Philip Rieff - American Conservative and Oxford Scholar

All Souls College at Oxford University is famous for having no students. That's right, no students. It's a "faculty-only" college, founded by Henry VI and Henry Chichele (fellow of New College and Archbishop of Canterbury), on 20 May 1438.

Today All Souls is open to only the most illustrious scholars of the world, who are invited to join and work on their most important projects. It's located---conveniently enough---right across from the Bodelian library.















When I was an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to have a class with a Fellow of All Souls, the American sociologist Philip Rieff, who did very important work on Freud and the impact of Freudian thinking on western culture---especially in the US, where Rieff feels it was tragically misunderstood and abused as a sort of cheap trick for allowing people to escape responsibility for their own actions.

He thought Freud was aiming for the exact opposite effect and would have been horrified by much of his current legacy. It was Rieff, in fact, who coined the phrase "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (in his landmark 1966 book of the same name) to describe the ascendency of a post-religious, therapy-based culture, which some now blame for the culture of rationalization, relativism, victimology, etc. in which people who have never heard of Freud ignorantly toss around his terms and concepts ("repression" "unconscious" "ego", etc.) on daytime television as they breezily justify their beastly behavior towards others as being beyond their control.














Rieff's pursuit of Freud's legacy eventually led him to despair over the fate of western civilization. He became in his last decades the kind of heavyweight conservative intellectual that I, as a liberal, value---for the honesty, integrity, and vast learning that his scholarship displays; for the wit, economy, and grace of his style; and most of all, for the difficult questions that he poses to all of us---especially liberals.

To what degree is an open society and a faith in progress compatible with wisdom and cultural greatness? What price do we pay for erasing boundaries between "high" and "low" culture? How has the 60's invention of a permanent revolutionary class called "youth culture" damaged our ability to sustain and transmit the highest acheivement of western civilization?

Rieff, in my view, makes the most profound and lasting case for why any person of substance---regardless of political, religous, or philosophical affiliation---must, in some sense, be bound to the "regulating weight" of authorities of the past. The modern decadence, which posits "the endless order-hopping of the questing young" as the greatest truth possible, is, in his considered opinion, "the condition in which a culture commits suicide."

Interestingly enough, his sadly neglected work has suddenly been getting a lot of attention (see this article), now that a backlash against "therepeutic culture" is in full swing. So I thought I'd post some of his more interesting quotes from the book he wrote at All Souls, 1973's Fellow Teachers:


Barbarians are people without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of radical contemporaneity. Released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it. (39)

Beyond some kind of faith, therapy describes the social procedure of release from the authority of the past. It takes at least two to commit a therapy. (23)

Our pedagogic task remains to repair the old and forge new links, not to continue breaking old ones already so broken that our students have scarcely done more than heard rumors of their existence. (15)

As teachers, we must be at war with the cultic 'life style,' with the endless order-hopping of the questing young, often formatively encouraged by their still questing parents, for whom the quest is an escape from the untaught authority of their own pasts. Authority untaught is the condition in which a culture commits suicide. For the suicide we witness, the responsible generation is the elder, not younger. 'Youth' has been taught that to be willing victims of untaught authority constitutes some new freedom, surpassing any experienced before. For this freedom, the default of authority, student youth is taught only how to sacrifice the life of the mind. . . (12)

A theory of punishment should have as its aim the recovery of a missing knowledge of true guilt. . . . No matter how great our technological capacity to produce comfort, the higher knowledge is of how to create a greater, constraining inner discomfort confident in its teaching of self-limit. In such a theory of punishment, which our ancestors understood and we seek to forget, punishment becomes retributive where it fails to be inhibitive. (167)

From the past we gain our regulating weight, to hold against the lightness of our acts. (15)

There is no good study without talk---useless, unmanaged talk. (192)

In the temple, as its servants know, there are no students' rights, except the right to be well-taught. (6)

We and our students shall have to be reminded that 'discipline, that is, perfect co-operation, is an attribute of civilization,' not of mass rationalization. Mill tells us that to be capable of discipline in great things, 'a people must be gradually trained to it in small.' ['Civilization] Such training cannot be politicized without inverting the meaning of discipline, from civilization to barbarism---from a not-doing of what is not to be done to a routine doing of precisely that. (47)

'No': that is the fathering word of our humanity. From that No, every Molly-coddling 'Yes' is born. The human plenitude and suppliancy of moralizing distinctions are put at risk by endlessly remissive reasonings of every distinction into its ambiguities. (xviii)

No is the first word of resistance; it remains the word that needs deepest, freshest, most constant relearning--and those learned in its ways---to articulate any culture. NO has to be studied and interpreted almost without break, although it too must exist in a sense heavily qualified, under the sabbath rule of remissions.

