July 4, 2006

Philip Rieff, Sociologist and Critic of Academe, Dies at 83

The sociologist Philip Rieff died on Saturday at the age of 83, The New York Times reported today.

Mr. Rieff, who was best known for his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Harper & Row, 1966), was a severe critic of contemporary academic culture. In Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death (University of Chicago, 1973), he excoriated his colleagues for failing to embody what he considered authentic authority and intellect, writing:

“Less and less is taught by more and more managers of the false knowledge industry, or by gurus of experimental Life, who help nothing by their preachings. These intellectual nullities, whatever side they are on in the passing political show, have disclosed their real problem: authority in the classroom. They have no idea of authority and therefore everything interdictory appears too simple to match their scientific data or literary experience.”

In a conversation last fall (The Chronicle, November 11, 2005), Mr. Rieff said that he “fell in love with the idea of the university” when he arrived at the University of Chicago as a student, but that he “soon lost all illusions about the purity of academic life.”

Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, studied with Mr. Rieff at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s. In November, Mr. Marino told The Chronicle that Mr. Rieff “took his vocation as a professor seriously, in a way that was very powerful. ... He gave me a better respect for the civilizing function of authority. Most teachers won’t tell you the things that you really need to hear.”

For a long period after 1973, Mr. Rieff published very little. Recently, however, with the help of several of his former students, he assembled four new books for publication. In January, the University of Virginia Press published My Life Among the Deathworks, Volume 1 of the trilogy Sacred Order/Social Order. And in February 2007, Pantheon Books will publish Mr. Rieff’s long-rumored book Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us.

Previous: Yale's Handling of Federal Grant Money Is Under Review
Next: Princeton Concedes It Spent Some Donor Funds for Different Purpose