Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

(5) There are those who claim Plato was being ironic about this whole business. I am not interested in that debate. Suffice it to say that many, including myself, take the text at its word and ponder what sort of world it invites and what sort of world it aims to cure.

(6) Here, too, see Public Man, Private Woman (pp. 127-148) and, as well, my essay, "What's Love Got to Do With It?" an essay on Mill against the passions in Salmagundi #114-115 (Spring-Summer 1997): 166-181.

(7) I do not mean to suggest that she would agree wholeheartedly with my irreverent tweaking of thinkers she much admired but that she would concur with the dangers I locate in the tradition of political philosophy she herself revered.

(8) Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," in Beyond Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968, 227-264), p. 231.

(9) New York: MacMillan, 1971, p. 12.

(10) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation (New York: MacMillan, 1959), p.78.

(11) Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 532.

(12) This appears in the fragment on "Judging" left incomplete at the time of her death. See The Life of the Mind (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978), pp. 257-258.

(13) Cites are from the one-volume edition of Democracy in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 691.

References

Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978.)

Arendt, Hannah, "Truth and Politics," In Beyond Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968).

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Creation and Fall/Temptation (New York: MacMillan, 1959).

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: MacMillan, 1971).

Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Elshtain, Jean Bethke, "What's Love Got to Do With It?' Salmagundi #114-115 (Spring-Summer 1997): 166-181.

Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

Lasch, Christopher, "The Illusion of Disillusionment," from "The Soul of Man Under Secularism." Harper's Magazine (July 1991): 19-22.

Plato, The Republic. Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Real Politics At the Center of Everyday Life (1998) and New Wine and Old Bottles: International Politics and Ethical Discourse (1999).