As we advance more deeply into the peculiar nihilism of the twenty-first century, the work of sociologist Philip Rieff (1922-2006) offers perhaps the single most incisive analysis of the symptomatic disorders of both his time and ours, for grasping the significance and development of what he called our therapeutic culture of panic and emptiness. Beginning with a body of work that culminated relatively early in his intellectual life with the publication of two widely acclaimed books, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966), Rieff had established himself by the last half of the 1960s as one of the most brilliant and daunting public intellectuals of his day. After the publication of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, however, the volume and visibility of Rieff’s published work steadily declined and continued to do so through the end of the century with the notable exception of Fellow Teachers (1973), which was initially published in an earlier, shorter version in Salmagundi (Summer/Fall 1972).¹ The publication of Fellow Teachers fifty years ago marked the close of Rieff’s role as a public intellectual. Rieff’s rejection of this role appears to have resulted from at least two related conclusions. First, Rieff had concluded that genuine teaching must take place in the classroom, not in the public arena. “Intellectuals belong in and to teaching institutions.”² The transfer of knowledge requires the presence of teachers and students alike who are prepared to submit to the discipline of learning together, not unattached “free-floating” intellectuals and unprepared audiences. Second, Rieff had also concluded that because liberal society existed in name only, he was at risk of being received as nothing more than another public performer in a culture obsessed with the charisma of publicity and bereft of any respect for the integrity of individual character. Indeed, as Rieff made clear in his essay on the public disgrace of Robert Oppenheimer published in his edited volume On Intellectuals (1969), character assassination was the preferred political option reserved for dealing with public intellectuals who still believed in open and honest debate in a post-liberal culture preoccupied with unmasking idealism and reducing everything to psychopathology.

As Jonathan Imber (a former student and editor of a collection of Rieff’s works prior to 1990, The Feeling Intellect) has reminded us, Rieff had published in a wide range of the most important public intellectual periodicals of his day prior to 1973, not simply in academic journals and books. These included Commentary, Encounter, Partisan Review, The New Leader, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, Daedalus (as a founding editor), Midstream, World Politics, The Kenyon Review, The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, and of course Salmagundi. After 1973, Rieff did not publish again in any of these periodicals, except for Salmagundi. During the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, Rieff published a small number of academic articles and reviews and accepted numerous invitations to give prestigious academic lectures, including the Gauss Lectures at Princeton, the Terry Lectures at Yale, the Trilling Lectures at Columbia, the Tate Willson Lectures at Southern Methodist University, and invitations to lecture in Canada and Australia. These lectures were occasions to rehearse portions of his magnum opus titled Sacred Order/Social Order, on which he labored from the 1970s onward.³ Near the end of his life, Rieff finally authorized the publication of four volumes of his work that would appear posthumously, three volumes of which were culled from thousands of pages of previously unpublished manuscripts that resulted in the first two volumes of Sacred Order/Social Order—My Life Among the Deathworks (2006) and The Crisis of the Officer Class (2007), and Charisma (2007). The fourth posthumous book and third volume of Sacred Order/Social Order, The Jew of Culture (2008), included one previously unpublished essay. Significantly, these four books were also edited by former students, including myself.

I.

Fellow Teachers is a pivotal work in Rieff’s oeuvre because it developed key themes from his earlier work, while at the same time it marked Rieff’s break with the great “undeceived” intellects of modernity, such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber. With Fellow Teachers, Rieff renounced what he had earlier characterized as the “ultimate violence to which the modern intellectual is committed…the desire not to be deceived,” including his own previous defense of Freud’s anti-credal “analytic attitude,” turning sharply against Freud’s relentless attack upon established ideals and the very process of idealization. As Norman Brown wrote in his review of Fellow Teachers, Rieff rediscovered “the necessity for the category of the sacred.” With this discovery, Rieff embraced the definition of traditional intellectuals formulated by Edward Shils, his former teacher at the University of Chicago, as individuals “with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of the universe, and the rules which govern society.” Indeed, the essay by Shils from which this quote is taken appears in On Intellectuals. To understand the evolution and implications of Rieff’s thought in Fellow Teachers, it is first necessary to review his theory of culture prior to this work.

