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Policy Review: The Overpraised American

Policy Review The Overpraised American

"Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure,� the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. For Lasch, writing in 1979, that character structure was an unrelenting narcissism, one that threatened to undermine the rugged individualism of previous eras and, quite possibly, liberalism itself. His book �describes a way of life that is dying,� he wrote in the introduction, �the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, [and] the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.�"

"Lasch subtitled his book, �American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,� and it is useful to question just how far the diminishing of expectations he first identified has gone. Looking back on The Culture of Narcissism more than 25 years later, what did Lasch get right and what did he get wrong? What developments did he presciently identify and which ones did he miss? In the interim decades, has Lasch�s narcissist given way to a new type of American character and, if so, what are that character�s defining traits? A descriptive tour revisiting some of Lasch�s themes � especially the transformation of the family � suggests that the narcissism Lasch described has not disappeared. It has simply taken on a different and in some ways more exaggerated form."

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Policy Review: The Overpraised American

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