Christopher Lasch

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family their defense of families carries no conviction.

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.