Christopher "Kit" Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.
Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.
Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.
The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.
The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the days of Tom Paine.
The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.
It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.
We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.
News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda.
The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.
Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.