From early on, Rieff assumed that at any given time and place, there is only one culture. He did not accept theories of “two cultures,” or conceptualize cultures in terms of “subcultures” and “autonomous spheres,” because such approaches obscure the highly differentiated structure of every culture, whether postmodern or primitive. Every culture is best understood as a dialectic of No and Yes, with the No’s dominant in every functional culture until late modernity, although every culture has also been characterized by significant tensions between restrictions and permissions. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff formulated this dialectic in terms of expressive “controls” and “releases,” arguing that all cultures until our own have been characterized by mandatory therapies of commitment defined by a dominant symbolic of “shalt nots” that supported a repressive-sublimative organization of motives and a subordinate symbolic of remissions that eased the strain of conforming to the controls. It is to control our “dis-ease as individuals” that we act culturally “in good faith,” Rieff explained. “Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and the filling up of emptiness.”⁴ Historically, in periods of significant cultural change when the established dialectic of controls and releases failed, a releasing symbolic became more compelling. Whenever such a failure of the cultural system developed, a period of cultural unrest and revolution followed until the establishment of a new symbolic of controls and releases, such as occurred when Christianity transformed a radically remissive Roman culture, eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century, or when competing definitions of Islam displaced traditional Arab culture during the seventh century.

Rieff argues in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which builds upon the last chapter of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (“The Rise of Psychological Man”), that with the emergence of an unprecedented therapeutic culture we have veered away from the classic model of cultural revolutions. Renewals of interdictory controls are no longer possible because all compelling ideals of self-renunciation have come under permanent and easy suspicion as we have learned how to probe and critique the unwitting part of culture necessary for thinking and acting in good faith. In American, European, and other advanced industrial (now post-industrial) societies, the triumph of a therapeutic personality type has signaled the defeat of traditional moralities of self-denial grounded in the assumption that the path to individual salvation is through submission to doctrines of communal purpose and adherence to narratives of spiritual ascent. An endlessly manipulatable sense of well-being has become the goal of life, supported by remissive moralities of self-affirmation authorizing experimentation with an endless variety of lifestyles.

By the early 1970s, Rieff began consistently stipulating the primary controlling forms of all cultures as interdicts and the secondary releasing forms as remissions (he would later refine his definition of the primary forms to account for taboos). In Fellow Teachers, Rieff explicitly introduced a third motif by stipulating violations of interdicts as transgressions, thereby expanding his theory of culture to accent his developing concept of the sacred as grounded in forbidden knowledge of “what is not to be done.” The introduction of the weightier language of interdicts, remissions, and transgressions allowed Rieff to analyze the variations within and between cultures more accurately and to underscore the dangers inherent in the dynamics of therapeutic culture in a way that he had not done previously. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff’s tone had been ironic and irenic: “What apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt? Perhaps the elimination of the tragic sense…is no tragedy.”⁵ In Fellow Teachers, Rieff’s tone turned mordant and damning, his condemnations of therapeutic culture more direct (despite his opening feint that he was neither for nor against the therapeutic), and his style more Nietzschean. Fellow Teachers is a dense, erudite book of over two hundred pages, packed with long and extensive footnotes, and filled with probing interpretations of Kierkegaard, Luther, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Conrad, Tillich, Fanon, and many others. Unfortunately, Rieff attempted to preserve the format of an extended lecture, from which the book originated; consequently, it contains no chapters or explicit organization. It is not for the uninitiated. Therefore, I shall concentrate on several themes that I believe will help to clarify what is at stake in the work and provide some entry points for unpacking its contents.

II.

The first of these themes is the death of culture, as opposed to the death of a culture. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff wrote, with the failing liberal-Christian culture of America and Europe foremost in mind, that “the death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.”⁶ Where the institutions of church and family had once transmitted demanding, militant ideals, now the hospital and the theatre were rapidly becoming the putative normative institutions of a permanently remissive therapeutic culture. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff returned to this argument with a vengeance, driving home his thesis that not only had normative institutions failed but that there was little prospect for the renewal of any normative institutions that could generate and instill the militant self-ideals necessary for a genuine culture: the primary interdictory motifs of Christianity were dead (though transgressive energies against the Jews persisted); the constitution of the United States was the creation of an interdictory culture that no longer existed (but therapies of sexual expression and violence grew in the name of freedom). If the hospital had been the most compelling institutional model in The Triumph of the Therapeutic for an emergent society preoccupied with assuaging hurt egos, in Fellow Teachers the theatre became an even more compelling model for a society that seemed to be engaged in endless role-playing and public expressions of transgression; hence, Rieff’s interest in the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman, whom Rieff helped secure a faculty position as his colleague at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.

