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Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 – July 1, 2006) was an American sociologist and cultural critic, who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992, and also, during the 1950s, at the University of Chicago, where he met Susan Sontag.
Dec 15, 2022 · Philip Rieff is remembered today—if at all—as the one-time husband of his former student Susan Sontag, and a crankily conservative observer of American society, which he saw...
Jul 4, 2006 · Philip Rieff, an influential sociologist, author and cultural critic who wrote well-known books on the impact of Sigmund Freud on society and on the direction of morality and Western...
- A Therapeutic Revolution
- A Sickness unto Death
- Three Cultural “Worlds”
- Onward to A Fourth World
- Rieff in Perspective
- Where Hope Prevails
Rieff began his academic career in the 1950s and 60s by focusing on the work of Sigmund Freud.1 In The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff argued that Freud’s exploration of neurosis was really an exploration of authority, as Western man was coming to view the notion of divine authority as an illusion. If God does not exi...
Though Rieff rose to prominence as a public intellectual in the 1970s, he suddenly withdrew from the public eye for more than three decades.4 In fact, it was not until after his death in 2006 that he re-entered the public square with the publication of My Life Among the Deathworks, the first volume in a “Sacred Order/Social Order” trilogy which wou...
To expose the problems of modern society, Rieff organizes Western history chronologically according to three cultural “worlds.” The first was the pagan world, enchanted by its many gods. Following this was the second cultural world, one dominated by monotheism. This era has only recently given way to the third cultural world, our present age, in wh...
Christians who resonate with Rieff’s grim assessment may be tempted to rewind the clock in a futile attempt to retrieve the lost Christendom of a previous age. But Rieff pushes us forward to envision a fourth world. We cannot rewind the clock by ignoring third world deathworks and returning to an ostensibly golden age, but we can recognize the real...
Critics have faulted Rieff for his dense prose, for the demands he makes upon his readers. He read widely, and even a cursory glance at his trilogy shows that he had “at his fingertips” a broad cadre of culture-makers such as Nietzsche and Derrida, Freud and Jung, Picasso and Mapplethorpe, Joyce and Kafka. More to the point, however, he alluded to ...
As those who know the end of history’s story, Christians can engage in cultural activity with a humble confidence. The realm of culture, as dark as it may often seem, will one day be raised to life and made to bow in submission to Christ. Christ will gain victory and restore the earth, but it will be hisvictory rather than ours, so we remain confid...
The acclaimed American sociologist and cultural philosopher Philip Rieff gained great academic prestige with his thesis on the emergence of 'Psychological Man' in western culture and with his classic book,, published in 1959.
If, as American sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the 20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the intellectual legacy he left….
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In his book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff examines the influence of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Lawrence on the psychological and cultural revolution within the Western Culture from the “grand crisis” (the antiquated ascetic of rules, symbols, prayer, etc.), to a conversion to a “superior system” of science wherein the ...
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