The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

By Jonathan B. Imber

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783085057

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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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© 2018 Jonathan B. Imber editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

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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 countercultureinvariably 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) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 159: 105n.

6 Rieff, Fellow Teachers , 169–70.

7 William Deresiewicz, On Political Correctness, American Scholar 86, no. 2 (2017): 30–42.

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.¹ 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.² 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 impossible. Yet he can still act in the world, if with deep resignation. Rieff interprets this combination of action and resignation as the key to his appeal. Orwell was a secular saint, remaining a socialist for want of anything better to believe in. Socialism is the last form of faith in the liberal-Christian era, although shadowed by its alter ego, even in the case of Orwell himself – a conservatism that defends good old values as it charts their decline. As Rieff gets older, he will head in this conservative direction, if with a radically different inflection.

Standing on this same precipice of cultural exhaustion and despair, Max Weber had proclaimed, in 1918, the last command as that of intellectual integrity, a mast to which he tied himself, although he had made clear that it was in itself absurd if there are no ultimate values left to which it might subordinate itself. There can be no plausible ultimate ends in a godless universe. Orwell embodied Weber’s intellectual integrity, in combination with a Christian ethic, and some capacity for action, all of which taken together appealed to a left-liberal intelligentsia which yearned for a practical, this-worldly antidote to its own lethargy.

Rieff would turn towards the conservatism he saw in Orwell, while realizing it needed a metaphysical armature if it wasn’t going to implode into the nihilist vacuum. He referred to himself, on occasion, as a post-Jew, by which he meant someone whose cultural and biological heritage was Jewish – a fact which pervaded his identity – but at the same time someone who had lost faith in the God and the religious practices of his people. Post-Christians found themselves in the same identity predicament, whether they were alternatively, and more specifically, post-Catholic or post-Protestant – a schism within the followers of Jesus which arguably separated them as much from each other as it did from the Jews. The analytical cue had come from Max Weber, and his argument that the Protestant character and its work ethic were the key to the making of the modern world: in its wake, modern Western decadence was characterized by the character and the ethic continuing on long after the Protestant God had died. We, the chosen heirs, were the prisoners trapped in an iron cage of profane rationalization, automated in our daily pursuits by the ghosts of dead religion. Rieff was keenly attuned to the ghosts of the dead religions, and their continuing presence.

It may be useful to distinguish four distinct Rieff modes. I shall not take account of the two books published at the end of Philip Rieff’s life, as they reflect a marked decline in quality, and at times they read like parodies of the earlier writings. Mind, one of the titles, My Life among the Deathworks, is vintage Rieff.

Rieff the Interpreter of Texts

In the written work, this is notably the Rieff of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), and of his earlier essays. The posited task is to interpret the times through the lens of the greatest literary and philosophical wrestlings from within the culture writ large – the culture of the West. The aim is understanding and diagnosis.

Faced by the Nietzsche problem, and the slant that had been put upon it by Weber, Rieff’s pedagogical response was two-pronged: to develop a theory of culture (which I shall consider in the following sections) and to select great texts from the Western tradition that help penetrate into the mysteries that underlie the human condition, engaging with them in close intellectual embrace. Thorough encounters with the texts were a means for finding roots, anchors that would not drag in the shifting sands of the modern condition. The theory came later than the earlier interpretative work, as if an instinct had drawn the hermeneutician to the territory in which he would spend the rest of his working life, close to the potentially revelatory texts. In Rieff’s case, it was literature, philosophy and painting that predominated. I have myself been strongly influenced in my teaching methods by the way Rieff used art works.

The guiding assumption drew on the Plato of The Republic, that the good society depends upon the rule from above by philosopher kings, ones who have been scrupulously educated, over decades, in the master works and disciplines. Consequently, the most important social elites were the teaching elites; the most important institution in the society, as Plato held, was the one that taught the teachers.

Teachers, who formed the core of the cultural elites, were custodians of the great texts. Rieff moved close to the perspective developed by the English literary critic, F. R. Leavis, a quarter-century earlier, whose school, based in Cambridge, taught a generation of lecturers in English literature throughout the Anglosphere. The Leavis model was predicated on the confidence that deep familiarity with the great literature of a culture – its canon – would produce young men and women who were of a finer sensibility and more moral character. Great literature helps shape, and even form, character. The influence of such literate graduates would spread through the society, elevating its people. The Leavisite movement had strong affinities with the Calvinist divines, who, based in the same university four centuries earlier, had driven the English Reformation – steeped as it was in a similar intensity of pious moral purpose. In practice, Leavisite literary criticism would train several generations of university literature students in textual analysis, a virtue that seems shiningly admirable from the dismal perspective of its near complete absence today. Rieff shared Leavis’s high-culture idealism centred on the practice of a painstaking training of students in the canon.

