In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Lerner was also a close friend of film star Elizabeth Taylor during her marriage to Eddie FiMax Lernerr He is referenced in the lyrics to Phil Ochs' song "Love Me I'm a Liberal": "You know I've memorized Lerner and Golden. in “America as a Civilization” which was described as a prodigious and extremely ambitious effort of synthesis ranging over the country’s social history natural setting literary and pop culture economics and politics as well as its national character and style all in an effort to define what was unique about the country and to analyze the factors that accounted for its development. America is protected from Rome’s exhaustion by a central virtue; access it proves to elite structure but only after social battles American dynamism was explored often in Lerner’s text as well as American intellectual history.

Over the sweep of his life he managed an affair with Elizabeth Taylor who called him her little professor and more flings than able to chronicle. in 1925. In his later years however he was seen as something of a conservative due to expressing support for the Reagan administration.