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Eric Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010. Pp. xx + 394. $32.00.
Eric Miller of Geneva College has written the biography of a teacher and intellectual who devoted his career to historical scholarship and to declaring the prospects of a better America. The book depicts Lasch's intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage from his Midwestern upbringing to his growth as a historian and cultural critic who engaged various theories and ideologies in his analyses of American society, politics, and culture. The constant theme: Lasch, a hopeful prophet, urged honest revolution in order to heal American society. Intellectual leaders had failed; the ideologies of modern progressives, liberals, and the New Left had added confusion. Lasch wrote out of obligation to warn and convert people to commit themselves to responsible "citizenship, neighborliness, stewardship" because of "goodness" (xix). Miller observes that though Lasch is now out of vogue, he remains valuable as a mirror of "the central tensions of twentieth century American life" (xx).
Born in June 1932, Lasch came of age during years of crisis and became a probing critic of the twentieth century. His father, Robert, was a Rhodes Scholar and prizewinning journalist, his mother, Zora, was a philosophy professor at the University of Nebraska. From them "Kit" inherited a working-class, Midwestern, post-populist progressive worldview, rational liberalism, religious skepticism, and grief over the failure of democratic socialism to take hold in and beyond the New Deal. Surely he emulated his parents, too, through his interest in music, art, politics, and writing, as a lifelong, prolific letter-writer, and as a husband and father of four in a secure home.
As a Harvard student Lasch focused on American political history, added intellectual history and theology, and tasted...