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Critical Review
Humanism and Antihumanism in Lasch and Sandel
by Tom Hoffman
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Abstract
Christopher Lasch’s True and Only Heaven and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent are similarly motivated criticisms of consumer society. However, Lasch identifies the ideals animating American consumer society as stemming from a broader humanist impulse, the roots of which he explores and criticizes. This strategy allows Lasch to place his critique of consumerism alongside criticisms of a full range of humanist ideals. Sandel, who articulates a more narrowly focused criticism of consumer society, never links its underlying imperatives to a broader humanism, thus failing to recognize how his alternative, civic republicanism, might share some of the same problems.
A prominent theme in social theory since Max Weber’s day is the paradoxical predicament of the modern individual: “freed” from traditional theological, moral, and communal authorities, the individual, in fact, remains as unfree as ever. But now the very social structures that helped loosen the hold of traditional authorities—the structures of the market and the bureaucratic state—are themselves felt by the individual to be regimenting and oppressive. Jürgen Habermas (1989) has described the contemporary welfare state in similar terms. The welfare-state project, he argues, is only the latest in a series of Enlightenment-inspired schemes, including successive incarnations of socialism and liberalism, that have all failed to deliver on their promises of individual liberation. The welfare state contradicts this promise, Habermas writes, as “an ever denser net of legal norms, or governmental and para-governmental bureaucracies” is unavoidably spread over daily life (ibid., 291). Even its promoters now recognize that it is “not a passive medium with no properties of its own,” in that there is a “contradiction between its goal [of opening up arenas of individual self-realization and spontaneity] and its method” (ibid.). Further, the inability of contemporary social theory to discern a convincing route away from the oppressiveness of market and state structures amounts to a “new obscurity” (ibid.).
A similar theme is the shared starting point for Christopher Lasch’s True and Only Heaven and Michael J. Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent. In strikingly similar ways, both works recast Weberian despair within the specific context of the growth and development of American consumer society. Lasch proclaims “the characteristic mood of the times” to be “a baffled sense of drift” (1991, 22). Echoing Habermas’s charge of theoretical “obscurity,” Lasch writes that
it is the assumption that our future is predetermined by the continuing development of large-scale production, colossal technologies and political centralization that inhibits creative thought and makes it so difficult to avoid the choice between fatuous optimism and debilitating nostalgia. (Ibid., 170)
Likewise, Sandel (1996, 323) writes that
The liberal self-image and the actual organization of modern social and economic life are sharply at odds. Even as we think and act as freely choosing, independent selves we confront a world governed by impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control.... We find ourselves overwhelmed as we turn to face the world on our own resources.
Indeed, the “discontent” in the title of Sandel’s book refers—in part at least—to this experience of being overwhelmed by impersonal structures of power.
Humanism as a Useful Concept
But from this shared starting point in a Weberian portrayal of recent American society, the two authors ultimately make crucially different turns. For Lasch, the solution resides in a wholesale rejection of the values that generate these large social structures. If modern economic and political institutions prove to be overwhelming or oppressive to the individual, then those institutions—and the material benefits and conveniences they provide—must be foregone. For Sandel, however, the answer involves no real rejection of modern economic and political institutions, let alone any sacrifice of the material benefits that flow from them. Rather, the individual citizen must be instilled with a stronger, collective sense of agency—adapted, in other words, to be the master of the social structures that seem so overwhelming under a liberal regime.
While there is some risk of confusion in using the term, I believe that comparing Lasch and Sandel in terms of “humanism” 1 is the best way to fill in the details of the interpretations I have just outlined. While a particular type of humanism is their common target, their respective analyses are distinguished most significantly by much different attitudes toward humanism in general. Using the concept of “humanism” not only reveals the two authors’ similarities and divergences, but discloses a gap in Sandel’s account: he never stops to ask whether his civic republican project would really result in happiness or contentment—even if it were successful in satisfying the deep-seated humanist desires he portrays as driving postwar American public dissatisfaction.
The form of humanism both writers condemn—the individualist humanism that has animated much of American social development during the past 40 or 50 years—expresses itself in attempts to promote individual autonomy and self-realization through collectively supported institutions that are informed by neutralist or minimalist conceptions of the good. Feasible or not, the imperative of this humanism is to distribute to increasing numbers of people the resources and protections taken as likely to contribute to individual human freedom.
