CHRISTOPHER LASCH AND PRAIRIE POPULISM

By the end of his life, cut short at age sixty-one, he had become one of the most famous intellectuals in the world.1 During his life of active writing from the time of the early Cold War until the fall of the Soviet Union, Lasch's distinctive voice pierced through the din of the nation's noisy political and cultural debates. "4 Lasch's pursuit of the truth, his fear of the "tremendous void" left by the decline of "historical awareness," his aversion to the suffocating fog of ideology, and his commitment to making democracy workable ultimately led him back to the prairie's most famous political movement, Populism.5 Lasch's explicit turn to the Populist movement and to broader forms of populism late in life helps explain his early works and elucidates his doubts about elite opinion and his resistance to the derisive treatment of the common man and traditional culture.