The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff (Anthem Companions to Sociology, 1, Band 1) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178308152X ISBN 13: 9781783081523

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Jonathan B. Imber is the Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA. The editor-in-chief of Society since 1998, Imber is the author of Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine (1986) and Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Authority in American Medicine (2008) as also the editor of The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings of Philip Rieff (1990).

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The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

By Jonathan B. Imber

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2018 Jonathan B. Imber editorial matter and selection
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-152-3

Contents

Introduction Jonathan B. Imber, 1, 
Chapter 1. Philip Rieff: Some Reflections John Carroll, 5, 
Chapter 2. Philip Rieff and the Impossible Culture John Dickson, 23, 
Chapter 3. Philip Rieff as Cultural Critic Steven Grosby, 41, 
Chapter 4. Philip Rieff as Teacher Samuel Heilman, 65, 
Chapter 5. Prophet v. Stoic: Philip Rieff's Case against Freud Howard L. Kaye, 77, 
Chapter 6. Decline and Fall in the Work of Philip Rieff: "I love the old questions" Beckett, Endgame Richard H. King, 99, 
Chapter 7. Philip Rieff as Social/Cultural Theorist Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Matthew D. Stewart, 117, 
Chapter 8. Fellow Sons James Poulos, 131, 
Chapter 9. Philip Rieff and Social Theory Charles Turner, 149, 
Chapter 10. A Kindly Apocalypse: Philip Rieff and the Endgame of the Therapeutic Peter Y. Paik, 167, 
Chapter 11. Disenchantment, Authenticity and Ordinary Charisma Alan Woolfolk, 189, 
Writings of Philip Rieff, 215, 
List of Contributors, 227, 
Index, 231, 

CHAPTER 1

PHILIP RIEFF: SOME REFLECTIONS

John Carroll

One of Philip Rieff's favourite paintings was Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf, in the National Gallery in London. It shows an angry Moses thundering down the mountain about to dash the stone tablets of the law to pieces in outrage at his fickle people dancing around and worshipping a huge statue of a golden calf. Rieff strongly identified with this Moses, the bearer of the law – the Thou Shalt Nots – sent from God. In Poussin's scene, the people renounce the authority of the Old Testament divinity and turn to the leisurely fun of dancing and feasting, worshipping a pagan pleasure god. Poussin had provided an uncanny parable for Rieff's own working life.

To my mind, the most striking thing about Rieff's work, when one stands back to take stock, is the deadly seriousness with which it takes culture, and the role of the cultural elites, or the clerisy – its custodians. Culture is the housing structure for God, and his later sublimations – a structure without which he could not exist. Rieff stands diametrically opposite to the mainstream of the times, which set about deconstructing culture, turning it from the central bearer of the truths that matter to a mask for power, exploitation and disadvantage. The task of culture for Rieff is to enchant and repress; the task for most of his academic contemporaries was to disenchant and liberate.

Rieff's work is also compelling because of its intellectual virtuosity, its originality, its blend of analytical insight and grander theme, and for the farrago of brilliant aphorisms peppered through it. There are types of intelligence and lucidity that have their own charisma.

There was a teaching virtuosity too. His students – of which I was never one – report the painstaking care with which he would proceed through his chosen texts. In 1980 he delivered a two-hour lecture as the finale to a Sociology of Culture Conference at my university in Melbourne. The title would have surprised no one familiar with his later work: 'Authority and Culture'. In a darkened room, speaking without notes, he held the audience spellbound, mesmerized by an entirely new experience, even though 90 per cent of the 200 present would have found the content an appalling anathema – if they had understood it – proclaimed in raw-edged violation of almost everything intellectual they held dear. Here was somebody speaking in the academy who actually believed in something, and did so with such seriousness and intensity that his very presence threw down an existential gauntlet, raising the issue of whether those present moved in sacred order, as he termed it, obedient to its demands, the state of their souls at stake, or whether they belonged to the tidal wave of transgression which characterized the times. Drawing on the seemingly secular Western canon, from Plato to Shakespeare, from Greek tragedy to Renaissance art, the oblique reference was to salvation or damnation. In the dark, this voice, deep and resonant, enunciating with slow deliberation its educated American East Coast accent beguilingly alien yet charming, was as close to deadly intent as words can get in the post-church world.

Philip Rieff was a professor of sociology for all of his mature working life, a fact which needs keeping in mind, given the number of academic disciplines within which he might have been placed (including psychology, philosophy, theology, art history and politics), and the number of roles beyond the academy that he might have assumed – I shall return to this later. He was a sociologist à la lettre, as the calling ought to be, taking up the central challenge of the discipline, as it had been left by Max Weber in his vocation lectures of 1918, and not advanced significantly since then. Weber had centred the discipline on the laying bare of the logic that had founded and driven modernization, from the English Industrial Revolution onwards – a logic that was, in its essence, cultural. Weber then proceeded to examine the contemporary costs, as the culture drove onwards, undermining the beliefs that had guided it through its formation and its development and into its decline in a secularized and inevitably profane maturity.

The question was broader than sociology, having been put first, and most cogently, by Nietzsche in the 1870s: the question of how to counter nihilism in a post-Christian era. Once the traditional monotheistic God is dead, all metaphysics begin to wobble, nothing is certain, and, in a world stripped of its traditional absolutes, individuals are threatened by the absurdity of existence. This is the prevailing modern condition. In literature, the Nietzsche question had been taken up most eloquently by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.

After the First World War, a series of commanding philosophical and literary figures made their own personal responses to the Nietzsche question. Georg Lukács, arguably the shrewdest and best-read intellectual of his generation, and a close friend of Max Weber, decided in 1918 that life was intolerable without something binding in which to believe: he joined the Communist Party and spent much of the rest of his long life as an apologist for Stalin. Writing in English, the two foremost poet diagnosticians of the modern predicament, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, both took a leap of faith out of their respective wastelands and joined the Anglican Church. Simone Weil developed her own singular meditations on the possibilities of spirit and conscience in the modern world, advocating an asceticism of spirit and body, which took her to the brink of joining the Catholic Church. Rieff belongs to this post-First World War lineage, a generation or so later.

Then there was George Orwell, the person who leads directly, in chronology and in character, to Rieff. Four years after Orwell's death in 1950, Rieff wrote a revealing essay on him and his appeal to the left-liberal imagination. Orwell is the honest man in a post-religious world. Orwell retains the Christian ethic of brotherliness and compassion, while having lost any Christian belief – his intelligence making faith...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178308152X
• ISBN 13: 9781783081523
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Herausgeber: Imber Jonathan B.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland