Lewis Lapham - Money and Class in America

Praise for MONEY AND CLASS IN AMERICA

Money and Class in America is an angry book; it is also frequently right.

The Washington Post

Acerbic in tone... Amusing and provocative.

The New York Times Book Review

Roams over the glitzy terrain of contemporary consumerism... Lapham effectively ridicules the widespread notion that money is omnipotent and can make everything all right.

Time

Lapham is a wonderful writer, a connoisseur of the perfect world. Stimulating ideas are expertly interlarded with amusing anecdotes, and the catholic assortment of quotations is marvelous.

Businessweek

A Brillo pad chafing the social psyches of this Teflon crowd... Lapham peppers his observations with priceless anecdotes of the absurdities of the rich and the only-wishing-to-be-so. Some of Laphams gems are side-splitting, culled from a lifetime amid the ivied walls and red-leather wingbacks of the nations clubby capitals... The author offers a sobering look at where we are headed if we do not see that we have sold our very humanness for the sake of the dollar bill.

Chicago Tribune

Money and Class in America is an intelligent, well-written and witty book, and replete with insights and deflating anecdotes and observations about the fatuities of the rich and powerfuland their retainers.

The Boston Sunday Globe

Lewis Laphams trenchant and stinging indictment of obsessive wealth in America is refreshingly direct. The issue itself is one many people would prefer not to have discussedto the detriment, unfortunately, of a nation.

Barry Lopez

A master satirist, [Lapham] has written a needed and important book... We should be indebted to Lapham for taking up the cudgels so trenchantly in the name of a more cultivated use of Americas wealth.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Contains as many hilarious, embarrassing truths about our society as a John Waters movie. Lapham writes with tongue firmly in cheek, celebrating the cheapness and vulgarity of mass consumption even as he pokes fun at it ... His witty commentary takes in all of contemporary America... An irresistably funny work of social commentary masquerading as satire, with enough one-line gems of wisdom to stock several quote notebooks.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

A scathing indictment of American attitudes toward money and class. It is a witty, often disturbing diatribe against what he calls the equestrian class.

The Houston Post

Lewis Lapham is blessedly cantankerous, stylish, elegant, erudite, unpredictable, cosmopolitan, cranky. What Mr. Lapham tells us about Americas love affair with money would make for awfully sad reading, were he not so witty, wickedly observant of the precincts of wealth through which, detached, he moves, and ultimately, wonderfully wise. Edith Wharton would have saluted him.

Barbara Grizutti Harrison

Wonderfully witty... This book chronicling Americans obsession with money, status, consumption and other vices is satirical humor at its best... its Henny Youngman firing off Swiftian one-liners. Dont try to read it all at once. Bite off half a chapter an eveningand laugh yourself into oblivion... Its simply delightful social satire.

The San Diego Union

This is a rich book... Lapham shows how the government, its people, and the business worlds have come to worship money and how that worship diminishes us all and leads us toward that ruin... Lapham the source is as important as the message. Hes no huckster. Hes not crying sour grapes. His work is credible and crafted keenly.

Topeka Capital-Journal

In Money and Class in America Lewis Lapham incisively separates the reality of the contemporary United States from the layers of spurious clich with which generations of false moralizing and special pleading have surrounded her... An angry masterpiece of insight. More than any work I know, it captures the essence of America in this second Gilded Age. Mr. Laphams book will endure in the literature of social observation.

Robert Stone

Also by Lewis H. Lapham

Fortunes Child

Imperial Masquerade

The Wish for Kings

Hotel America

Waiting for the Barbarians

Laphams Rules of Influence

The Agony of Mammon

Lights, Camera, Democracy!

Theater of War

30 Satires

Gag Rule

With The Beatles

Pretensions to Empire

Age of Folly

1988, 2018 Lewis H. Lapham

New introduction by the author 2018 Lewis H. Lapham

Foreword 2018 Thomas Frank

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Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion was first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, in 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-944869-89-2 paperback

ISBN 978-1-944869-90-8 e-book

Published for the book trade by OR Books in partnership with Counterpoint Press.

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

This book is set in the typeface Pobla Book.

Typeset by Aarkmany Media, Chennai, India.

For Andrew, Delphina and Winston

Thomas Frank

This following catalogue of the tastes and delusions of Americas equestrian class comes to us from 1988, but you will be excused if, as you turn its pages, you feel you are reading an unusually articulate anthropologists description of a tribe that goes about its loutish rituals in the present day. Nearly everything in Money and Class in America still applies: The insane CEO paydays that Lewis Lapham noted still go on; so do the aristocrats dreams of godhead and their acts of extraordinary pettiness to one another, all of which he scrutinizes in fascinating detail.

We were living through our own gilded age Lapham wrote in 1988, and like many of the descriptions he invented, that historical comparison has today become a truism, repeated constantly by pundits and presidential candidates alike. What the phrase meant, for Lapham, was the triumph of capital over labor and the emergence of a billionaire classa phenomenon that modern scholars like to imagine they have only recently discovered and to which they have given the pseudo-technical name of inequality. In truth, however, a considerable literature on the subject was already under production by the late 1980s, and Laphams observations on it sit on the shelf beside a number of contemporary analogues, including Kevin Phillipss The Politics of Rich and Poor , the movie Wall Street , or the initial run of Spy magazine. All addressed the extraordinary fortunes then being assembled, the showy pretentiousness of the new aristocracy, the bull market that seemed to recreate the bubble of the 1920sand what it all meant for a republic like ours.

Money and Class in America was written during the first decade of what Lapham called the Republican Risorgimento, a time of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for business. These developments were still fairly new in 1988, and people like me found reason to expect that all of it was but a passing phasethat a chastened nation would soon grow wise to Reaganism and its pasteboard plutocracy in favor of the more democratic habits that had been Americas default position since World War II.