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Topic: Philip Rieff

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	The Chicago Blog: Philip Rieff, 1922-2006
		Rieff was a sociologist best known for his examination of the social consequences—especially the moral consequences—of the assimilation of the ideas of Freud into modern culture.
		In 1989 the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Rieff's essays, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, edited by Jonathan B. Imber.
		We have also kept in print two of Rieff's most influential works: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.
	pressblog.uchicago.edu /2006/07/04/philip_rieff_19222006.html (153 words)

	The Religion Report - 19 July 2006 - Philip Rieff Obituary
		Philip Rieff came to Australia to lecture several times, once famously declaring to his audience, 'I am the great barrier Rieff', referring to his key idea that culture is all about prohibitions.
		Philip Rieff himself is Jewish, and regarded himself as what he called 'a post-Jew', so there was a lot of internal wrestling with the greatest of 20th century post-Jews in his own mind, and that's probably an uncontroversial reading of Freud.
		John Carroll: Because Rieff, as he developed his own theory of culture and this to me is the most important to mention of his own work, came to see culture a bit in the way of the Old Testament, as a range of interdicts of 'Thou shalt nots...'.
	www.abc.net.au /rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1690308.htm (2467 words)

	BOOKFORUM \| Feb/Mar 2007 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Philip Rieff was born in Chicago in 1922 of Eastern European Jewish extraction, the son of a butcher whose given name, Gabriel, was changed to Joseph at Ellis Island, a symbolic shift that Rieff made much of.
		Rieff's Freud, in contrast, is a stoic culture hero, a "statesman of the inner life" who arrived at the tail end of the age of belief just in time to provide a somewhat bleak morality to replace the older one grounded in faith and guilt.
		Rieff's sense of charisma is inseparable from the concept of prophecy, and in his book he comes on as a self-anointed prophet of guilt (it comes as no surprise that his famous seminars at Penn were often devoted to semester-long unpackings of a single epistle from the Guilt Guy, Saint Paul).
	www.bookforum.com /howard.html (3787 words)

	The aesthetics of Moloch.(books, arts & manners)(My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Rieff's essay "The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet" is perhaps the best short introduction to his thought and chief themes.
		In the essay, Rieff reprints part of the cross-examination of Wilde by Edward Carson, QC, in the famous and disastrous libel trial that Wilde himself brought, and lost, in 1895 against the father of his homosexual lover Lord Alfred Douglas.
		The one with commentary is of Abraham Lincoln, whom Rieff sees, as does Harry Jaffa, as a "sacred messenger" bearing tragic but ultimately hopeful witness to the American constitutional, democratic, republican cause, past, present, and future: a residual but renewable trajectory and momentum of civic decency in the light of Divine Goodness.
	www.encyclopedia.com /doc/1G1-156123132.html (1237 words)

	A Moralist of the Mind
		Rieff, who died on July 1 at the age of 83, was for many years a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
		At the same time, Rieff's ideas are still very much in the vein of what Sontag denounced, not long after their divorce in 1958, as ``piety without content." That makes it all the stranger (and almost embarrassingly poignant) that Rieff dedicated the book to her memory.
		Rieff was particularly disgusted to think that academics and intellectuals (who ought, in his view, to serve not just as interpreters of cultural artifacts but guardians of the sacred order itself) had grown mindlessly cynical about all forms of authority.
	www.mclemee.com /id180.html (1148 words)