To refer to the death of culture per se in any standard social scientific understanding of culture makes little sense. What Rieff meant by the death of culture is the death of high culture. The death of high culture refers not to the death of the arts and sciences, but to the death of the interdictory forms and deeply internalized militant oppositional ideals necessary for individuals to find themselves and their higher purpose in life, and equally necessary for the highest spiritual achievements, including the arts and sciences, even when they register rebellions against the interdicts of high culture. To clarify what was at stake, Rieff added the subtitle Of Culture and Its Second Death to the second edition of Fellow Teachers (1985). It is a direct reference to the Augustinian second death of the soul. The cover of the second edition also included an image of David’s The Death of Socrates to represent visually the highest ideals of self-renunciation that were no longer culturally exemplified or available, indicating that Keats’ soul-making journey had become difficult, even impossible, in the present therapeutic age.

A second theme that permeates Rieff’s entire oeuvre is the concept of guilt. In Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff raised questions about the tendency of Freudian psychology to reinterpret traditional religious and moral understandings of guilt as a sense of guilt. In the Freudian understanding, a sense of guilt was not an accurate index of moral offense but all too commonly a symptom of psychological compulsion and irrationality. In the latter work, Rieff traced out the implications of a vulgarized Freudian psychology for a therapeutic culture in which better living rather than the good life became the new standard. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff attempted to find his theoretical way back to the good life. Guilt is repeatedly identified as essential to the psychic structure of all high cultures insofar as it supports or “subserves” the interdicts. (Rieff made no distinction between guilt and shame cultures. In later writings, he stipulates that shame is simply the social dimension of guilt.) All cultures of militant truths must establish inhibitions in the psyche through the mechanism of guilt to control impulsive-expressive tendencies and to render individuals trustworthy and civil towards one another.

Rieff’s theory of culture posits (while owing something to Kierkegaard) that the limitation of possibilities in the personality is necessary for fending off the panic and emptiness to which we are otherwise prone. What Rieff repeatedly referred to as our “cultureless society” in Fellow Teachers failed to accomplish this function because the habitual discipline necessary for creating the unwitting self-renunciations of culture cannot develop without the internalization of interdictory limits and the cultivation of guilt knowledge. At several points during his theoretical career, Rieff returned to the Deweyan critique of the concept of instinct, arguing for the theoretical importance of habit, a concept routinely ignored by sociologists (Colin Campbell and Charles Camic are important exceptions). “Impulse,” Rieff argued in Fellow Teachers, “indicates the failure of habit, of interdictory discipline,” including the failure of what used to be called “character.”⁷ With this theoretical move, Rieff advanced beyond Freud’s instinct theory, while also shifting his focus toward the failure of psychic defenses against both internal and external stimuli in therapeutic culture. All cultures must instill the capacity to resist what Rieff called “the assault of experience” (an expression borrowed from Henry James) in Fellow Teachers, not simply the impulses of the self, especially a culture such as our own that has advanced exponentially from print to electronic forms of communication in the five decades since its publication.

Rieff believed during the 1960s that the civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King might result in a renewal of interdictory controls, anchored in a cultivation of interdictory discipline against violence. In fact, Rieff even wrote to King at one point, but to no avail, to propose that King write an introduction to an edited volume of writings by Gandhi on non-violence (presumably to be edited by Rieff himself). By the time Fellow Teachers was published, however, Rieff observed that “in its early phase, when Martin Luther King was its voice, the black-led civil rights movement carried a meaningful interdictory thrust. ‘Freedom Now’ had little of the transgressive public meaning it now carries.”⁸ Likewise, Rieff had also held out at least “some hope” that the Vietnam war protests might lead to a renascence of true guilt:

