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Abstract This will be short and sour; a belch brought on by a politically acid stomach. The immediate cause is a number of passages in some of the papers presented at the recent Narcissism Symposium at Cortland and published in Telos 44. Seemingly signs of a new and astonishing sensibility, the passages in question are really signs of an older and tedious sensibility newly conceived and confident. The immediate culprits are Christopher Lasch and Jean Bethke Elshtain (with a small and remediable contribution by our own beloved helmsman, Paul Piccone). What we have here are theoretically sophisticated expressions of a phenomenon that reaches back at least to the late 1960s.
Paul Breines (Tue,) studied this question.