Both critics note the circumscribed range of issues addressed by a consumerist political economy. It tends to ignore such problems as the development of individual character—especially regarding fitness for political participation—and how best to protect personal, familial, or local integrity. Sandel, for instance, complains that “beginning in the late New Deal and culminating in the early 1960s, the political economy of growth and distributive justice displaced the political economy of citizenship” (1996, 250). The postwar American debate between the left and right thus “revolve[d] around two considerations: prosperity and fairness” (1996, 124). Similarly, for Lasch, the terms of national political debate are shaped by an overarching acceptance of a “distributive view of democracy” (1991, 345), within which, again, differences largely concern such matters as how best to secure prosperity and the relative need for policies promoting redistribution or fairness.
While both authors are clearly on the American left, 2 in neither of the books in question do they show any great enthusiasm for arguing (directly at least) in the voice of the mainstream welfarist left for a more egalitarian distribution of social resources or for the promotion of specifically working-class interests. They remain committed to these goals; however, the burden of their arguments is to question the premises of contemporary American political debate. Both criticize the content of the shared ideal underlying this debate, rather than any perceived failure or unfairness in its realization.
While Lasch understands his target to be more narrowly a belief in the idea of progress, the notions that he puts forth in opposition to it—most especially his call for a sense of “limits”—show that what he is objecting to can be understood along the lines of the concept of humanism as it has been spelled out here. If humanism is understood, roughly, as a deep confidence in humankind’s ability to know and control its environment, then its identity with what Lasch prefers to call a belief in progress can be seen in some of the attributes Lasch associates with that belief, such as its “insatiability of curiosity and desire” (1991, 528) and its assumption that the advent of “economic abundance gave mankind mastery over its own destiny” (ibid., 121).
Like Lasch, Sandel dissents from this kind of confidence in human power and control—but only when it is vested in the individual citizen. Sandel maintains an unquestioning confidence in our power to know and control our environment and our destiny when this power is vested in a collective political agent. Indeed, his fundamental argument for the superiority of republicanism over liberalism rests on his belief that republicanism—unlike liberalism—successfully delivers human mastery. Sandel’s central notion of a “formative” collective project, for instance, highlights his confidence in the ability of a polity to control the most important of its environments—the moral and social environment that constitutes its citizens’ characters—through self-conscious political debate among the citizenry.
In some respects, though, the authors of Democracy’s Discontent and The True and Only Heaven take the same approach to dealing with the problems they identify. Both retrace the steps by which America’s consumer society arose, searching for eclipsed ideals that might form the basis of a critical perspective and a viable alternative. Both look to history for inspiration to dissipate the contemporary “obscurity”; and in doing so, both identify as exemplars many of the same producerist and republican social and intellectual movements. Lasch’s populist dissent from the idea of progress, and Sandel’s civic-republican opposition to liberal proceduralism, are both, at heart, protests against the effects of twentieth-century America’s valorization of individual choice and power.
There is a great overlap, then, between the problems these writers set for themselves, the methods they use, and—superficially—the alternatives they propose. In fact, though, their respective answers differ fundamentally. While both Lasch and Sandel attack the ideal driving American consumerism—the ideal of individualist humanism—only Lasch proceeds to extend this critique to the humanist impulse more generally. Because Lasch’s critique peers more deeply into the motivations beneath contemporary consumerism, he must wrestle with the question of whether any expression of human autonomy, freedom, and power is likely to result in happiness.
Sandel’s analysis, on the other hand, merely seeks to redirect the humanist impulse from its individualistic focus in modern consumerism to a more collective level, without ever seriously raising the question of its relationship to human happiness. Producerist and republican strains in U.S. history are identified by both authors as providing the basis for an answer to the deficiencies they find in contemporary society, but for Lasch it is producerism’s sense of limits—which amounts to a rejection of humanism—that recommends itself. For Sandel, by contrast, producerism is attractive precisely because of its (purportedly) superior ability to enhance human agency. “Democracy’s discontent” refers, Sandel writes, to “the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives,” along with “the sense that, from family to neighborhood, to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us. These two fears—for the loss of self-government and the erosion of community—together define the anxiety of the age” (1996, 3). Together they produce, he maintains, a widespread perception of a “loss of mastery.”
