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Philip Rieff

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Also known as Rieff

American sociologist (1922–2006)

Person · Open Library

Born
1922
Died
2006
Works
33

Top works

  • My life among the deathworks
  • Freud
  • Fellow teachers
  • The triumph of the therapeutic; uses of faith after Freud
  • Fellow Teachers

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Quotes

  • Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.
  • Surely the romantic and now permanent revolution against the ancient regime of reason is against a regime largely invented by the revolutionaries themselves.
  • Depth psychology has demolished the optimistic faith of democrats in the rationality of a free citizenry, by discovering that the average citizen (in or out of a crowd) is not rational. But this is no reason to despair. There remains what is for Freud perhaps the highest rationality: knowledge of the irrational, a knowledge which may be used […] to arrive at rational decisions essential to democracy.
  • Freud was overimpressed, it now appears, with the monolithic repressiveness of culture, and unable to perceive that our own culture might become highly permissive in the sphere of private sexual morals—the better to enforce its public repressions. The combination of a repressive political order with a permissive moral order is not unheard of in human history.
  • [T]his transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia
  • The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. …The grimness is relieved by the levity of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives.

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