The decisive and exemplary figure for Rieff, and from early on, was Freud. Given what was to follow, the choice was not obvious. The possible reasons include attraction to the twentieth century’s most brilliant theorist; to the master diagnostician of character and motivation; and, by the close of Rieff’s Freud book, to the opening of a more sociological hypothesis that the defining modern type was ‘psychological man’, as most insightfully analysed by Freud. Maybe the fact that Freud was Jewish also counted. Rieff had been pitched into a lifelong wrestling with psychoanalysis and its founder.

Rieff had, in his cultural theory, more in common with Jung, in attributing the sources of modern sickness to loss of faith, rather than to the parent problem – to disenchantment, not Oedipal anxiety. Nevertheless, Rieff wrote Jung off as ‘a master in the puppetry of traditions’, and dedicated a highly dismissive chapter in The Triumph of the Therapeutic to his work.³ Perhaps this wasn’t just an objective judgment – plausibly contemptuous of Jung’s fascination with a plethora of obscure religions, including alchemy, and his dabbling in god-terms; his inferiority to Freud as a theorist, and as a writer; and for the comparative fuzziness of his interpreting mind. There was, closer to the bone, the ever-present threat for Rieff of becoming a ‘sociologist of religion’, with that sub-discipline’s characteristic mode of believing that religious faith is necessary for humans, and for healthy communal life, but with the sociologist lacking faith himself. Knowledge and faith belong to different and incompatible universes. The Plato of the Laws was the first to assume this pose. So did the younger Kierkegaard, whose way of putting it was that he had faith that faith existed, but he didn’t have faith himself. Rieff’s later work balances on this cliff-edge of inauthenticity.

The Freud book raises a conundrum. Why the mind of the moralist? Freud was not principally a moralist – he was only so in a most oblique and occasional sense. Rieff’s introductory justification, in his preface, is that Freud’s work provides lessons on the right conduct of life. Yes; but if the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is the reduction of anxiety, the softening of guilt and a better adaptation to the realities of the day, as Rieff himself underscores more lucidly than any other interpreter, then morality is irrelevant. Indeed, for Freud, morality is a symptom of society’s need for control over the individual, reduced to no more than necessary functional utility. The ethical has no independent status. Freud, in his major key, is an Enlightenment man, dedicated to the application of dispassionate intelligence to help cure the diseased; he is the Darwin of psychology; and his utopia, if lukewarmly proclaimed, is a post-religious and amoral temple of stoic rationality. The moralist is Rieff not Freud; it is not even Rieff’s Freud, but rather it is Freud transmogrified into Rieff, as will become apparent in the later writings.

Rieff never relinquished his love-hate affair with Freud: ‘Freud the rarest event in our history – a great mind’.⁴

Rieff the Sociologist

Rieff’s second major work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Uses of Faith after Freud (1966), develops a theory that would have a culture-wide impact and change thinking about the prevailing direction of Western societies. This Rieff was later elaborated in influential works by Christopher Lasch, and Frank Furedi, amongst others – works that, at their best, still lacked Rieff’s analytical sophistication and often proceeded with churlishly inadequate attribution.

Rieff provided a new theory of culture to underpin his reading of the rise of psychological man, a theory that would remain at the centre of his work. For him, culture is, at its core, moral. Every culture has two main functions:

(1) to organize the moral demands men make upon themselves into a system of symbols that make men intelligible and trustworthy to each other, thus rendering also the world intelligible and trustworthy; (2) to organize the expressive remissions by which men release themselves, in some degree, from the strain of conforming to the controlling symbolic, internalised variant readings of culture that constitute individual character.⁵

In terms of its sociological parentage, this book is heavily Durkheimian, with a tinge of Georg Simmel’s essay ‘On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture’. Terminology is drawn from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.⁶ The language in which the previous definition is written soon after disappears from Rieff’s work – as it is a touch ponderous and wordy with academic formality. And, there is little, at this stage, of the stamp of Max Weber’s more Nietzschean reflections on culture.

