By Francis X. Maier

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Now for Mr. Maier's column...

Exactly 30 years ago this fall, Christopher Lasch delivered the manuscript for his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, to W.W. Norton his publisher. He'd written it with the help of his daughter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, herself a distinguished scholar, while dealing with terminal cancer. He refused chemotherapy to keep his mind clear in completing his final text. And he died just a few months later, in February 1994.

So why would a dead historian and social critic with no religious faith warrant remembering by Christians, especially in a week marked by Thanksgiving? Two reasons. First, he had an outsized influence on the thinking of a whole generation of scholars, many of them Catholic. And second, the substance of his work was, and remains, genuinely prophetic. In some ways, it's more relevant today than when he wrote it.

Lasch was always a man of the Left. He grounded his early career in Marx and Freud. But he was never a predictable zealot. He was admired by some of the leading cultural conservatives of his day and despised by some of his own intellectual tribe. He came from a militantly atheist background and was never personally religious. But over time he became more and more sympathetic toward religious belief and believers.

He was repelled by the destructive effects of late-stage capitalism and the wealth inequality it bred. He was against easy divorce, a critic of the sexual revolution, distrustful of social-science elitism, and a strong supporter of intact, traditional marriages and families. He preferred the small scale and the communitarian to globalist thinking; a life ruled by obligations as well as rights; and hope instead of optimism.

Lasch had a keen sense of social justice and the need for mature, engaged adults capable of unselfish action in sustaining the democratic process. As a result, he had little use for progressive ideology because of its refusal to accept the tragic elements of life. He wrote that:

The idea of progress alone. . .weakens the spirit of sacrifice, nor does it give us an effective antidote to despair. . . .Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things will not be flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on a confidence not so much in the future as in the past. . .

Why would the past matter? It mattered for Lasch because real history honestly remembered is a master class in reality. And its main lessons are two: First, humans are inescapably fallible and weak. But, second, humans also have the capacity for nobility, generosity, genius, and the creation of new life.

"The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for," Lasch wrote, because:

their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while [their] knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrat...