Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

" In addition he finalized his intentions for the essays to be included in Women and the Common Life: Love Marriage and Feminism which was publiChristopher Laschd with his daughter's introduction in 1997. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment. Most of his books even the more strictly historical ones include such sharp criticism of the priorities of alleged "radicals" who represented merely extreme formations of a rapacious capitalist ethos.

' His books including The New Radicalism in America (1965) Haven in a Heartless World (1977) The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The True and Only Heaven (1991) were widely discussed and reviewed. In the 1960s he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions public and private were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities.