We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society | Kenan Malik

Forty years ago, a US historian claimed that social changes were severing communal bonds. He was right

The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one's own life together in the face of mounting pressures." American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch's pessimistic prognosis of the shifting relationship of individuals to societyand to each other in The Minimal Self was published 40 yearsago. It might have been written yesterday.

From the late 1970s, Lasch published a series of books, most notably The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self and The Revolt of the Elites, that prefigured many contemporary debates, about culture wars, the rise of a liberal elite", the corrosiveness of individualism, the encroachment of the market into social life, the creation of a celebrityculture, the rise of a therapeutic" mindset.