SOURCE: "Liberalism Takes a Licking," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 27, 1991, pp. 2, 11.

In the highly positive review of The True and Only Heaven below, Hodgson discusses the book's critique of the ideology of progress and some strategies used by Lasch.

From the New Deal until the 1970s, liberalism in all its variants was the public philosophy of the United States. And what brought together a whole coalition of interests, classes and temperaments under the banners of liberalism was a shared belief in the idea, indeed the ideology of progress.

Since the 1970s, with bewildering speed, liberalism has been rudely unseated from that position of hegemony. This is not just a swing of the political pendulum, or of shifting fashions in graduate schools, publishing houses and the editorial pages of newspapers. Liberalism, once arrogantly confident of its solutions for all manner of problems, has turned defensive, and all...