	Prophet of the Therapeutic Age -- Philip Rieff Dead at Age 83
		Posted: Thursday, July 06, 2006 at 3:18 am ET Philip Rieff, who died last Saturday at age 83, was one of those few individuals in any generation who names their own age in indelible ink.
		Philip Rieff, known best as a sociologist and interpreter of Sigmund Freud, did this in 1961 when he wrote of the "triumph of the therapeutic" in contemporary culture.
		Philip Rieff aimed his critique primarily at those he considered to be the enemies of social stability and cohesion, and he frustrated orthodox Freudians by turning Freudianism into an argument for tradition and rather conservative values.
	www.albertmohler.com /blog_read.php?id=710 (455 words)

	the New Pantagruel: Hymns in the Whorehouse
		Philip Rieff appreciated the real significance of Freud because he was not a psychologist but a sociologist, and not just any sociologist, but one who understood both the religious nature of social order and its crystallization—or decomposition, as the case may be—in the psyche of the individual.
		Rieff discerned the most radical effects of this revolution in the rise of “therapeutic culture,” one defined by its calculated lack of spiritual ambition in any traditional sense, religious, philosophical, political, or artistic.
		Philip Rieff brilliantly distinguished the analytic from the therapeutic bent of Freud’s remarkable intellect.
	www.newpantagruel.com /2006/05/psychological_m.php?page=all (7336 words)

	David Rieff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		David Rieff (born September 28, 1952, in Boston) is a nonfiction writer and policy analyst.
		Rieff graduated from Princeton University in 1978, and was a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1978 to 1989, working with such authors as Joseph Brodsky, Elias Canetti, Carlos Fuentes, Alberto Moravia, Les Murray, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Marguerite Yourcenar.
		Rieff has expressed strong disapproval of the American policies and actions that both informed and followed the invasion of Iraq [1].
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/David_Rieff (332 words)

	Philip Rieff's Theory of Culture
		Rieff's sociologized version of Freud was widely trusted as a surrogate for young scholars who did not have time to read the collected Freud themselves.
		Where a less sensitive scholar might have taken Rieff to task for any number of stylistic and substantive sins, Zondervan is always the sympathetic hermeneut, bringing out the best of Rieff's efforts and claiming that his entire oeuvre needs to be preserved for current and future use.
		Rieff sorely misses an imagined past in which a "positive community" provided a basis for individual security and salvation as well as cohesiveness.
	www.cjsonline.ca /reviews/reiff.html (1130 words)

	Obituary: Philip Rieff \| Obituaries \| Guardian Unlimited Books
		For Rieff, history had five stages: a political era; a religious one; a liberally inclined economic phase, degenerating into 20th-century consumerism, whose insecurities fostered the age of the contemporary "psychological man" - a conclusion more simplistic than the engrossing book itself.
		Rieff himself comes to mind when he says of Adolf Harnack's 1890s History of Dogma that "formidable scholars are not generally formidable persons".
		Rieff's five-stage view of history is now reduced to three: a first, pagan world embracing Plato and aboriginal life; a second, religious world from Judaisim to Islam; the third world is the current mess, which has lost that order he calls "vertical in authority".
	books.guardian.co.uk /obituaries/story/0,,1834640,00.html (627 words)

	Mind-boggling sociology … and the rest is history - Obituaries
		For Rieff, history had five stages: a political era, a religious one, a liberally inclined economic phase, degenerating into 20th-century consumerism, whose insecurities fostered the age of the contemporary "psychological man".
		Rieff's five-stage view of history was reduced to three: a first, pagan world embracing Plato and aboriginal life; a second, religious world from Judaisim to Islam; the third is the current mess.
		Rieff was haunted by Nazism, and inveighed against those various "deathworks" in art and politics which are "an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture".
	www.smh.com.au /news/obituaries/mindboggling-sociology-8230-and-the-rest-is-history/2006/09/08/1157222325340.html (517 words)

	Peter Eisenman and the Architecture of the Therapeutic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Philip Rieff has aptly characterized the analytic thrust of Freud's work as being guided by "the ethic of honesty"--a characterization that in an odd, impure, "between" sort of way may also apply to Eisenman's work.
		The term "therapeutic" is Philip Rieff's, developed over the last three decades in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and its Second Death (1973).
		The salvation of which Rieff speaks, in the old "ladder-language of faith," was a byproduct of the self's commitment to communal purposes defined with reference to sacred order and its demands.
	www.thursdayarchitects.com /Texts/petereisenman.html (2476 words)