By contrasting Sandel’s civic republicanism with Lasch’s differing attitude, I hope to raise a basic question about Sandel’s vision: namely, would a civic-republican public philosophy really make Americans less discontented—that is, happier? Instead of asking this question, Sandel labors to portray liberal consumerism as a public philosophy that generates discontentment, and then goes some way toward describing how his alternative republicanism might prove better than liberalism at providing a sense of autonomy or mastery for its citizens. The crucial final link in the argument is left undeveloped: nowhere in Democracy’s Discontent does Sandel explain how or why a sense of collective mastery is likely to prevent the discontent of individual citizens, or how it will make individuals happier. This is where Lasch’s work is especially instructive. A central—perhaps the central—message of The True and Only Heaven is to warn against any complacency concerning the connection between attempts at mastery and the achievement of human happiness. This kind of complacency, according to Lasch, is a damaging—if pervasive—form of modern arrogance.
Sandel’s failure to question the assumption that republican freedom will lead to happiness is akin to the widespread assumption on the part of liberals that individualist freedom will result in happiness. 3 Sandel—like Lasch—is quick to point out that happiness has not resulted despite the best efforts to date of an individualist form of humanism. It is striking, therefore, that he does not stop to consider his own prescription’s ultimate connection with happiness.
It might be thought that Sandel’s answer to this question is implied in the solution he offers for the second of the two basic anxieties he describes: the concern about an unraveling of community. But by interrogating this theme of Sandel’s book in terms of happiness, we will find that he provides no answer here either. I will argue that what Sandel is trying to address here is the problem of perceived moral chaos, a fear of moral anarchy. But the kind of civic republicanism he embraces as a solution—which is pluralistic so as to avoid the charge of coerciveness traditionally associated with republicanism—turns out to be an impotent remedy for such moral chaos. Thus, it would be wrong to assume that his republicanism is linked to happiness through its ability to reduce the anxiety or discontent caused by moral fragmentation. While Sandel’s republicanism may avoid coerciveness, and may also avoid the fatuous nostalgia Lasch identifies with communitarianism (1991, ch. 3), it would merely move moral fragmentation and conflict to a more public and fully collective level—if anything, intensifying its effects.
Sandel and the American Quest for Mastery
Examining the argument in Democracy’s Discontent in terms of humanism as it has been spelled out here means focusing particular attention on the central role of “mastery”—or the perceived loss of it—in Sandel’s account of American political life. According to Sandel, the reigning liberal public philosophy has nothing to say about the dual anxieties beneath the discontent currently besetting American democracy. His analysis indicates that, in fact, it is the ascendance of a liberal public philosophy that has generated these anxieties in the first place, fueling the growing sense of lost mastery. The republican alternative is (Sandel argues) equipped to re-engender a sense of mastery on the part of the public, answering its pervasive discontent. It is on this claim that his case for embracing a version of civic republicanism ultimately rides.
In the two parts of his book, Sandel successively narrates liberalism’s eclipse of civic republican values in constitutional law and of republican concerns in debates over political economy. In both of these cases, the triumph of procedural or neutralist liberalism over its civic rival is achieved by harmfully bracketing off the most important substantive issues from the political realm. Political judgments about morality are suppressed in an attempt to liberate the individual. With the minimal proviso that each individual must extend to others a similar toleration, the liberal republic attempts to extend procedural protections and material resources and opportunities to each individual in an attempt to make each morally sovereign.
The public philosophy of liberalism has at its heart an understanding of human freedom as “the capacity of persons to choose their values and ends” (Sandel 1996, 5). The republican alternative, by contrast, Sandel tells us, is founded on a notion of “freedom as self-rule” (ibid., 6) in the collective sense—that is, it “depends on sharing in self-government” (ibid., 5). Such sharing, in turn, depends on successfully inculcating certain habits or traits of collective decision making. This inculcation Sandel terms variously “the formative project” or “the formative ambition.”
