Category Archives: Christopher Lasch

Christopher Lasch and the Crisis of Self-Government

Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) trained as a historian, but his work grew into a broad inquiry into the cultural, moral, and psychological foundations of democratic life. Readers remember him first for The Culture of Narcissism (1979), a book that won the … Continue reading

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Alliance Theory & Hero Systems

Ernest Becker’s hero system and Alliance Theory snap together cleanly once you drop the idea that either is mainly about belief. Becker says humans need a hero system to manage death anxiety. A hero system tells you what counts as … Continue reading

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Decoding Christopher Lasch

ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory reads Christopher Lasch not as a cranky cultural critic or a nostalgic moralist, but as a diagnostician of a failed elite alliance and a prophet of its downstream pathologies. Lasch’s core insight was not psychological in … Continue reading

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