projects of self-transcendance, limits to what finite and mortal human beings can do confronted with the great and inexorable force of necessity. Lasch was offended by the sleight-of-hand pulled by certain cultural "Freudians" (Marcuse comes to mind) when they tried to turn Freud into a totem of "liberationism." They did this by radically altering Freud's texts, for example, substituting "scarcity" for Freud's "necessity," as if "necessity," for Freud, was primarily an economic category. But it was not. It was the great and inexorable goddess of Fate in the ancient Greek sense. Fatedness, recognition of our status as mortals, was not something that could be overcome with a superabundance of goods of every kind and a growing superfluity and optimism. For Freud, this sort of thinking represented an illusion and a dangerous one at that. Unsurprisingly, then, Lasch's Freud was the Freud who reminded us, over and over again, that we were limited and mortal and that while there might be defensible grounds for hope there were no good grounds at all for optimism.

A number of issues have been put on the table: limits and hope, loss and defeat, fate and necessity, particular commitments and universalistic aspirations. Let me now turn directly to "Lasch vs. Political Philosophy." It is a fascinating story. If Lasch is right--and there seems little doubt to me that he is--that alienation "is the normal condition of human existence," much of Western political thought becomes a beguiling and often masterful exercise in articulate self-deception.(3) In our dominant religious narratives, human beings are compelled to renounce the "comfortable belief" that the world is made for our convenience or cut to our design. But the political philosophy story, or at least one dominant and continuing motif that helps to constitute this tradition, offers comfort or a cure for the malign hand that fate has dealt us all, including the sure and certain knowledge of our own deaths.

Consider, for example, Plato's great Republic. Here we find an unmatched articulation of an architectonic schema for the perfectly righteous or just city, a world in which "public-spirited men rule for the common good."(4) Consider the unabashed ambition of the project--it requires that the rulers take "the dispositions of human beings; as though they were a tablet ... which, in the first place, they would wipe clean. And that's hardly easy." The Guardians of the ideal Republic, then, must quite literally remake human nature. To this end, children over the age of ten are best banished as their dispositions are already formed within the old order. To this end, such a powerful, all-encompassing bond between individuals and the city must be created that all social and political conflict disappears, discord melts away, and the state comes to resemble a "single person." To this end, women (for the ruling class) are in common and children have no relationship to their particular mother--they, too, are "in common." If a strong, particular loyalty develops it threatens to undermine single-minded devotion to the city and its purposes. On and on.