According to Sandel, the liberal and republican traditions
assess political institutions by asking different questions. The liberal begins by asking how government should treat its citizens, and seeks principles of justice that treat persons fairly as they pursue their various interests and ends. The republican begins by asking how citizens can be capable of self-government, and seeks the political forms and social conditions that promote its meaningful exercise.” (Ibid., 27)
Thus, Sandel contends, the liberal philosophy, which views “citizens first and foremost as objects of treatment” 4 rather than as “agents of self-rule,” effectively concedes “from the start a certain disempowerment, or loss of agency” (ibid.).
For example, discussing what he takes to be the influence of liberal procedural thinking on the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, Sandel notes a “shift from self-government to self-expression” (ibid., 80) as the basis for the right to freedom of speech. This shift, he argues, is a “particular case of a more general principle of respect for persons as independent selves, capable of choosing their values for themselves” (ibid.).
But the discontent that besets American public life today illustrates the inadequacy of this solution. A politics that brackets morality and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment. Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meaning finds undesirable expression. (Ibid., 322)
By attempting to respect—or empower—individuals as sovereign moral agents, liberal proceduralism leaves them isolated, alone and unfulfilled. And, so, while a “voluntarist conception of freedom that inspires this liberalism holds out a liberating vision, a promise of agency that could seemingly be realized even under conditions of concentrated power” (ibid, 278), the reality fails to deliver. Although Sandel does not provide any additional evidence for the claim, his argument seems to be that neutralist liberal practices are psychologically unstable. An apparently irrepressible “yearning for a public life of larger meaning” can only lead either to “narrow, intolerant moralisms” or to a tabloidized version of the public sphere (1996, 322) once the “procedural republic” of liberalism has closed off genuinely republican alternatives.
In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Sandel had developed a technical philosophical argument about agency that clearly undergirds the cultural, legal, and historical claims of Democracy’s Discontent. As in more recent work, Sandel’s first book faults liberalism for failing to deliver on its humanist promises. Or as Sandel puts it in the closing paragraph of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, liberalism fails by “putting the self beyond the reach of politics,” thus making “human agency an article of faith rather than an object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement” (1982, 183). Since Sandel’s argument in the later book omits an account of precisely why an individualist moral order is psychologically unsatisfying, or how a collective construction of agency might be more satisfying, we might expect to find the missing arguments in Limits. But while the earlier volume does contain a more precise elaboration of the kind of human agency Sandel proposes, there is little, if any, attempt to link it (psychologically, philosophically, or otherwise) with happiness.
Sandel does argue that his notion of agency—an agency that is a combination of both will (choice) and self-reflection upon the given, socially created constituents of the self—provides a better context for individual choice or judgment. This form of agency, he argues, allows the individual to make choices that “are not arbitrary in the same way” as the choices of a liberal, unencumbered self (1982, 180). An individual can assess the appropriateness of any particular desire, for instance, based on the intersubjective sense of the good that she recognizes as constitutive of herself. Perhaps the presence of such a framework for prioritizing desires—what Charles Taylor has called “inescapable (moral) horizons” (1991, ch. 4)—is what is needed to banish psychological discomfort. Still, arbitrariness would, in fact, remain 5 (or at least the perception of it would), 6 since Sandel is unwilling to propose that any single set of collective moral horizons be treated as authoritative, and because he allows some choice on the part of the self-reflecting individual concerning which aspects of one’s socially constructed self (one’s moral “inheritance”) one embraces as truly constitutive.
In any case, what Sandel does say in Limits effectively endorses a radicalization of humanism. Conscious human control is to be exerted not just over ends (understood as alienable from the self) and other “external” aspects of the environment, but also over the deepest constitutive or “internal” elements of the self—elements not even recognized under a liberal conception of agency, according to Sandel. The fact that this would be a collective form of humanism—a drive for knowledge and control that operates through collective rather than individual deliberation—does not lessen the fact that it is, in fact, a type of humanism.