Sacred order is not beyond us. It is the here and now. In sacred order, as in social, we do not learn to do right, but learn in doing right. Right follows right; wrong follows wrong.

Failures of knowledge in sacred order are represented by pratfalls in secular. There you have divine comedy, the world in a nutshell. Social order registers out endless shifts in sacred. Nothing secular is comprehensible without referring to some one or another occasion of experience in sacred order.

Sacred order and secular are not merely equal; they are visibly identical in the eyes of any who have learned how to see. To conserve and transmit a vision of the highest, with a veto complicit in every vision: that is what is higher about education. (vxii)

. . . being mere interpreters of interpreters, not ourselves prophets, we are authorized only by the greatness that has preceded us, from which we make knowledge our own. . . . all our greatest teachers are always dead. Yet God enlives their minds in us. (10)

The one true annoucement we teachers can make to our students is that all prophets of the new are false, precisely because the age of prophecy is past; its authority lives only in our interpretations of it. (15)

From the past we gain our regulating weight, to hold against the lightness of our acts. (15)

No public should be too quickly ready for Change. Such readiness indicates a breakdown of culture. (19)

Our god-terms mock their ancestors, the gods, in one special respect: no god-term worth using can be merely heuristic, a device for extending intellectual reach. God-terms must have binding authority, compelling not merely intellectual interest but also suspicion of that interest. Our God can only reveal as he conceals himself; ask that, concealment with every revelation, and you have understood why the major questions must always continue as if unanswered. (48)

What may be taken lightly is not the god-term, but oneself. Luther called this the joy of the faithful. (49)

Whenever I hear the word 'value,' I reach for my wallet. . . (FN 4 p. 7)

How can anyone regret that they are not young, that it is over and done with? This is not to say that the young ought to grow up fast; rather, only that we are mistaken to stay young. How sad for our young that their elders imitate them. (156)

Hitler once put the entire case of the Right in a nutshell: "Only the impossible is successful."

Love comes after law. Positive acts are prepared by negative commandments. The modern notion that a victim has no rights represents the return of the most primative iniquity, a worship of he who does and a contempt for he who is done to. (166)

To make distances may help save this society from its cruel infatuations with one damnable simplification after another. The most complex analyses grow brutally simple as they become public objects. (5)

Every political world exists in its own right only when it can justify itself. 'Inner justifications,' authority in the right, can be so only because there is that which is wrong, and those who are wrong-doers. If to be 'justified' once meant, as it did, to be freed from the penalty of sin, through grace and not through merit, by the highest authority, then our human justice must involve the tragic relation of right authority as the penalty of wrong-doing. Authority ia as of right action, reserved for acts of wrong. Only thus is the exercise of power ever remotely near the condition of being just. Therefore no justice can be said to exist without reverence. This is the principle of order without which there can be no law, as Protagoras rightly teaches. (17)

A work of art is a moralizing form; moved as we are by it, no work of art can be neutral in the eternal war of culture. Art is the most subtle form of social direction. Either a work of art deepens the thrust of culture into character, creating ever greater loyalties to the godheads most fully alive in (and only in) their deepest order; or, as in its present extremity, art subverts that order, goes down to murder its own godheads, and, often, to mock its own use of god-terms. It is interior space that is first reshaped, preliminary to the reshaping of social order. (21)

If a past has no authority, then it is dead, however expensive its artifacts. There can be no culture without living authority, right and proper demands superior to competing immediacies, not reducible to nor identical with power, which is the successful assertion of one's own immediacy over another's. Modern rulers have no authority. Our governments cannot be ordained remedies for sins we no longer can commit. Because the civil order, too, retains no presiding presence, it has become inherently unstable. The old interdictory motifs into which the remissions were once woven, the fabric of authority, no longer hold. The abuse of power cannot be justified as punishment. That most obvious break, in the connection between power and authority, is one way to state the subject matter of sociology in its triple probes---of culture, society and state. (22)

It is the prototypical cycle of authority that generates order in the family. Therefore, no strict and affectionate discipline can apply to children without applying, first and more rigorously, to their parents. For the rigor of that self-application, authority descends through the generations and so allows children, in the family order, to correct their parents; for it is the parents, first, who must be an obedient people; then it is that children have someone to obey. (FN 134 p. 208)

