If Lasch were around today, he would undoubtedly see Occupy Wall Street as a source of both optimism and despair—as many of us have. One of his interests would be the movement’s vacillation between two conflicting visions of work. Its populist ninety-nine-versus-one-percent rhetoric, as well as its emphasis on debt and widespread unemployment, seem to point to a society in which good and meaningful work might be available for all. Yet in the carnivalesque atmosphere of the protests, with their drum circles and festive feel, there was also a sense that all work was oppressive, that a revolution would entail liberation from work entirely. Forty years ago, Lasch had already criticized the tendency for certain radicals to “define personal liberation … as freedom from work, discipline and from authority in general”:

The trouble with this definition of the “cultural revolution” is that it tends to divert attention from work to leisure, thereby reinforcing one of the strongest and most dangerous tendencies of advanced capitalist society—the attempt to compensate for the meaninglessness of work by holding out the possibility of spiritual fulfillment through consumption. Contrary to a widespread cliché of popular sociology, “the challenge of leisure” is not the most important issue in advanced society. The most important issue remains work—the loss of autonomy on the job, the collapse of high standards of workmanship, the pervasive demoralization that results from the mass production of goods that are widely recognized as intrinsically worthless by those who produce them, and the general crisis of a culture historically oriented around the dignity of labor.

Counterculturalists, Lasch believed, tended to picture “utopia as generalized leisure, thereby reaffirming, instead of contradicting, the vision of industrial society itself.” Yet, Lasch contended, “centuries of experience … have taught us that work is one of the deepest of man’s needs.” The task confronting the left was therefore not to overthrow the work ethic—which was already under attack from within capitalist society—but to invest it with new meaning.

Lasch was hesitantly hopeful. He noticed former New Left activists joining the workforce, and “rediscovering the importance of institutional ties.” Instead of denouncing all professional organizations as “purely imprisoning,” these new workers were growing more interested in the kinds of solidarity they might discover in the workplace, as sites of potential “ferment,” “fellowship” and “support for the creative use of one’s talents.” To Lasch, a “revolt against narrow professionalism and professional irresponsibility” was key to the unleashing of radicalism in America. But it had to be a “revolt not against the professions but within the professions.” One had to, in the language of our own times, occupy institutions of work in order to infuse them with new values. “What seems to be needed,” he mused,

is a fusion of community politics and trade union politics—two dissident traditions that have increasingly grown apart. The product of this fusion would not be simply a new unionism or a new kind of community organizing but a new form of politics altogether, centered on the factory—and on the research and development laboratory, the intellectual assembly line, the professions, the media—but always heedful of work in its larger social implications.

Today, as many students sink into crushing debt as the price for credentials that increasingly do not even guarantee professional employment, Lasch’s observations about the relationship between student life and work seem all the more applicable. His insights—about the connections between an alienating education and future work, and about the import of workspaces for building solidarity—offer new directions for the ninety-nine percent. Lasch’s reflections on student-worker dynamics indicate that the contemporary effort to delineate between the large, quite diverse group of have-nots and the increasingly small group of elites, must focus not only on the ability to own a home or participate in the consumer market, but also on the draining of meaning from work at all levels.

Yet there remains even in Lasch’s late books, and especially in his final book, True and Only Heaven, hints and portents of what a truly engaged and “radical” social criticism might look like. A test for this criticism would be its ability to provide a vision of the good life that rejected a progressive fantasy of abundance without sliding into nostalgia for yesteryear. Already in the early Seventies, Lasch had begun to explore how Americans could be made to wake from the dream of perpetual progress:

It is only therefore when we find ourselves imprisoned in our private cars, marvelously mobile but unable to go anywhere because the highways are choked with traffic; when we find ourselves surrounded by modern conveniences but unable to breathe the air; provided with unprecedented leisure to fish in polluted rivers and swim at polluted beaches; provided with the means to prolong life beyond the point where it offers any pleasure; equipped with the power to create human life, which will simultaneously destroy the meaning of life—it is only, in short, when we are confronted with the contradictions of individualism and private enterprise in their most immediate, unmistakable, and by now familiar form that we are forced to reconsider our exaltation of the individual over the life of the community, and to submit technological innovations to a question we have so far been careful not to ask: Is this what we want?

By connecting the big questions of liberal progress and perfectibility to an even larger, more pressing question—“Is this what we want?”—Lasch challenged his readers to search for a way out of the impasse where the only two options seemed to be a crackpot realism that insisted on technological degradation as a necessary corollary of progress, and a glazed-over utopian drive for perfection. As was so often the case, Lasch looked to the past—and to the populist past—for help articulating such a path. In place of the idea of history as linear progress, he argued for “concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or providence.” Instead of “luxury for all,” he endorsed “competence, as [American populists] would have called it—a piece of earth, a small shop, a useful calling.” Competence, Lasch believed, “was a more reasonable as well as a more worthy ambition” than consumerism or perfectionism, embodying “a humbler set of expectations” in addition to “a more strenuous and morally demanding definition of the good life.”