[1] In his last months, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete the work, in which he "excoriated the new meritocratic class, a group that had achieved success through the upward-mobility of education and career and that increasingly came to be defined by rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, a thin sense of obligation, and diminishing reservoirs of patriotism," and "argued that this new class 'retained many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues', lacking the sense of 'reciprocal obligation' that had been a feature of the old order.
According to Lasch, the new elites, i.e. those who are in the top 20 percent in terms of income, through globalization which allows total mobility of capital, no longer live in the same world as their fellow-citizens.
Composed of those who control the international flows of capital and information, who preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education, they manage the instruments of cultural production and thus fix the terms of public debate.
In addition, he finalized his intentions for the essays to be included in Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, which was published, with his daughter's introduction, in 1997.
[4] Kirkus Reviews wrote that The Revolt of the Elites stands out from Lasch's other, more pessimistic books by being hopeful about a future for democracy, through the promotion of public discourse, commonality within education and religion as an antidote to "professional arrogance".