Weber identifies authority, as distinct from power, with service to ends, and ends with faith. But his faiths---'rational, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldy, or religious' are a functionalized psychology of motive. . . . Weber's ends, the causes there to be served, are means of acting; they cannot escape service to power. That knowledge of inescapability describes the Protestant pathos from which Weber suffered. (22)

At the despairing edge of the Protestant pathos, to say, 'some kind of faith must always exist,' as Weber said, is to implicate therapy, the great conceptual term beyond Weber's historical vision, for the justification of all immediacies. (23)

Modern revolt has no authority and is all the more dangerous because there is no authority against which to revolt; we are stripping politics to its barest form, struggle for power after power, violence. (46)

We and our students shall have to be reminded that 'discipline, that is, perfect co-operation, is an attribute of civilization,' not of mass rationalization. Mill tells us that to be capable of discipline in great things, 'a people must be gradually trained to it in small.' ['Civilization] Such training cannot be politicized without inverting the meaning of discipline, from civilization to barbarism---from a not-doing of what is not to be done to a routine doing of precisely that. (47)

All revolution worthy of the name has been against authority, giving rise to a new presiding presence, without which authority cannot exist. . . . Suppose, however, there is no authority---only power and its theatrical effects? How can there be a crisis of authority? . . . To feel guilt takes a certain submission to authority. There can be no transgressive sense without someone (and his theory) to transgress. (47)

Our god-terms mock their ancestors, the gods, in one special respect: no god-term worth using can be merely heuristic, a device for extending intellectual reach. God-terms must have binding authority, compelling not merely intellectual interest but also suspicion of that interest. Our God can only reveal as he conceals himself; ask that, concealment with every revelation, and you have understood why the major questions must always continue as if unanswered. (48)Serious attacks on authority must breed new authority. (49)

What may be taken lightly is not the god-term, but oneself. Luther called this the joy of the faithful. (49)

Under the enlightenments of therapy, teaching orders of law, dependent as they must be upon orders of authoritative persons, appear as penal colonies; we re-educated ones cannot comprehend our own received punitive writ; it is a meaningless legacy, handed down by some presence no longer presiding. It is punishment that will become the crime. (56)

A society that does not have the tragic sense to punish must die at the hands of its decriminalized transgressors---at the top and bottom of the social structure. (56)

But victims are not born; they are re-educated, their minds too much broadened. In cultures of truth, the object of education it to narrow the mind. (61)

All giftedness, like Barth's, signifies guilt---although al guilt does not signify giftedness, for to become gifted, guilt must take on the form of privaleged knowledge. This is to say: our guilt must be instructed. For a true culture, there must be masters of the knowledge of guilt. (61)

[Burke] "nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power." (66)

No culture can live except under transferable authority; this is the authority of persons themselves under the same laws that should establish the significance of our arts and sciences. In their highest obedience, humans are compelled by god-terms that will not be treated as mere heuristic devices. (67)

As interdicts fail, repressions show themselves in symptoms. But repressions cannot occur except in responsive defence of the established but failing interdicts from which they derive. What gives an 'idea' its 'fundamentally offensive' character cannot be generated in the repression itself. A culture in which its interdictory motifs were entirely stable would not need to call in repressions, which, in Freud's conception, must lead to symptomatic behavior. (69)

Authority remains superior to that which it authorizes. No order can exist that is not taken seriously and remains, in some respects, beyond criticism. That the most compelling and yet avoidable interdicts are those buried deep in character implies their exterior existence. (70)

The purpose of culture is to fight off the what-is-not. Death is what-is-not, the final opening of possibility that it is the purpose of culture to close. A culture that engages itself to the interminable opening of possibilities issues its own death warrant. (70)

Under such shifting conditions [of modernity], all justifications exposed as ideologies, the discipline necessary for collective existence must become more intirely outward than ever before in our history. (71)

Because moderns think they are so wonderfully malleable, they require fresh constraining orders, truths at once credal and repressive, to limit the dangers of their infinite presumption. (71)

Our academic institutions lack a presiding presence. Our expert devotions, endlessly critical, can never be commanding. We are stuck with our faith in criticism, only marginally different from popular versions of the endless expressional quest or liberated understandings. A true critic, I think, would be one who teaches in an institutional order critically opposed to the established ease of questioning. If we were true critics, than our work could not be taken up and laid down as it is, one enlightenment crowding another, and certainly we could never be hired for what we are not: each of us his own 'Perfesser,' at his piano, tinkling interminable blues for the masses of traumatized now gainfully employed in the cat house of intellect. These people are not clinically ill. They are the next worse thing: culturally disorganized. (88)