In the social history presented in Democracy’s Discontent, we are told that the experience of the postwar economic boom 7 forestalled the American public’s perception of a loss of control for decades after the ideological tide had decisively turned toward a consumerist public philosophy. However, in 1968, “America’s moment of mastery expired” (1996, 294–95). Since then, the fortunes of specific American political figures—and, thus, the dynamic of the nation’s politics itself—have reflected the public’s anxiousness to regain a sense of mastery or control. The travails of the Carter administration, for instance—the Iranian hostage crisis and the failed rescue mission—“seemed to confirm yet again, that a nation accustomed to mastery had lost control of its destiny” (ibid., 308); thus, Carter left office discredited. Reagan’s popular appeal, meanwhile, was based on his (fraudulent, according to Sandel) ability to evoke a return to mastery: the Reagan campaign “above all was all about mastery, all about countering the sense of powerlessness that afflicted the Carter presidency” (ibid., 311).
Sandel’s verdict on Carter’s infamous “malaise speech”—a speech purportedly written in consultation with Lasch 8 —is telling. The address, while “a cogent statement of the discontent that had been building for over a decade,” is faulted by Sandel for failing to provide any real answers to the problem of lost mastery and for relying instead on mere exhortation to have “faith” (1996, 307–308). To the extent that the speech was inspired by Lasch, it is not surprising that Sandel would find in it no feasible road map toward mastery. For Lasch, unlike Sandel, is skeptical about the desirability of such a humanist project.
The route to mastery, Sandel says, is to exert human choice and control collectively and politically, not individually and privately. To do so we must embrace the formative project of civic republicanism, consciously seeking to create fit political actors, citizens who are comfortable participants in collective decisionmaking. The goal is political agents who are willing and able to coordinate their wills, and who are attached to a common understanding of the good. This sense of the common good should guide all their political actions (ibid., 5).
By creating citizens with a deep sense of—and love for—the common good, Sandel’s collectivist humanism would seem well positioned not only to reassert human control over the large social structures that mark modern American life, but also to restore in its individual members a powerfully reassuring sense of community and moral context. Even if the former achievement failed to deliver happiness as a side effect, perhaps the latter might. In other words, the roots of the present discontent may lie less in a perceived loss of control and more in a sense of moral anarchy or loss of shared values.
As in the account of agency spelled out in Limits, however, in Democracy’s Discontent Sandel seems unwilling to leave behind large chunks of liberalism—notably a foundational skepticism, a tolerance for pluralism, and an acceptance of some measure of individual choice of ends. In the civic republicanism that he endorses, the common good is not assumed to be unitary and incontestable—as it had been in older, coercive forms of republicanism (ibid., 319ff.). Sandel (rightly, in my view) is explicitly unwilling to purchase collective mastery or an unclouded sense of community at the cost of abandoning moral pluralism. But by flinching here, Sandel renders his position a non-answer to the concern about moral chaos—that is, the anxiety about the sense of lost community and a rent moral fabric.
Indeed, Sandel’s formative project can be seen as a sort of “procedural republicanism” in which citizens are habituated to political contestation, but in which only a minimalist or neutralist conception of the common good is authoritatively instilled. This avoids coerciveness. Presumably, though, these newly minted citizens would exercise their public skills in the service of the full range of commitments, or understandings of the good, that currently seem so incommensurable and disorienting. There would likely be as much moral fragmentation as exists under contemporary liberalism, only the stakes would be raised. All the most important sources of meaning and commitment for individuals would be loaded onto the political stage, and—if anything—a stronger sense of selflessness in the service of these values would make particular actors more willing to engage in extreme acts in the promotion of their causes. 9
Finally, it seems unlikely that individuals would identify with—and, thus, gain satisfaction from—political outcomes that diverged from the notions of the common good to which they are committed. To the extent that they did not—to the extent that they felt that the values constituting their identities had publicly lost out—they would probably feel less mastery and contentment, not more. Certainly, a formative project along the lines of Sandel’s would concentrate on instilling a powerful sense of commitment to procedural political norms. Citizens would be consciously formed so as to feel constrained by principles limiting them to the use of fair or mutually acceptable political tactics, and to accept specific political setbacks. Still, given human experience to date, it seems reasonable to at least question whether such procedural commitments—no matter how strongly reinforced—would stand up to the potentially contrary pull of truly substantive moral-political commitments. Sandel entertains none of these concerns and fails to consider the possibility that any or all of them may prevent a civic republican polity from making its citizens happier or less discontented.
