Eric MillerHope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans. 2010. Pp. xx, 394. $32.00

From the mid‐1960s until his death in 1994, Christopher Lasch was a major force in American historical writing and on the public scene. His The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965) was a brilliant rereading of the Progressive impulse, tracing a line of frustration with estrangement from “real life” from Jane Addams through the New Republic's fervent support of World War I to the realists just then plunging the nation into war in Vietnam. His Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977) was an angry historical account of the bourgeois family as beset by the forces of capitalism, post‐Freudian feminists, and, above all, the expert legions of the therapeutic state. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978), his bestselling and deeply pessimistic reading of the...