	United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Rieff's use of the vocabulary of Freud and other pessimistic modernists to reach conclusions that were strikingly friendly to "tradition" and the premodern world.
		Rieff believes that an authentic religious culture is not about citizens' intellectual understanding of rules of right and wrong, but about structures of authority, myth, and meaning that are so deep that people are only half-aware of them.
		Rieff denounces the emptiness of what he calls the modern "anti-culture," it might be better understood as a tragic lament than as a call to arms.
	www.ufppc.org /content/view/3608/36 (3362 words)

	NYO - National Observer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Rieff’s title are masterpieces of third-world genius aimed at the second world: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (on the front cover); the philosophy of Nietzsche; the poetry of Wallace Stevens; the poetry (once called science) of Sigmund Freud.
		Rieff ranges widely, picking fights with everyone: Harold Bloom’s Book of J is dismissed as “fiction,” and John Paul II is chided for calling totalitarianism a “substitute religion” when it really opposes “all sacred orders” (you have to like a man who lectures the Pope on his job).
		Rieff’s most audacious claim is that Hitler was “a great third world artist,” because he attempted a “clean sweep”—not only against second-world ideas and morals, but against a whole chosen people.
	www.observer.com /20060327/20060327_Richard_Brookhiser_opinions_nationalobserver.asp (601 words)

	Education \| The ideas interview: Philip Rieff
		Rieff is dismissive of feminism, modernism, gay rights, MTV - everything that, since the 1960s, might have been conceived as social progress or cultural innovation in America.
		Rieff has always been the most cross-grained of American neo-Freudians - one who believes the psychoanalytic "therapeutic culture", far from "curing" ills, has brought our world to its third, and terminal stage, staring barbarism in the face.
		Rieff, it should be explained, sees the world as having developed through three successive cultures, or what he calls "ideal types".
	education.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,5348235-108229,00.html (985 words)

	Crunchy Con: Rieff on grace and holy terror - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Rieff shows how St. Paul transformed charisma into a form of social organization, how it was reworked by Martin Luther and by nineteenth-century Protestant theologians, and, finally, how Max Weber redefined charisma as a secular political concept.
		Rieff’s analysis of charisma is an analysis of the deepest level of crisis in our culture.
		Before you read it, understand that Rieff was not a religious man, though as a sociologist he was preoccupied with profound questions of the role faith plays in sustaining cuulture and civilization.
	www.beliefnet.com /blogs/crunchycon/2007/01/rieff-on-grace-and-holy-terror.html (973 words)

	Rieff Encounter \| The New York Observer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-27)
		Rieff, the son of the late Susan Sontag and the distinguished sociologist Philip Rieff, is a rare and at times maddening sort of public-intellectual aristocrat.
		Rieff said, "I think what I wanted was a large family and what she wanted was a large library." But, he added, she was very devoted to David.
		Rieff may spend a lot of time in international war zones, but it's the enormous library in his apartment-he calls it "a family vice"-that seems to inspire the most pride, longing and glee.
	thebridalblog.observer.com /node/50746 (2838 words)

	The Chronicle: 11/11/2005: Prophet of the 'Anti-Culture'
		Rieff's use of the vocabulary of Freud and other pessimistic modernists to reach conclusions that were strikingly friendly to "tradition" and the premodern world.
		Rieff believes that an authentic religious culture is not about citizens' intellectual understanding of rules of right and wrong, but about structures of authority, myth, and meaning that are so deep that people are only half-aware of them.
		Rieff denounces the emptiness of what he calls the modern "anti-culture," it might be better understood as a tragic lament than as a call to arms.
	chronicle.com /free/v52/i12/12a01501.htm (3213 words)

