Christopher Lasch was one of the most important and controversial social critics of the latter half of the twentieth century. A noted reviewer and polemicist, his writing appeared regularly in venues such as The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books for over three decades. Interviews with Lasch appeared in Time and Newsweek after he won the National Book Award in 1980. Though trained as an historian, Lasch always had his eye directed towards the political and cultural forces at work in the present. He was fearless in his pursuit of an idea to its logical conclusion, regardless of its historical affiliations with the Right or the Left. Lasch’s passionate integrity made him an unpredictable and nearly uncategorizable thinker, who at various times was called a liberal, a Marxist, a reactionary, a contrarian, a New Leftist, a conservative, a populist, and an agrarian, just to name a few of the labels that he variously embraced and resisted throughout his remarkable career.