Had nature taken a more typical course, Christopher Lasch would still be with us. Only sixty-one years old when on Valentine’s Day, 1994, he succumbed to cancer, Lasch died while still in his intellectual prime. He had just finished, with the aid of his daughter Elisabeth, the manuscript of The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, a book in which he attempted to bring into focus the problems posed for authentic democracy—the health of which, as we shall see, was always Lasch’s overriding concern—by the detachment of the new privileged classes, both physically and ideologically, from common men and women. . . .