SOURCE: "The Life and Work of Christopher Lasch: An American Story," in Salmagundi, Nos. 106-107, Spring-Summer, 1995, pp. 146-61.

Below, Elshtain, a personal friend of Lasch, relates Lasch's thought to his character, reminiscing about and illuminating Lasch's observations of contemporary American life.

Christopher Lasch was my friend. That means I called him "Kit." When he died on Valentine's Day, 1994, the loss was a personal one enveloped by a patina of public concern. Who, I fretted sadly, will take his place? I found it hard to imagine a world without Kit's voice, a very particular voice, quintessentially American, rooted in the soil of this strange and wonderful country with its vast and lurching empathies and antipathies. Lasch believed in the responsibility—shorn of condescension and vanguardist elitism—of the intellectual to and for his or her particular time and place. Sadly contemplating a world without Kit, I recalled the words...