Career
He studied at Harvard and Columbia, where he worked with William Leuchtenburg. Richard Hofstadter was also a significant influence. He contributed a Foreword to later editions of Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition" and an article on Hofstadter in the New York Review of Books in 1973.
Lasch taught at the University of Iowa and then was a professor of history at the University of Rochester from 1970 until his death from cancer in 1994.
He also took a conspicuous public role. Russell Jacoby acknowledged this in writing that "I do not think any other historian of his generation moved as forcefully into the public arena". In 1986 he appeared on BBC television in discussion with Michael Ignatieff and Cornelius Castoriadis.
During the 1960s, Lasch identified himself as a socialist, but one who found influence not just in the writers of the time such as C. Wright Mills but also in earlier independent voices such as Dwight Macdonald. Lasch became further influenced by writers of the Frankfurt School and the early New Left Review and felt that "Marxism seemed indispensable to me". During the 1970s, however, he became disenchanted with the Left's belief in progress—a theme treated later by his student David Noble—and increasingly identified this belief as the factor which explained the Left's failure to thrive despite the widespread discontent and conflict of the times.
At this point Lasch began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique - a syncretic synthesis of Freud and the strand of paleoconservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism and its effects on traditional institutions.
Besides Leuchtenburg, Hofstadter, and Freud, Lasch was especially influenced by Orestes Brownson, Henry George, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Philip Rieff. A notable group of graduate students worked at the University of Rochester with Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and, for a time, Herbert Gutman, including Leon Fink, Russell Jacoby, Bruce Levine, David Noble, Maurice Isserman, William Leach, as well as David Chappell.
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