Lasch: Populist, Not Civic Republican
In The True and Only Heaven, Lasch presents the reader with something that is “not so much an intellectual tradition as a sensibility” (1991, 17). The sensibility of populism is distinguished mostly in the negative, by what it opposes: the prevailing humanist currents in modernity that remain confident of the possibilities of indefinite progress and improvement in human life. While described as “the conscience of the lower middle class” (ibid.), Lasch identifies elements of this dissenting sensibility in the work of a remarkably diverse range of social and religious thinkers. Many of the figures Lasch draws upon are contributing members of traditions distinct from populism—syndicalism, liberalism, and even civic republicanism—who nonetheless articulate “populist” themes, perhaps most poignantly during moments of doubt. He acknowledges, for instance, that his account of nineteenth-century populism in part “builds on the work of J.G.A. Pocock, Gordon Wood and other historians of the republican tradition” (ibid., 15). 10
This is among the reasons that Lasch’s populism bears a rather complicated relationship to civic republicanism. At a deep level, he believes, the populist worldview diverges from republicanism, even while the two have overlapped in some instances and have often been allied against the dominant ideology of progress. The liberal tradition is built around a notion of the possibilities of material progress, abundance, and consumer choice. According to Lasch the republican tradition, too, is implicated in a desire for human control, but in another guise.
Nonetheless, Lasch typically has good things to say about thinkers in the republican tradition. The reasons for this are somewhat puzzling, but his discussion of Machiavelli’s republicanism (ibid., 49–52) may be instructive. Lasch endorses the acceptance by Machiavelli and his Renaissance peers of the ultimate power of fate—or fortuna—over human affairs. While a form of humanism, Renaissance republicanism was one version (unlike modern humanism, Lasch seems to believe) that still recognized limits.
The republican tradition in general also has reasons to commend itself to Lasch, particularly as an individual ethos. Considered from the individual citizen’s perspective—though not from the perspective of the polity—the republican ideal does involve an acceptance of limits to one’s sovereignty. Lasch (ibid., 50–51) notes that because the civic ideal has often defined itself in opposition to Christianity,
it is easy to miss their underlying affinity....There was a world of difference, to be sure, between a community of saints and a community of virtuous citizens, but the two concepts, virtue and grace, “found common ground,” in Pocock’s words, “in an ideal of austerity and self-denial.” The belief in progress carried with it a very different ideal of the good life.
However, civic republicanism promotes self-denial only in the name of a larger humanist aspiration, not for deeper spiritual or metaphysical reasons or even in the name of individual happiness. Lasch (1991, 173) notes, for example, that the republicans’ notion of virtue—in contrast to the populists’—is grounded in “self-assertion and self-realization, not self-abnegation.” This fact limits the compatibility of republicanism and Lasch’s populism.
Populism is a sensibility born out of doubt and a failure of confidence, so it is not surprising that it “offers no panacea for the ills that afflict the modern world” (Lasch 1991, 173). As Lasch argues in conclusion, it “asks the right questions, but it does not provide a ready-made set of answers” (ibid. 532). By looking at some of the questions that it asks, we can soon see the extent to which the republicanism Sandel offers is a panacea.
Aside from its deeper questioning of humanist values and their connection to happiness, Lasch’s vision also, implicitly at least, takes into account the material sacrifices implied by a rejection of consumerist humanism. Sandel does not. For Sandel the move to redirect political-economic discourse to include civic ends—the addition of the formative project as an important end of the economic order, along with wealth creation and distribution—is an apparently costless one. Nowhere in Democracy’s Discontent does he hint at—let alone try to assess—any material sacrifice. Perhaps more importantly, he devotes no attention to those character traits—often featured in traditional forms of republicanism—that support the frugality or austerity of the individual lives required by systems that demand significant time and attention for the cultivation of political life. Thus, for example, while Sandel (1996, 318–21) is explicit about his disavowal of Rousseau’s unitary conception of the common good, he simply fails to consider anything like Rousseau’s psychology of individual dedication and material self-restraint—aspects of the tradition of republicanism likely to be as alien and disconcerting to prevailing contemporary tastes as the rejection of moral pluralism.