But authority cannot exist unless it is possessed in an idealization to which it is willing to submit, although never uncritically. (FN 68, 108)

In his superb Terry Lectures, Islam Observed, Clifford Geertz refers to faith as a 'steadfast attachment to some transtemporal conception of reality.' . . . . However else it works, faith attaches to itself, in interdicts and their remissive modalities, actions that are no so 'steadfast' as they may appear. That 'steadfast attachment' to which Geertz refers hides ambivalence as the primary psychological modality inside culture. Where there is faith, transgressions are always possible. Without the moralizing authority of the interdicts and their remissions, no faith attaches itself to us. I know of no faith without interdictory implication---which is to say without submission to authority and to its presiding presences. This is true even of 'atheist' faiths such as Buddhism. Faith implies both 'alienation' and 'organization.' It is not easy for a Jew to learn the Law and he could not learn it, rightly, alone: Torah is taught and the learning of it interminable. Buddism cannot be abstracted from its teaching orders. Faith is no less social a procedure than its opposite, therapy. (25)

Simplicity is a complex cultural achievment. I consider it a grave error, something dangerously Romantic and self-dramatizing in our (mainly) Christian tradition, to oppose faith and culture. That Romanticism has led to further false--even catastrophic--oppositions: as, for examples, between energy and morality, between achievement and decency. (30)

. . . our barbaric enlightenments have deinhabited the agency of inhibition: super-ego. The super-ego has not declined; it has undergone a metamorphosis. That agency made too active in any cause, rather than constraining, incites; modern criminals and would-be revolutionaries are not creatures of 'impulse,' as in the nineteenth-century imagination, but more and more often, I suspect, driven creatures of high principle, militants of this immediacy and that. . . . Such activists of easy principle are one price we are paying for packaging authority entirely inside quotation marks; inside those quotes our principles no longer bring home to us the tragic sense of danger inseparable from all their enactments. (43-44)

A society that does not have the tragic sense to punish must die at the hands of its decriminalized transgressors--at the top and bottom of the social structure. (56)

All giftedness, like Barth's, signifies guilt---although all guilt does not signify giftedness, for to become gifted, guilt must take on the form of privaleged knowledge. This is to say: our guilt must be instructed. For a true culture, there must be masters of the knowledge of guilt. (61)

A sociological definition of a Jew: he who resists---i.e., resists the very problem of his identity. (78)

A true prophet is called to conserve what is being destroyed. Problem-solvers parody prophecy; they call themselves to destroy what may be possible still to conserve. (76)

Meaningful interdicts must be taught; we humans are not born with them. On the contrary, the human is a born criminal. . . . No culture can survive without police of our sort---priests, teachers, whoever acts as a responsible draftsman of the ceaselessly redrawn hermeneutic circle, within which is the essential safety, from the danger of living outside it. . . . Where authority is no longer mindful, and no longer deeply felt, first by the authority-figures themselves, then all power to armed nihilists is more than likely. (93-94)

Even those students who do not want to become operators or projectors, either in the university or its prototype, corporate technology, do not understand that the captains of our knowledge industry are perfectly willing to give them what they do not yet know enough not to want, gratifying therapies and circuses--candy floss in all colors, fed on demand. (96)

The well-known special law, with reference to academic institutions, is: mediocrities finish first. (96)

Greatest among the stupefactions is an almost complete sense of historical memory within the contemporary family. Our students, whether from families more affluent or less, have inherited nothing from their ancestors; they are the true disinherited. Feeling the pinch of their disinheritance, made acutely impatient by it, some of the most promising among our students are more deeply pained by dissolutions of historical memory than they can say. Indeed, precisely these dissolutions make it almost impossible for them to articulate anything; they mistake their emotional states for statements. Detecting the advanced barbarism into which they have come, our students sometimes try, crudely inverting a politics, to demand from their college what it is too cowardly and condescending to give: a teaching authority of feeling intellect. (97)

What the most promising students imagine depends upon how they are sprung loose from their verbal and numerical dexterity routines, on the one hand, and from their demoralizing entertainments, on the other. Under the present egalitarian experience swindle, even the most promising student is likely to be confused about what he wants. (98)

In a true academy, the teacher is not to be criticized, except as he has not become authoritative enough, in himself, repeating to his successors of what was repeated to him, the knowledge that is in repetition. (117)

The classic professor was engaged in the transmission (and creation by interpretive linking to his predecessors and successors) of privlaged knowledge. In contrast, the therapist is no model; he is a nonmaster, a tactician on how to exempt the self from those relations of reverence without which there is no justice. (124)

