In this hard-hitting book, one of America's most distinguished historians takes aim at what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. Lasch argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, but by the elites. As they abandon the middle class and divide the nation, Lasch warns, they betray the idea of a democracy for all Americans.
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In this hard-hitting book, one of America's most distinguished historians takes aim at what is wrong with the values and beliefs of America's professional and managerial elites. Lasch argues that democracy today is threatened not by the masses, but by the elites. As they abandon the middle class and divide the nation, Lasch warns, they betray the idea of a democracy for all Americans.
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Add this copy of Revolt of the Elites Pa to cart. $14.36, new condition, Sold by indoo rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Avenel, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by W. W. Norton & Company.
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New. In The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch argues that democracy is not threatened by the masses, but by the elites, mobile and global in their outlook, refusing to accept limits or ties to nation and place. Isolated in networks and enclaves, they abandon the class and betray the democracy they purport to champion. Throughout his work, Lasch's bracing, penetrating and unabashedly moral mind allows us to witness the true illnesses of our age, while prescribing, by example, the cure: ''The best defense against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet resounds to our needs. '' It is indeed a shame that Lasch can no longer continue to respond to the needs our culture has become too self-reflexive to know they have.
Add this copy of The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy to cart. $24.00, new condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 1996 by W. W. Norton & Company.
In 1994, shortly after Christopher Lasch's death, Harper's published the first, eponymous, chapter of this book of interconnected essays. It made a strong impression on me, to put it mildly. This was partly due to the essay's prophetic recognition that the elites of this country (and indeed the developed world)--the professionals and managers of the upper-middle class and higher--were pulling away from the rest of the pack, tacitly renouncing their stake in and responsibility to our democratic social contract, and slowly changing the rules of the game so that this process of decoupling would accelerate and widen (as indeed has come to pass); and partly because Lasch's critique was based on conservative, some might even say reactionary, principles. The diverse pieces collected here, which comprise sections on the intensification of socioeconomic divisions, the decline of education and democratic discourse, and the modern transformation of spirituality and morals, form a cohesive whole more for their common conservatism of thought than their common subject matter. By conservatism, though, I don't mean the incoherent and ugly pudding of warmed-over Ayn Rand for Ignoramuses and hate-based Christianity that passes for "conservative" in our current time: Lasch was in fact an old-school, big-L Yankee Liberal, who believed that the Constitution deserved considered reverence and that democracy was less about rights than participatory responsibilities, such as voting, proper child-rearing, and paying one's taxes. He believed in all those things, such as God and Family Values, that today's ersatz conservatives pay lip service to, but fail to actually honor or subject to rigorous analysis. Lasch is Glenn Beck in reverse: he compares the founding Enlightenment principles of the United States to the current state of affairs, and produces thoughtful, historically accurate criticism, rather than hysterical rants based on distortions. As an adherent to Old Liberal principles, Lasch recoils from the shibboleths of the liberal left: condescending ideas that harden into institutional policy and cause more social problems than they solve. Along the way, he critiques works of John Dewey, Robert Bellah, Walter Lippmann, Horace Mann, Clifford Geertz, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, and Roger Kimball, among others. His conclusion is that democracy, for all its inherent weaknesses, is worth saving--all we have to do is let go of our apathy and cynicism, our desire to find easy solutions, and do the work to keep it alive.
Mark S
Dec 2, 2010
Great book!
Though this book is about 16 years old now, the principles and ideology of Democracy and its roots in America that "Revolt" disects are timeless. This book has clarified and answered a great deal for me regarding how America got to where it is today... and how we might go about regaining the American Dream.
