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information about Philip Rieff We had planned on doing some interviews soon about the work of sociologist and cultural theorist Philip Rieff, plans which became more appropriate with Rieff's death in early July. Prior to his death (he was 83 and had been ailing for some time), our interest was sparked by two publishing "events." The first was the imminent republication by ISI Books of Rieff's 1966 seminal book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. The forthcoming edition contains essays by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Wilfred McClay, and Stephen Gardner. In that book, Rieff argued that the most significant task of cultures is to communicate a set of deeply held convictions about reality to their members. Discrete and diverse cultural artifacts align the affections of cultural participants cultivating a shared understanding. As Rieff put it early in his book, "Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and the filling up of emptiness. Superior to and encompassing the different modes in which it appears, a culture must communicate ideals, setting as internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that unite men and permit them the fundamental pleasure of agreement. Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied."  Behind this passage is an assumption (which conforms to a Christian understanding, although Rieff was not a Christian) that human beings are created to be social, that our identity is known in relationships, not individualistically, and that membership in a society is essential for personal fulfillment. But, as Rieff documented in his work, the crisis of modern culture is that, for a variety of reasons, "all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy suspicion." The second reason for our current editorial interest in Rieff is the publication this past January of the first new book by him in many years. The volume is the first of four collected under the title Sacred Order/Social Order (he had completed the manuscripts some time ago), this first provocatively called My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (University of Virginia Press). While we're preparing our interviews about Philip Rieff's work, you may want to read some recent pieces about him, some published because of the books coming out, some because of his death. Richard John Neuhaus wrote a brief appreciation of Rieff's prophetic voice on the First Things blog, in which he reminded us that "Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Last November, the Chronicle of Higher Education, anticipating the publication of My Life among the Deathworks, featured an article called "Prophet of the 'Anti-Culture'", which summarized his career and his main arguments about contemporary culture. The on-line journal The New Pantagruel has two features on Rieff now available, the first a review of the new book by Jeff Castle, the second a longer essay by Stephen L. Gardner called "Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire." This essay will be included in the new edition of The Triumph of the Therapeutic. We hope to interview Dr. Gardner, as well as Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Wilfred McClay, and others about Philip Rieff's work. Stay tuned for more information. [Posted July 2006, KAM]
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