Lasch C. The True and Only Heaven. Progress and Its Critics

New York, London: W- W- Norton & Company, 1991 — 592 p. — ISBN: 0-393-30795-6.Can we continue to believe in progress? In this sobering analysis of the Western human condition, Christopher Lasch seeks the answer in a history of the struggle between two ideas: one is the idea of progress - an idea driven by the conviction that human desire is insatiable and requires ever larger production forces. Opposing this materialist view is the idea that condemns a boundless appetite for more and better goods and distrusts "improvements" that only feed desire. Tracing the opposition to the idea of progress from Rousseau through Montesquieu to Carlyle, Max Weber and G.D.H. Cole, Lasch finds much that is desirable in a turn toward moral conservatism, toward a lower-middle-class culture that features egalitarianism, workmanship and loyalty, and recognizes the danger of resentment of the material goods of others.Introduction: the obsolescence of left and right.
The Current Mood.
Limits: The Forbidden Topic.
The Making of a Malcontent.
The Land of Opportunity: A Parent's View.
The Party of the Future.
and Its Quarrel with "Middle America".
The Promised Land of the New Right.
The idea of progress reconsidered.
A Secular Religion?
Belief in Progress as the Antidote to Despair.
Against the "Secularization Thesis".
What the Idea of Progress Really Means.
Providence and Fortune, Grace and Virtue.
Adam Smith's Rehabilitation of Desire.
Smith's Misgivings about "General Security and Happiness".
Desire Domesticated.
Henry George on Progress and Poverty.
Inconspicuous Consumption, the "Superlative Machine".
The Keynesian Critique of Thrift.
Optimism or Hope?
Nostalgia: the abdication of memory.
Memory or Nostalgia?
The Pastoral Sensibility Historicized and Popularized.
Images of Childhood: From Gratitude to Pathos.
The American West, Childhood of the Nation.
From Solitary Hunter to He-man.
The Village Idyll: The View from "Pittsburgh".
Nostalgia Named as Such: The Twenties.
History as a Progression of Cultural Styles.
Nostalgia Politicized.
The Frozen Past.
The sociological tradition and the idea of community.
Cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment's Critique of Particularism.
The Reaction against Enlightenment: Burke's Defense of Prejudice.
Action, Behavior, and the Discovery of "Society ".
Culture against Civilization.
Gemeinschaftsschmerz.
The Moral Ambivalence of the Sociological Tradition.
Marxism, the Party of the Future.
The Structure of Historical Necessity.
"Modernization" as an Answer to Marxism.
The Last Refuge of Modernization Theory.
The populist campaign against "improvement".
The Current Prospect: Progress or Catastrophe?
The Discovery of Civic Humanism.
The Civic Tradition in Recent Historical Writing.
Tom Paine: Liberal or Republican?
William Cobbett and the "Paper System ".
Orestes Brownson and the Divorce between Politics and Religion.
Brownson's Attack on Philanthropy.
Lockean Liberalism: A "Bourgeois".
Early Opposition to Wage Labor.
Acceptance of Wage Labor and Its Implications.
The New Labor History and the Rediscovery of the Artisan.
Artisans against Innovation.
Agrarian Populism: The Producers Last Stand.
The Essence of Nineteenth-Century Populism.
"No answer but an echo": the world without wonder.
Carlyle's Clothes Philosophy.
Calvinism as Social Criticism.
Puritan Virtue.
"The Healthy Know Not of Their Health".
Carlyle and the Prophetic Tradition.
Political and Literary Misreadings of Carlyle.
The Strenuous Life of Sainthood.
Superstition or Desiccation?
The syndicalist moment: class struggle and workers' control as the moral equivalent of proprietorship and war.
The Cult of "Mere Excitement".
James on Moral Equivalence.
Sorel's Attack on Progress.
The Case for "Pessimism".
War as Discipline against Resentment.
The Sectarian Dilemma.
Wage Slavery and the "Servile State":
G. D. H. Cole and Guild Socialism.
The Attempt to Reconcile.
Syndicalism with Collectivism.
From Workers' Control to "Community":
The Absorption of Guild Socialism by Social Democracy.
Work and loyalty in the social thought of the "progressive" era.
Progressive and Social Democratic.
Criticism of American Syndicalism.
Revolutionary Socialism versus Syndicalism:
The Case of William English Walling.
The IWW and the Intellectuals: Love at first sight.
Herbert Crory on "Industrial Self-Government".
Walter Weyl's Orthodox Progressivism: The Democracy of Consumers.
Rival Perspectives on the Democratization of Culture.
Van Wyck Brooks and the Search for a "Genial Middle Ground".
The Controversy about Immigration: Assimilation or Cultural Pluralism?
Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty.
The Postwar Reaction against Progressivism.
Lippmann's Farewell to Virtue.
Dewey's Reply to Lippmann: Too Little Too Late.
The spiritual discipline against resentment.
Reinhold Niebuhr on Christian Mythology.
The Virtue of Particularism.
The "Endless Cycle of Social Conflict" and How to Break It.
Niebubr's Challenge to Liberalism Denatured and Deflected.
Liberal Realism after Niebuhr: The Critique of Tribalism.
Martin Luther King's Encounter with Niebuhr.
Hope without Optimism.
Indigenous Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement in the North.
From Civil Rights to Social Democracy.
The Politics of Resentment and Reparation.
The politics of the civilized minority.
Liberal Perceptions of the Public after World War I.
America the Unbeautiful.
Social Criticism, Disembodied and Connected.
Sociology as Social Criticism: The Apotheosis of the Expert.
Experts and Orators: Thurman Arnold's "Anthropological" Satire.
The "Machiavelli" of the Managerial Revolution.
From Satire to Social Pathology: Gunnar Myrdal on the "American Dilemma".
The Discovery of the Authoritarian Personality.
Politics as Therapy.
The Liberal Critique of Populism.
Populism as Working-Class Authoritarianism.
Educated Insularity.
Camelot after Kennedy: Oswald as Everyman.
Right-wing populism and the revolt against liberalism.
The "White Backlash".
A Growing Middle Class?
Working-Class and Lower-Middle-Class Convergence.
The Lower-Middle-Class Ethic of Limits and the Abortion Debate.
The Cultural Class War.
The Politics of Race: Antibusing Agitation in Boston.
"Populism " and the New Right.
The Theory of the New Class and Its Historical Antecedents.
Neoconservatives on the New Class.
New-Class "Permissiveness" or Capitalist Consumerism?
The New Class as Seen from the Left.
A Universal Class?
Populism against Progress.