Philip Rieff earned recognition as one of the most profound social theorists of culture and authority of the twentieth century. Through such works as
Freud: The Mind of the Moralist
and
The Triumph of the Therapeutic , he proved himself an incisive interpreter of Freud and his legacy. His work now culminates with the long-awaited trilogy
Sacred Order/Social Order , a three-volume work on social theory and contemporary culture.Arnold Eisen chose the selections for the final volume of the trilogy in consultation with Philip Rieff. All of the selections bear on the nature of the
Jew of culture.
Rieff explicitly and consistently identified with this ideal-type, named for the first time in Fellow Teachers, and crucial in one form or another to everything he wrote. For the rest of Rieff’s long career,
Jew of culture
would serve as foil, countertype, corrective, and adversary to the
therapeutics
who represented both Rieff’s analysands and his antagonists. The purpose of this collection of Rieff’s writings, undertaken at his suggestion, is to trace the evolution of the
Jew of culture
over the course of his work. In doing so we gain particular insight into his distinctive theory of society and the self; we also come to better understand the theorist.