To see so many would-be students, lost, on every campus, for want of teachers, describes our universities. Now mainly as knowledge factories, they pump out research that legitimates, as Science, the destruction of reverence and justice. (124)

The disciplines of the intellect that constitute higher schooling are inherently undemocratic and need both long preparation and regular exercise in a protected institution uniquely unchanging in its object. If, in a thoroughly rationalized culture, no knowledge need be privaledged and no superiority personal, then the university has no sacred object, no intellect relating to the interdicts and their remissions specially to be cultivated in its precinct, no special objectivity. (125-126)

How fortunate future generations will be: they will be incapable of being deceived, for they will have nothing in which to disbelieve. (126)

How can we expect true disciples, in real disciplines, when we ourselves have never met a master, but only office managers and more or less celebrated critics of whatever might be construed as reverence? (Meanwhile, justice is coupled with irreverence.) We have taken too seriously the superiority of all disestablishements; nothing entitles us to this belief in unbelief---and yet this is what we teach; a transgressive mystique under various names; critical, original, liberating, innovative, fulfilling, christening, actualizing, ad infinitum; reflexive is the latest. (172)

For self-respect continues to depend upon, and derive from, a respect that is not for self. If the interdicts are not deeply installed, if conscience does not express, in its particular loyalties, the prototypical series of authority figures, then authority acquires no presence; where no presence presides, authority must fail all those who can achieve self-respect only as a by-product of an inner distance that is the achievement of a disciplined relation ot authority. Where authority is not personal, and the personal not made credal, in institutions that are the ground of habit, there, at best gently, the prototypal series runs out in generalities and pale abstractions. We arrive at Protestant pathos. (100)

A true charismatic is victorious in defeat. Never having submitted to a higher authority, the modern charismatic can never sustain defeat. (106)

Culturally, truth is the renunciation of sheer movement, of lightness and play; aestheticizing reality can make truth less grim, but jokes can be quite cruel, specially when perpetrated by the young. The joy of games depends upon there being something that is not a game---something grave to relieve the tedious jollity. (206)

A premonition of what hysteria meant occurs in Goethe's analysis of Luciane as a person incapable of 'distinguishing the profitable from the unprofitable" performance. (133)

Hysterical attacks against a defaulting authority have grown obsolete; that obsolescence is one of Freud's victories. As authority declines so do the rewards (even if only a certain family celebrity) for hysterical performances. . . . Re-educated women do not swoon. Instead, the more liberated sort rant about their captivity to defaulting father figures, Leones, who refuse to hold them captive. (133)

As Rousseau rightly imagined, 'natural man' emerges at the end of civilization, not at its beginning; and, in the end, he will voice all sorts of views, take all manner of positions, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, political and apolitical, monoatheist and poly, whatever serves his sense of well-being in particular situations. His 'gods' are never resurrected; they are terms, made for use and in no way commanding obedience. Where revelations were, there the writings of 'natural man' will be, at once confessional and pedagogic. At the end of culture, 'natural man' will find all positions worth taking. Why not the clenched fist, raised and closed tight around the cross, at once a gesture of benediction and violence? Teh therapeutic is capable of posing with the most opposed ideals; none compel or direct him to stand long in one pose. Such a stand would mean immobility, one of the two dread dieases of the therapeutic. (152)

Natural man is the self-conscious killer who kills for the sake of his health. (153)

Be grateful for your sense of guilt and doubly grateful if it has not been badly damaged. Without that guilt, an elaborately cultivated strength of inhibition preventing or punishing transgressive activity, there can be neither aristocracies of the feeling intellect nor democracies of obedience. Guilt, subserving the interdicts, is inseparable from the workings of high culture. (156)

Authority emerges out of the crucible in which desires are tempered. What is good can only emerge in interdictory form. From among the lessons to be learnt still in the history of our culture, we have forgotten that no good can be achieved except as the supercession of desire and the limit of power. It is in this latter sense alone, as a modal naming of interdicts, that authority is itself right and necessary. All true ethics are ethics or self-deprivation, modeled in a commanding interdictory character. I all other forms, authority abolishes itself, without the help of some critical theory, as a transgressive search for power, based on a model of unsatisfiable Man, in endless thrusts toward what is not himself. The 'surplus value' of desire is death. (207)

But the real young are not old Marcuses made immortal by sexual energy. Until they are inducted into the order of the old, graven with a tragic sense of the world that will not yield to their wishes, the real young remain desperate dying animals, too young to assume responsibility, and hiding from reality behind the skirt of their ethics of conscience. (207)