	Philip Rieff, sociologist, critic of Freud, US culture; at 83 - The Boston Globe
		LOS ANGELES -- Sociologist Philip Rieff, who wrote erudite analyses of cultural decline and was known for his critiques of Sigmund Freud, died July 1 at his Philadelphia home.
		Rieff withdrew from publishing for 26 years, breaking his silence early this year with ``Life Among the Deathworks," which he dedicated to Susan Sontag, the essayist and cultural critic from whom he was acrimoniously divorced in the late 1950s.
		Rieff was born in Chicago on Dec. 15, 1922, and aspired to become a baseball writer.
	www.boston.com /news/globe/obituaries/articles/2006/07/10/philip_rieff_sociologist_critic_of_freud_us_culture_at_83/?page=full (841 words)

	Philip Rieff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		He taught at Brandeis University, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and the University of Munich, and until his retirement in 1992 held the position of Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology and University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
		In Freud it is instinct and the unconscious that drive social conflict, not ineffective social structures which are tasked with the facilitation of human striving for pleasure and away from pain.
		In that grey area is the enactment of culture, the ongoing negotiation of the problem of human nature in human life within the tension of interdict and transgression.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Philip_Rieff (1458 words)

	FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Philip Rieff’s Charisma
		By Rieff’s analysis, the central and defining purpose of culture is to regulate the always-troublesome relation between the No-imposing voice of commandment and the Yes-seeking desires of the individual.
		Rieff was a brilliant social critic because he could distinguish between the logic of arguments and the conclusions individual thinkers drew.
		As Rieff observes, in the aftermath of Weber’s theory, “authority becomes suspect not only in its ends but in its origins.” It is not just that selfish, venal men have gained control over the many cultural institutions that socialize us; reformers since the beginning of time have said as much.
	www.firstthings.com /onthesquare/?p=713 (1884 words)

	The New Beginning: Philip Rieff
		Philip Rieff, who died last Saturday at age 83, was one of those few individuals in any generation who names their own age in indelible ink.
		On the other hand, Rieff also believed that those who think themselves immune from the therapeutic virus are themselves mired in therapeutic quicksand.
		Philip Rieff aimed his critique primarily at those he considered to be the enemies of social stability and cohesion, and he frustrated orthodox Freudians by turning Freudianism into an argument for tradition and rather conservative values.
	cantate-domino.blogspot.com /2006/07/philip-rieff.html (439 words)

	The ideas interview: Philip Rieff, the eminent sociologist \| The Guardian \| Guardian Unlimited
		Rieff is dismissive of feminism, modernism, gay rights, MTV - everything that, since the 1960s, might have been conceived as social progress or cultural innovation in America.
		Rieff has always been the most cross-grained of American neo-Freudians - one who believes the psychoanalytic "therapeutic culture", far from "curing" ills, has brought our world to its third, and terminal stage, staring barbarism in the face.
		Rieff, it should be explained, sees the world as having developed through three successive cultures, or what he calls "ideal types".
	www.guardian.co.uk /ideas/story/0,,1657860,00.html (995 words)

	FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » RJN: 7.10.06 Philip Rieff has died at age 83…
		Rieff: “James Joyce mounted a deathwork against the novel and the European tradition.
		Almost all the obituaries gave major attention to Rieff’s first marriage, to Susan Sontag, the celebrated social critic, when he was a young teacher at Chicago and she his 17-year-old student.
		Rieff once wrote that ‘the heterodoxies of genius require generations to assimilate.’ This can and will be said of Philip Rieff and his contribution as well.” I am very open to that possibility.
	www.firstthings.com /onthesquare/?p=300 (1307 words)

	Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
		Rieff explicates the dangers of the writings of Freud, Jung, Reich and Lawrence (always with the highest respect for manifest implicit brilliance).
		The four geniuses Rieff takes to task (and that they were, though through misfortune, they weren't privy to the net and IC!) missed the point: the functions of culture surround the organization of moral demands we make upon ourselves through symbol systems.
		Rieff helps me out a bit since he blames the therapeutic (read: "secular") mind as that which feels the notion of an outside Creator as a lot of truck.
	www.intellectualconservative.com /article4466.html (968 words)

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