The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

Description

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) was a preeminent American social and cultural theorist. The original essays in The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff offer an important new assessment of the major works of Philip Rieff by leading writers in the fields of social and cultural theory. These essays are the first to assess Rieff’s influence and significance as a master theorist and teacher, drawing on the contributors’ long interest in the broad scope of his work, from Freud: The Mind of the Moralist to The Triumph The Mind of the Moralist to The Triumph of the Therapeutic to his posthumous work, Sacred Order/Social Order.

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Introduction, Jonathan B. Imber; Chapter 1. Philip Rieff : Some Refl ections, John Carroll; Chapter 2. Philip Rieff and the Impossible Culture, John Dickson; Chapter 3. Philip Rieff as Cultural Critic, Steven Grosby; Chapter 4. Philip Rieff as Teacher, Samuel Heilman; Chapter 5. Prophet v. Stoic : Philip Rieff ’s Case against Freud, Howard L. Kaye; Chapter 6. Decline and Fall in the Work of Philip Rieff : “I love the old questions” Beckett, Endgame, Richard H. King; Chapter 7. Philip Rieff as Social/ Cultural Theorist, Elisabeth Lasch- Quinn and Matthew D. Stewart; Chapter 8. Fellow Sons, James Poulos; Chapter 9. Philip Rieff and Social Theory, Charles Turner; Chapter 10. A Kindly Apocalypse: Philip Rieff and the Endgame of the Therapeutic, Peter Y. Paik; Chapter 11. Disenchantment, Authenticity and Ordinary Charisma, Alan Woolfolk; Writings of Philip Rieff; List of Contributors; Index.

