Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006
Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959/61), a revised Chicago dissertation, was considered required reading among serious students of social theory for 15 years or more after its publication, especially for those many scholars who did not wish to become slaves to the psychoanalytic worldview, yet needed to learn how Freud could enrich their macro-level theorizing. 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. (Rieff's 10-volume 1963 paperback edition of Freud's papers further positioned him as the major interpretative voice of this material, even though he was not a trained analyst, nor even a thoroughgoing Freudian.) My own heavily annotated copy of Rieff's Freud, all 441 pages of it, has been consulted many times since being studied for the first time 35 years ago. Even though important later works, like Paul Roazen's Freud: Social and Political Thought (1968), either took exception to Rieff's interpretation (Roazen: 230, 257), or broadened his views, this did little to diminish the reputation of this celebrated study, which, amazingly enough, Rieff had written during his early 30s. That he worked on this gifted interpretation while married to Susan Sontag — whose contribution to the work some people argue was substantial (e.g., Rollyson and Paddock, 38-46) — simply added to its perceived weightiness. That nothing he subsequently wrote repeated its popular success posed the interesting question of what happened to his extraordinary early promise. Of course, his Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) developed its own following, as did Fellow Teachers (1972), both of which appeared when masses of Boomer college students were hungry for theoretical tracts such as his — even if they were put off by his increasingly obvious cultural conservatism and his wilfully recondite prose. Yet for all the admiration that flowed Rieff's way during his first 15 years of professional life, he seemed to have lost his momentum when the hopeful Sixties collapsed into the dour Seventies. For the next 35 years he became the gray eminence within sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, fondly remembered by some for his early work, but no longer relevant to developments in social or psychological theorizing. His name is absent from the indices of books that purport to deal with contemporary social theory, and as Freud's stock fell, particularly from feminist attack, so did that of his many commentators, Rieff among them. Finally, in 1992 when 70, he was forced to retire from the sociology department at Penn, for a few years moving to its med school to teach in its psychiatric program (Zondervan, 22). In 1996 he quit working on his multi-volume magnum opus altogether, turning it over to an admirer for eventual publication.
Considering all this, it is fascinating to learn that a Dutch theologian, "an independent scholar living in Utrecht," has come forward with the first monograph devoted entirely to Rieff's work, while poignantly noting "Rieff's later works are not very well known" (Zondervan: 23). He took the trouble to visit Rieff in Philadelphia, and has checked archives elsewhere that contain relevant materials. The resulting monograph is careful, thorough, fair-minded, and interesting, as much for it sad tale of failed ambition as for its other qualities. 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. Sad to say, though, Zondervan's monograph appears prior to the publication of Rieff's summum, perhaps because he was tired of awaiting its arrival.
Zondervan's summary and analysis of Rieff's career is ably carried out, and he concludes with several sharp observations regarding the continuing utility of Rieff's ideas about culture. A minor archival document in the Rieff papers at Wellesley College (an NEH fellowship application) indicated to Zondervan precisely what Rieff hoped to achieve in his final years: "I shall finish the writing agenda of my scholarly lifework ... The leitmotif is the long cultural revolution that is transforming Western civilizations. This transformation is called, in my historical typology, 'late second culture' ... the complex order of compelling symbols and compulsive symptoms ... of Western social conduct under the increasing threat by intellectual and moral currents of thought and feeling represented by what I address, typologically, as 'third culture' (Zondervan, 22). Students of Pitirim Sorokin's cultural sociology will recognize in Rieff a kindred spirit, since his objection to "third culture" is akin to Sorokin's concern about the apparent triumph of "sensate" over "ideational" ethics (Sorokin, 1947: 620ff). There is also a lineage connection between Rieff's anxiety and the eloquent high cultural criticisms of John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater as they confronted early "mass culture" during the mid-19th century. Although wrapped in its own special jargon and connected with graphic art rather than "merely" with words, Rieff's religiously based response to hyper-secularization among the intelligentsia and artists falls into the same general camp of cultural critique that was available in Britain 150 years ago. Rieff sorely misses an imagined past in which a "positive community" provided a basis for individual security and salvation as well as cohesiveness. In its stead we find a "negative community" — oxymoronic, it could be argued — that spurs individual choice and action, but no "collective salvation" (Zondervan, 80).
Zondervan queries Rieff in a concluding chapter along three lines. Despite being "a language artist," "Why did he choose to write in such an extremely difficult style?" asks Zondervan (p. 140, original emphases). Secondly, why is there no Rieff school when compared, for instance, with the thriving Peter Berger clan? Most importantly, are Rieff's ideas about desecularization and "new religions" still useful, especially as expressed in his final work? Zondervan finds Rieff's theory, especially because it "presupposes the existence of a transcendent order in reality," of pertinence today (Zondervan is, after all, a theologian). His monograph is a valiant effort to prove that Rieff's "transgressive" theory, which opposes the Enlightened "transformative" ideas that he prized when younger, deserves renewed attention. Were Rieff's own sentences as transparent as Zondervan's, the prospects for his theorizing reentering today's conversations might be stronger, even allowing for his rigidly counter-revolutionary turn of mind.
The first volume of Rieff's much-delayed masterpiece, Sacred Order/Social Order, has just been published by the University of Virginia Press, the first of several promised volumes edited by Kenneth Piver, a practicing psychiatrist. I would have liked to have read it in tandem with Zondervan's monograph, but could not get a copy in time. Its subtitle, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, indicates how far afield it lies from much of what now is written in the broad terrain of "social theory," at least in North America. It is hard to imagine that a less famous author could have persuaded a university press to market such a book nowadays, particularly since it boasts 40 black and white illustrations in addition to its 234 printed pages. Perhaps Zondervan will write another monograph that will clarify Rieff's ultimate theorizing for a small but attentive audience of readers who find contemporary culture as disturbing as does the Philadelphia Enigma.
References:Alan Sica
Pennsylvania State University
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/reiff.html
May 2006
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