Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) est un historien et un critique social américain connu pour ses ouvrages portant sur la politique et la culture américaines au XXème siècle. Cette thèse cherche à éclairer sa présentation de l’idée de progrès et de ses conséquences pour la polis américaine. Nous interprétons la pensée de Lasch comme un « libéralisme tragique », en voulant signifier par-là que l’historien américain voit une tension non résolue entre le libéralisme politique et l’idée de progrès. Pour présenter ce constat, nous abordons tout d’abord la genèse de cette formulation critique de l’idée de progrès en présentant une succincte biographie intellectuelle de Lasch. Nous examinons, ensuite, l’histoire que Lasch fait de l’idée de progrès dans son maître ouvrage de 1991 intitulé, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Nous analysons enfin les conséquences sur la vie politique et sociale des démocraties libérales contemporaines que Lasch analyse à la suite de ce qu’il juge être l’expansion et le triomphe sans partage de l’idée de progrès dans nos sociétés. Ce dernier point nous permettra d’illustrer en quoi la conception laschienne du libéralisme est, à notre avis, tragique.

Thesis advisor: Peter Skerry / The most important political fault line in American politics today is marked by the postwar liberal consensus itself. What is often overlooked, however, is that both liberals and anti-liberals assume a modern, progressive view of history in which the world is growing up to become more secular, technologically advanced, and egalitarian. Liberals celebrate this trajectory as they see themselves “on the right side of history.” They consider their opponents backward holdouts or, more generously, those not yet enjoying the goods of modern life. Anti- liberals on the right see the world according to liberalism proceeding apace to undo traditional morality, globalize economies, automate jobs, replace the nation-state, and undermine cultural norms. A nostalgic politics of reaction aspires to reverse the course of history and return to an unmolested golden age. In the words of one recent variation on this theme, only such a reversal can “Make America Great Again.” This dissertation offers intellectual portraits of three American social critics: Christopher Lasch, Paul Goodman, and Jane Jacobs. Each was a critic of progressive habits of mind in different ways, but all three offer an alternative to the progressive optimism and nostalgia for the past at work in today’s debates. If, then, these thinkers were reactionaries in resisting progressive programs of their times, they were enlightened reactionaries insofar as they rationally resisted the deeper assumption of inevitable progress that animates both left and right. While I address a specific concern in the work of each writer, I draw out three points common to their thought. First, each thinker dissolves the dichotomy between past and future that is central to progressive history. The progressive view of history shared by liberal and anti-liberal alike points toward, alternatively, an inevitably improved future or a past that is slipping away. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs, however, point to the continuity of past and future and resist subsuming the present in a deterministic account of history. Second, the thought of each embodies a defense of tradition – historically conditioned ways of knowing, as opposed to supposedly trans-historical universal reason. That defense is expressed not only in each thinker’s view of the past as a resource for the present, but in his or her resistance to the very idea of an Archimedean point that is assumed by claims to have seen the end of history. Indeed, each thinker’s arguments are presented explicitly as part of a tradition, and the work of each points to the importance of tradition as an indispensable lens on the world. Each author shows how the assumption of progress, despite progressives’ claims to have escaped tradition, does not reflect an inescapable law of history but is itself part of a modern tradition that we are free to modify. This in turn points to the political possibilities of recovering tradition as the basis of common discourse. To the extent we are conscious of the decisive role of tradition, we will be aware of the degree to which we are responsible agents: responsible for the contingent way we see the world, and for the contingent choices made by the light of our traditions. Finally, I argue that Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs’s use of tradition stands in contrast not only to transcendent, objective reason but also to an understanding of traditions as closed language games, coherent in themselves but rationally inaccessible to one another. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs present a view in which traditions are dynamic, self-correcting, ongoing arguments within and between themselves. Their use of tradition-bound arguments to develop counter-traditions against dominant progressive perspectives exemplifies the way in which traditions might confront and correct one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

En retraçant le parcours intellectuel de l’historien, moraliste et critique américain Christopher Lasch, ce mémoire vise à mettre en exergue la pertinence et les subtilités de sa pensée politique. Sur la base d’une analyse de ses principaux textes, nous démontrerons, qu’au-delà du pessimisme et du catastrophisme qui lui sont généralement attribués, Lasch porte un regard fécond sur la singularité de l’époque contemporaine. Nous soutiendrons que ses critiques acerbes sur la société et l’individu sont faites, avant tout, dans le but de remédier aux carences morales et sociétales qui auraient engendré un certain idéal libéral progressiste. Selon Lasch, le déploiement continu et illimité de cet idéal est en dissonance avec le caractère essentiellement contingent et conflictuel de la condition humaine. Parallèlement, nous présenterons les incidences psychiques qui se traduisent par une « culture du narcissisme » suscitée notamment par diverses composantes de la société contemporaine. À travers une relecture de la condition humaine, Lasch préconise un correctif idéologique qui est axé sur les notions de limites et d’espoir et qui se trouve au sein de la tradition agraire populiste américaine du 19e siècle. Nous démontrerons ainsi comment ce retour en arrière est entamé dans le but de susciter un renouveau politique et identitaire au sein de la société. L’étude se conclura par une discussion sur la plausibilité de l’idéal populiste, tel que l’entend Lasch, à l’ère du 21e siècle. / By retracing the intellectual journey of the historian, moralist, and American critic Christopher Lasch, this paper aims to highlight the relevance of his critical thought. Based on an analysis of his main texts, it is demonstrated that, rather than the pessimism and catastrophism that is often identified with him, Lasch has a fruitful perspective on the uniqueness of the modern era. His trenchant criticisms of contemporary society and of the individual in it address, first and foremost, the moral and social deficiencies that he believes has been caused by the progressive ideal of liberalism. According to Lasch, the assertion of this ideal is incompatible with the essentially contingent and conflicting nature of the human condition. In parallel, the psychological effects which result from what Lasch calls the “culture of narcissism” will be examined as will Lasch’es alternative, which is based on the notions of limits and hope found in the American agrarian populist tradition of the 19th century. Lasch believes that we must engage in this turn to the past in order to bring out a political renewal of society. The study concludes with a discussion of the plausibility of the populist ideal in the 21st century.

A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.

This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.