The axiomatic equation stipulates that either there is binding community, with its own authoritative conscience, or there is sick and solitary ego. Culture is, at its core, moral, organized collectively into a body of coherent symbols. Durkheim had derived the pathologies of introverted egoism or purposeless anomie from the weakening of communal moral ties characteristic of a modernizing society.

Culture, for Rieff, is predicated on a series of interdictory Thou Shalt Nots. It is the prime task of elders, which means all adults, to teach the interdicts to every new generation, and to enforce them. Inevitably there will be remissions: legitimate excuses why an interdict in special circumstances may be broken. For instance, in defending family or country from invasion, it is permitted to transgress ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ As there are interdicts and remissions, there are, thirdly, transgressions.

Rieff extrapolates the theory into a critique of the contemporary West. Healthy culture requires a balance of interdicts and remissions. That balance is progressively being lost, as the traditional authorities that reinforced the interdicts, led by the churches, are in decline, and with them a string of central institutions from the universities, to the judiciary, and even including the parliaments. A new culture has arisen, one that rebels against limits, mocks interdicts and believes that the repression of instinct is merely repressive, engineered by the punitive resentment of a joyless older generation. Rieff will term the new culture ‘remissive’, characterized by its own hypocritical interdict: ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ Embodied as it was, and to almost ‘ideal-type’ perfection, by the new student generation of the 1960s, that generation’s self-proclaimed ‘counter-culture’terminology was unwittingly drawn straight out of Rieff’s theoretical briefcase.

The modal inhabitant of this new culture is ‘therapeutic’, his driving impulse release from inhibition, freedom from all interdicts, release from all inherited guilt. The therapist replaces both the priest and the teacher, as the master interpreter/director of the new culture. As Goethe and Kierkegaard had both earlier predicted, the hospital will become the central social institution in the dystopia of the future. Rieff has renamed ‘psychological man’. Freud is the Dr Frankenstein who created the new monster, or at least the midwife who delivered it from out of the womb of modern nihilism. He provided both the commanding analytical framework – the theory and rationalization – and the authority for cultural revolution, in an antitheology of a human individual governed by pleasure seeking and pain avoidance, and in constant need of psychological massage.

Yet Jung is the more specific target of The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

Jung’s mania for antiquarian shopping in disused modes of thought thus has a powerful tendentious quality. It is directed to trimming down all specific beliefs, ending all creedal strife, so as to supply a language of faith that can serve the individual without compelling him to serve a creed.⁷

Jung commits what is by now the prime transgression in Rieff’s emerging theological orientation: he is indifferent to the need for interdicts. Jung stresses that the answer to nihilism is revitalized myth, not creedal authority and moral rectitude. Here, Jung has a better case than Rieff gives him credit for.

Kierkegaard’s either-or is being played out. The Danish philosopher has been plausibly read as being, at one and the same time, the last Christian – in the sense of the last to add any originality to Christian theology – and the first post-Christian – proving the impossibility of Christian faith in a modern, adult world (he dismissed, if with some nostalgic admiration, the Catholic moral order and its method as religion for children).

Kierkegaard posited his either-or as the turning point for a viable life – initially a choice between the aesthetic, or pleasure sphere, and the higher, ethical sphere. As the theory developed further, especially in Fear and Trembling and The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the crucial choice switched to one between the quite distinct spheres of the ethical and the religious, or the aesthetic and the religious, in an ascending tripartite hierarchy in culture – aesthetic, ethical and religious. Jung follows Kierkegaard in separating the moral from the religious and asserting the superiority of the religious sphere.

Rieff is diametrically opposed in terms of the key category, unambiguously proclaiming culture as ethical – creedal and interdictory. This might be termed a Jewish theory of culture, echoing a tradition that had the stone tablets of the law, housed in the Ark of the Covenant, as the sacred object at the centre of worship, originally placed as it was in the holy of holies, behind a sacred veil, in the Temple in Jerusalem. This is a Ten Commandments culture, pivoting on the view that both salvation and the good life depend on keeping the commandments, that is, on obeying the interdicts stipulated in the holy texts. Rieff’s self-description as a post-Jew has special cogency here. (Durkheim, another post-Jew, also held to a Ten Commandments theory of culture.)

Accordingly, the sin of the modern world is to not believe in sin, and to hold that guilt is merely neurosis