Philip Rieff's Moral Vision of Sociology

Abstract

In this article I present Rieff as a theorist and moralist of cultural change. The trajectory of his work is from the elusively descriptive to the elusively prescriptive. Descriptively, Rieff identifies the elements of what he calls our current `negative communities' and contrasts them with moribund `positive communities' and their `therapies of commitment'. He believes that, among others, Weber and Freud both recognized that negative communities emerge once positive communities are recognized as illusory. Prescriptively, while still accepting the intellectual justification for negative communities, Rieff became transparently critical of their byproducts: a `remissive' culture incapable of distinguishing `god-terms' from `transgressive depths'. This culture produces a relativist, permissive culture, a version of the cult of the individual, alienation, consumerism and indifference to tradition. In most of his work, Rieff acknowledged the inevitability of negative community but not the inevitability of its byproducts. In his most recent work he has tried to preserve the monotheistic `second culture' and oppose the approaching `third culture' of modernity. Through his teaching and scholarship, Rieff has tried to envisage what a contemporary model of the sacred might be like in a negative community. In doing so, he has been drawn back to the positive communities that he had believed were no longer viable. Rieff's dilemma is that the sacred order that he wishes to preserve can only be defined by what it forbids. Therefore, any effort to specify it is self-defeating. It is preserved not through celebrations but by the negative and in his view vital emotion of guilt.