Lasch turns to themes in Protestant thought, along with the anti-luxury themes of the republican tradition that go largely unnoted by Sandel, to develop a rather bracing ethic of austerity. This ethic is consistent with a rejection of individualist humanism—and in Lasch’s case, with a rejection of humanism altogether. While it may be unrealistically demanding, the idea of a “spiritual discipline against resentment” (Lasch 1991, ch. 9) articulates the kind of personal ethic likely to be required of citizens in a society that has largely abandoned both the overwhelming social structures of humanism and the material comforts and conveniences provided by them. Lasch is explicit and realistic about the costs of his rejection of individualist humanism—even if it may be unrealistic to expect contemporary citizens to accept such costs. Unlike Sandel, Lasch asks—in detail—what a rejection of consumerism would really require of individuals. “Populists” must, he argues, never forget
the habits of responsibility associated with property ownership; the self-forgetfulness that comes with immersion in some all-absorbing piece of work; the danger that material comforts will extinguish a more demanding ideal of the good life; the dependence of happiness on the recognition that humans are not made for happiness. (Ibid.,16)
For Lasch, these “truths” are more than just the prerequisites, at the level of individual character development, of a rejection of consumerism. They articulate multiple aspects of the sensibility he thinks crucial to happiness in any society. A collectivist quest for power or mastery—like an individualist one—would distract humanity from the quiet cultivation of a way of life based on these truths. By holding out the promise of human mastery, Sandel’s republicanism—just like individualist humanism—would encourage the optimism that Lasch describes as “a higher form of wishful thinking” (1991, 530), and which he sees as so destructive to human contentment because so easily devastated by the inevitable setbacks reality deals to human design.
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As one critic has said, Lasch’s basic message—communicated in antimodernist terms—echoes some postmodern voices in proposing that “the problem of our time is humanism—a nihilistic faith in human power that underwrites the subjection of otherness” (Isaac 1992, 84). But this critic contends that Lasch goes too far, that he confuses a recognition of human limitedness with a belief that those limits are good—that they “accord with some mysterious properties of the universe that we cannot understand and to which we should thus submit” (ibid., 94).
Considering Lasch’s discussions of Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr (1991, ch. 9), and earlier Protestant thinkers (ibid., ch. 6), this seems a valid criticism. Lasch, for instance, reports approvingly of King sermonizing about “the rightness of a world full of unmerited hardship” (ibid., 392) and of Thomas Carlyle’s Puritan-influenced recognition of “the sinfulness of man’s rebellion against... limits” (ibid., 240).
Related to this occasional tendency to confuse “is” with “ought”—and to seemingly impute a cosmic imprimatur to the fact of human limitedness—is what another critic has termed the “Protestant parochialism” (Lears 1995, 48) of Lasch’s response to those limits. This might best be seen in Lasch’s return, again and again, to a Calvinist-like fixation on the value of the work ethic as the route to self-abnegating happiness. It can rightly be asked whether any other practices or states of mind could not be understood as potential routes away from humanism (and, thus, to happiness)—even, perhaps, some consumption-based forms of self-forgetfulness, the likes of which Lasch seems completely unwilling to consider.
In defense of Lasch, however, there is a deep ambivalence in his stance toward human limits. The whole of his distinction between “hope”—a chastened, realistic aspiration for human happiness—and “optimism”—a hubristic demand for happiness on humanity’s terms—is premised on his concern to articulate the prerequisites for human happiness in the here and now, not necessarily to demand humanity’s acceptance of the truth of Protestant theology for its own sake. He retains a kernel of humanism in his own concern to explore the possibility that humanity might be able to know itself and its (imperfect) condition well enough to come to an acceptance and a kind of hopeful happiness. Thus, he manages to move beyond the confines of his own Protestantism and his Protestant sources to express a more broadly generalizable insight.
One need not go all the way with Lasch, then, to accept his point that the route from humanism to happiness is too complex to be merely assumed. In making this point, it seems to me, Lasch exposes a link between the widespread embrace of humanist values and the tendency in modern political thought to make human freedom intrinsically valuable rather than a means to happiness (Friedman 1994), or to fail to ask what freedom is good for. This widespread tendency, shared by liberals, communitarians, and civic republicans of Sandel’s ilk, may well stem from a prior unquestioned acceptance of humanism. The important thing is to pause to ask these questions, as Lasch does.
References
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Holmes, Stephen. 1993. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Isaac, Jeffrey. 1992. “Modernity and Progress: An Exchange.” Salmagundi 93 (Winter 1992): 82–97.
Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lears, Jackson. 1995. “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” The New Republic, October 2: 42–50.
Sandel, Michael J. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sandel, Michael J. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Soper, Kate. 1986. Humanism and Anti-Humanism. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court.
Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Endnotes
*: Tom Hoffman, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, e-mail thhoffma@indiana.edu, would like to thank Russell Hanson, Jeffrey Isaac, and the editor of Critical Review for their helpful comments. Back.
Note 1: Of course one might prefer to speak in terms of a drive for human agency or freedom, empowerment, mastery, or—as Lasch put it—a faith in open-ended human progress. “Humanism” seems capable of encompassing all of these. In her survey of the concept, Kate Soper (1986) acknowledges the great variety of meanings denoted by “humanism,” and especially the difference in traditions of usage of the concept in Anglo-American versus Continental social thought. However, she concludes that what “lies at the heart of every humanism” is a “profound confidence in our powers to come to know and thereby to control our environment and destiny” (ibid., 16). A philosophy or worldview that asserts this kind of confidence, along with an attendant valorization of human freedom, is what I mean by the term. Back.
Note 2: Although Lasch has sometimes been deemed a “conservative,” Ronald Beiner’s label of “left-wing conservatism” (Beiner 1997) is probably most apt. Back.
Note 3: Friedman 1994 discusses not only the pervasiveness of this assumption (about the value of individualist freedom) within liberalism, but also—while highlighting the similarities between liberals and their communitarian critics generally—points out that Sandel, too, holds onto this assumption. Indeed, I will argue, this overlap with the assumptions of liberalism surfaces most clearly in Sandel’s concern to argue for a noncoercive (read “liberal”) form of republicanism—a republicanism that respects pluralism. Sandel’s more general argument for the superiority of republicanism to liberalism, however, relies not on the assumed value of individual-level freedom, but on the analogous assumption about the value of collectivist freedom. Back.
Note 4: But this last statement seems an unfair characterization. Civic republicanism could be cast in similar terms as a philosophy that views citizens as first and foremost objects of creation—through the formative project—rather than as agents of self-rule. There is no need for Sandel to deny—as he seems to do here—that the liberal philosophy is about freedom. All he need say is that liberalism, by seeking a flawed (individualist) form of self-rule, soon sinks into treating its citizens as objects. Back.
Note 5: See Friedman 1994, 306–308 for a fuller discussion of how choices made from a Sandelian conception of agency would still, at bottom, remain arbitrary. Back.
Note 6: In truth it is the perception of arbitrariness that is important here. While some illiberal or traditional social orders may be able to impose a single moral code, liberal toleration results in societies marked by moral pluralism, often perceptually a challenge to those who want to believe that one moral order is uniquely metaphysically sanctioned. As Sandel agnostically puts it, when it comes to the question of arbitrariness (e.g., of values, or of the nature of selves), ultimately “only theology can say for sure” (1982,180). Back.
Note 7: The notion that economic growth can mask the sense of powerlessness felt by the American public is curious. Since it is the sheer scale of the social institutions confronting the modern individual (such as the market) that supposedly fuels the discontent, it is hard to understand why a period of rapid market expansion would mask rather than aggravate that perception. On the other hand, if economic growth is successful in creating economic contentment, one might wonder about the wisdom of making a concern for citizen formation one of the primary goals of the economic system, given that doing so might hamper economic growth. Back.
Note 8: See Lears 1995, 43 for one account of Lasch’s involvement in this 1979 speech. Back.
Note 9: As Stephen Holmes (1993, 180) has warned: “It is much easier to be cruel in the course of acting for the sake of others or for a ‘cause,’ than while acting for one’s own sake.” Passionate cruelty can easily follow from a sense that one is acting for the common good, not just for the sake of one’s own faction. Back.
Note 10: 10. Lasch (1991, 15) is quick to follow up his acknowledgment of his debt to republicanism with this qualification:
It is my contention, however, that the concept of virtue, which played such an important part in the nineteenth-century critique of “improvement,” did not derive from republican sources alone. Recent scholarship... has overlooked the more vigorous concept of virtue that was articulated in certain varieties of radical Protestantism.Back.