Sujets

• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781783085057
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff
ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY
Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Series Editor
Bryan S. Turner, City University of New York, USA / Australian Catholic University, Australia / University of Potsdam, Germany
Forthcoming title
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff
Edited by Jonathan B. Imber
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2018 Jonathan B. Imber editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-152-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-152-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Jonathan B. Imber
Chapter 1. Philip Rieff: Some Reflections
John Carroll
Chapter 2. Philip Rieff and the Impossible Culture
John Dickson
Chapter 3. Philip Rieff as Cultural Critic
Steven Grosby
Chapter 4. Philip Rieff as Teacher
Samuel Heilman
Chapter 5. Prophet v. Stoic : Philip Rieff’s Case against Freud
Howard L. Kaye
Chapter 6. Decline and Fall in the Work of Philip Rieff: “I love the old questions” Beckett, Endgame
Richard H. King
Chapter 7. Philip Rieff as Social/Cultural Theorist
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Matthew D. Stewart
Chapter 8. Fellow Sons
James Poulos
Chapter 9. Philip Rieff and Social Theory
Charles Turner
Chapter 10. A Kindly Apocalypse: Philip Rieff and the Endgame of the Therapeutic
Peter Y. Paik
Chapter 11. Disenchantment, Authenticity and Ordinary Charisma
Alan Woolfolk
Writings of Philip Rieff
List of Contributors
Index
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan B. Imber
Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922–July 1, 2006) published three major works during his lifetime, and several others at the very end of his life and posthumously. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) was critically acclaimed and helped shape much of the subsequent debate about Freud’s cultural impact for more than a decade. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966) represented Rieff’s broad account of cultural change in the age of therapeutic culture, and its prescience has been widely acknowledged. Finally, Fellow Teachers (1973) received much less critical attention, and it is regarded as Rieff’s retreat from public writing, though it was first delivered to an academic audience of faculty and students, the only public that truly mattered to him. 1 After that, Rieff labored for 30 years on his magnum opus, Sacred Order/Social Order , three volumes of which appeared shortly before and after his death. Charisma , a manuscript composed largely after the publication of The Triumph of the Therapeutic , was also published after Rieff’s death.
Very little secondary commentary exists on Rieff’s theories as compared to other social and cultural theorists of similar stature and importance. One book-length study exists written by a Dutch scholar Antonius A. W. Zondervan ( Sociology and the Sacred: An Introduction to Philip Rieff’s Theory of Culture¸ 2005), and another by Cain Elliot ( Fire Backstage: Philip Rieff and the Monastery of Culture , 2013). Recent scholarship on Sigmund Freud refers to Rieff as “the venerable conservative sociologist and critic (and Freud expert)” 2 and as “the eminent sociologist.” 3 This volume of essays addresses Rieff’s work, a decade after his death, and it seeks to redress the scarcity of writings on Rieff’s vision in particular as a sociological and cultural theorist, but also as a teacher.
This brief introduction is intended to argue that Rieff was not characteristically ambitious in the sense of seeking wider and more lucrative audiences. 4 In fact, in his reckoning of the ancient therapeutai —Rieff’s conceptual doppelgänger who exemplifies all that his modern “therapeutic” does not—therapy was the theoretical trapdoor available to the worried well who managed modern life with relentless ambition rather than realistic hope and with aching envy and disappointment rather than modest and inevitable despair. 5 Rieff has understandably been regarded as a pessimist of the first rank, but he was not a general leading his troops against night falling on the West. His prophetic voice, which grated against a tone-deaf social science and a politicized humanities already a half-century ago, was not one of doom and gloom but rather a call back to higher hopes and finer exemplifications of character. His personal struggles with despair were not the result of being misunderstood or ignored or even forgotten, they were acknowledgment of the fragility of one’s presence in the lives of others. The fragile nature of our understanding of ourselves and of one another, taken up as the core of the therapeutic encounter, has made the ineffable concrete and the unsaid put into words, leaving less and less that is any longer mysterious or unspoken.
What Rieff called “political theatre” were those internal and external movements that have, over the past half-century, decimated the intellectual culture of elite schools of higher education, inviting the most recent call for “freedom of expression” as if either the call or the defense of free speech is at bottom even remotely the real problem. Over a generation ago, Rieff wrote, “immediately behind the hippies are the thugs,” an aphorism intended to describe how the then so-called elite student counterculture invariably led to violence. 6 What was once the political theatre of the counterculture is now the political correctness of mainstream academic “culture,” with its therapeutic appendages of safe spaces, microaggressions, and trigger warnings enacted in those same elite institutions. The update would then be immediately behind the over-entitled are the thugs. 7 Entitlement is the reigning concept of the therapeutic, but social security is not equivalent to safe spaces. Rieff knew the difference between what was owed to those who have worked a lifetime and those who camp out in fine digs for four years. What would Philip Rieff think of the world mess now that he is no longer a living witness to a precinct that can no longer embrace and cherish the kind of demanding personal presence he embodied? The age of such teaching authority has passed.
This volume is a tribute not only to a great mind but also to the passing of the persona of a great teacher of sociological theory, one who made the life of the mind a searchlight for much more than the obvious. It stands to reason that he will be rediscovered again and again, both as a formidable theorist as well as a guide to the perplexed.

Notes
1 A demonstrable instance of this commitment was his regular participation in the life of the university. At the University of Pennsylvania, in 1968, Rieff wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian , the University’s student-run newspaper, with the headline, “Grief from Rieff,” which read as follows: “Sir: The best thing that could happen to the intellectual life of the University of Pennsylvania would be the abolition of the fraternity system. That system has been, and must remain, anti-intellectual – a contradiction of the very idea of a University. The fraternity houses along Locust Walk ought to be transformed into residential experimental colleges. Philip Rieff, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology” (September 30, 1968, 2).
2 Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 11.
3 Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 243. In another book Todd Dufresne cites Rieff’s book on Freud as follows: P. Rieff (1961). Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (with S. Sontag). New York: Doubleday. Dufresne, The Late Sigmund Freud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 267.
4 The popular success of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) inspired a humorous envy on Rieff’s part, more in keeping with a prideful sense of vindication.
5 “Always, my use of the name therapeutic has followed Philo’s by inversion.” Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers/Of Culture and Its Second Death (1973) (Chi