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Soc (2013) 50:6164DOI 10.1007/s12115-012-9611-3
PROFILE
Philip Rieff and Fellow Teachers
Jonathan B. Imber
Published online: 19 December 2012# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Philip Rieff at the very end of his life and shortly following his death in 2006 literally doubled his published oeuvre from three books to six books (with The Mind of the Moralist, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and Fellow Teachers, on the one hand, and My Life Among the Deathworks, The Crisis of the Officer Class, and Charisma, on the other.) (The third work in Rieffs trilogy, The Jew of Culture, is largely previously published work, as was The Feeling Intellect from which The Jew of Culture draws conspicuously.) It is Fellow Teachers in 1973 that marks the end of his early and mid-career as a public intellectual. Rieffs relative obscurity that began afterwards had been preceded by his well-regarded publications in the most important public intellectual periodicals of his day, including Commentary, Encounter, Partisan Review, The New Leader, Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, Daedalus (as founding editor), Midstream, World Politics, Kenyon Review, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review. After 1973, at the age of 51, he never published again in any of these periodicals, with the exception of Salmagundi, not included in this litany.
If Rieff went subterranean, away from the published world of periodicals, he remained regularly active in the lecture world during the 1970s and 1980s, and they were prestigious lectures, including the Gauss Lectures at Princeton, the Terry Lectures at Yale, the Trilling Lectures at Columbia, and numerous invitations to lecture in Canada and Australia. Late in his career he lectured at the United States Naval Academy. All of these invitations came after 1973. All of them were rehearsals for his magnum opus, the trilogy on Sacred Order/Social Order. The iterations of manuscript that evolved over the course of some three
decades are testament to a very different idea about publishing and about audience. Following his own advice in Fellow Teachers, Rieff appeared determined to write more for himself than for any particular audience, offering instead the opportunity to be seen and heard rather than read in print.
What are we to make of this change in ambition as his...