Liberalism Takes a Licking : THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN, <i> By Christopher Lasch (W. W. Norton: $25; 576 pp.)</i>

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 its enemies have been on the attack.

The most familiar assaults, of course, come from the various tribes of conservatives. Christopher Lasch, the historian and long an adherent of the American Left, does not march under any of their banners. Instead, in this difficult but learned and subtle--perhaps too subtle--book, he digs down to the philosophical foundations of liberalism, and exhumes a whole cluster of rival traditions that always have challenged the liberal assumptions.

At the heart of the liberal tradition, says Lasch, is the idea, the ideology of progress. In its origins in the 18th-Century Enlightenment, this was the noble doctrine of the perfectibility of man and his institutions. At the height of Victorian confidence, liberals saw no contradiction between moral and material progress, and sought to bring the whole world the blessings both of Protestant Christianity and of capitalism. But in the late 20th Century, the liberal idea coarsened until liberals often confused the ideal of progress with the pursuit of economic growth.

In form, therefore, Lasch’s book is an essay on the history of ideas, an analytic catalogue of the chief successive enemies of the idea of progress. In the beginning, the idea of infinite progress and perfectibility ran counter to the grand tradition of republicanism, or “civic humanism,” as Lasch names it, that traces back through Rousseau, Montesquieu and James Harrington to Machiavelli, whose concepts of “virtue” and “fortune” embodied an awareness of limits that was the antithesis of the liberal confidence in progress.

Then Lasch looks at a whole series of ideas and traditions in European and American thought that militated against the all-conquering power of progress. There was nostalgia for a Golden Age in the past, whether it was the Arcadian idyll that haunted the Renaissance imagination, the idealized Middle Ages of the pre-Raphaelites or the gentrified Frontier of James Fenimore Cooper.

There was the ideal of “community”-- Gemeindschaft as opposed to Gesellschaft , mere “society” without the communal bonds of obligation and duty--held out by Toennies, Max Weber and the other founders of sociology. And there was the long, stern line of 19th-Century prophets who denounced the false gods of progress, from Thomas Carlyle thundering forth his denunciations of Mammon worship amid the coal-smoke fogs of Victorian London to Emerson and William James in a Boston that felt its puritan heritage just as much threatened by the accelerating machines of the Gilded Age as were its banks by the triumph of New York.

And so Lasch leads the reader on, sure-footedly negotiating the intellectual bogs and potholes of the late 19th- and early 20th-Century Left, never losing sight of the bearing he has drawn on the distinction between those writers who accept, and those who reject, the idea of progress as their guiding star.

It is done with remarkable skill. Lasch’s reading is vast, his insight into what a writer is trying to say penetrating. Still, there comes a point where many readers may stop and ask themselves: Why is he telling me all this? Adam Smith and Orestes Brownson, Henry George and Jonathan Edwards, Georges Sorel and G. D. H. Cole: The menu is so long and many of the dishes so unfamiliar that the reader may find the meal indigestible.

I myself had almost reached the point Winston Churchill had arrived at during the famous dinner party where he is said to have burst out, “Waiter! Take this pudding away; it has no theme !” when I began to catch on to what Lasch was about. Two clues hinted to me what Lasch’s real purpose is. The first lies in a brief intellectual autobiography he provides early in the book.

Lasch explains that he grew up in the tradition of Middle West progressivism. In the 1970s, he reacted to the excesses and absurdities of the 1960s “New Left” by embracing Marxism, not in its straitjacket form, but as taught by such Western Marxists as Gramsci, Marcuse, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. But in the mid-1970s, influenced by his experience and concerns as a parent, he began to see that most liberals did not really believe that ordinary Americans shared their values.

Thus the use of legalistic strategies to advance the rights of “minorities” (in quotation marks because one group treated by analogy as a minority was “women”) both demonstrated how little liberals really trusted the majority of their fellow citizens, and divided liberals from the working-class majority they had been accustomed to lead.

The second clue is closely related. As a former Marxist, Lasch instinctively associates a theory with a particular class. And just as the natural bearers of the ideology of liberalism are the “New Class” of those who live by the word and the idea, so resistance to the idea of progress, Lasch argues, always has been associated with another class, none other than the “petty bourgeoisie,” the lower middle class which gave us Margaret Thatcher’s father, Ronald Reagan’s mother and so many other of the enemies of liberalism.

Lasch is far from praising the lower middle class without reservation. Its characteristic vices, he says with some justice, are envy, resentment and servility. Yet notwithstanding those vices, he goes on, “the moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral temptation of resentment are the materials on which critics of progress”--he means, of the idea of progress--”have always had to rely.

It is a remarkable insight, and his book would be stronger and more satisfying if he had worked it out and followed it out with less literary analysis and more political savvy. For I think I see what he is after:

Liberalism, he is saying--and it is not an original perception--has lost contact with the working class in America because the working class put other values, not least the survival and happiness of family, neighborhood and children, before progress. “Small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen--more often the victims of ‘improvement’ than beneficiaries--are unlikely to mistake the promised land of progress for the true and only heaven.”

Lasch’s strategy is original. He is suggesting that an intelligentsia that wishes well to its fellow citizens ought to abandon the unattainable ideal of unlimited progress and join hands with Middle America in the search for a happier society less obsessed with progress.

What he has not succeeded in doing in this volume, impressive in many ways as it is, is in even sketching out a convincing theoretical basis on which the heirs of the “working stiff” of labor tradition and the corporatized intellectuals of the New Class might join to build a new solidarity.