The opposition to the Vietnam war, even crossed as it was by various transgressive protest movements, gave reasons for hope. I have said many times over that there can be no culture without guilt; Vietnam rekindled our sense of guilt, not widely or deeply; nevertheless, that indispensable and true sensibility seemed alive again. But I fear that the true guilt for which I hope was crossed by false, creating predicates which mixed criticism of warmongers, professionals of state-abstracted violence, with amplifications of transgressive behavior among anti-culture mongers.⁹

By the 1970s, Rieff had clearly given up hope for any renascence of true guilt, despite his half-hearted assertion that the therapeutic movement had “not yet penetrated deep down into the culture class-order, but dominates only…the transgressive top, the commercialized middle stratum, and the false (bohemian) bottom.”¹⁰ No guilt inducing cultural elite could be seen on the horizon because the dynamics of therapeutic culture subverted the very process of idealization both sociologically and psychologically.

This brings us to three interrelated themes at the center of Fellow Teachers that are of incalculable importance for understanding the deeper disorders of our age: the remissive-transgressive dynamics of therapeutic culture, the prevalence of dramaturgy in social and political life, and the lack of stable psychic structures in individuals.

III.

As illustrated by the civil rights and Vietnam anti-war movements, Rieff had learned from the 1960s that the remissive freedoms of therapeutic culture opened the door to transgressive freedoms. As King himself had feared, the interdictory freedom of non-violence too easily gave way to the threats of violence behind the slogan of “black power.”¹¹ Anti-war protests turned violent in a therapeutic culture with fewer and fewer interdicts. The remissive middle ground proved unstable. “Immediately behind the hippies are the thugs. They occupy the remissive space opened up by the hippies, deepening it from an aesthetic into a politics…transgressive succeeds remissive.”¹² The remissive freedoms of the 1960s seemed harmless enough, especially with reference to sexuality, drug use, and various forms of deviant acting out, but Rieff emphasized (in a voice that still sounds overly conventional, if not reactionary) that such therapeutic license in social relations too often turned manipulative and destructive, that such freedoms were simply another dimension of a society characterized by extraordinary incivility, economic exploitation, and racist conduct. With the emergence of a therapeutic culture in which religious and moral interdicts were failing, the danger grew that transgressions would multiply unchecked, even as “deviance” was, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan later observed, “defined down.”

In Fellow Teachers, Rieff repeatedly returned to a dramaturgical model of society and politics to illuminate the remissive-transgressive dynamics of therapeutic culture. Dramaturgical analysis was not original to Rieff, nor even to Goffman. Rieff had undoubtedly read the fragmented final chapter of Kafka’s Amerika, “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.” More importantly, Rieff was quite familiar with Nietzsche’s assertion in The Gay Science (passage 356) that “every time man starts to discover the extent to which he is playing a role and the extent to which he can be an actor, he becomes an actor…With this, a new human flora and fauna emerges that cannot grow in firmer and more limited ages…it is thus that the most interesting and maddest ages always emerge, in which ‘the actors,’ all types of actors, are the real masters.” Fellow Teachers built upon Nietzsche’s insights about the “maddest” of ages. Therapeutic culture may be understood as a culture in which individuals begin to imagine that they are actors engaged in role-playing. No one plays a role without thought of change; no one is irrevocably bound by a firmly established identity, by what Rieff variously describes as “character,” “inwardness,” “militant ideals,” and the “truth of resistance” because interdictory discipline fails and individuals begin to imagine that they may become nothing more than virtuoso actors. But the collapse of a stable psychic structure in individuals results in the need for additional therapy. Action is further freed from belief with the erotic sphere as the paradigm of unbelieving therapeutic action. “In a cultureless society of role-changers…sexuality was bound to become the first object of therapy.”¹³ But it is not the last, as the separation of belief from action spreads to other realms of society and politics.

One of the most important contributions of Fellow Teachers to understanding both the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is Rieff’s analysis of politics, specifically his stipulation of the link between social dramaturgy and totalitarian politics as located in guiltless role-playing, in unbelieving action. “In a theatrical culture, therapeutic role-playing becomes the major form of existence; reality becomes some temporarily preferred style, a pose the more preposterous the more likely to be adopted.” But Rieff immediately follows with the jarring statement that “historical reality becomes a theatre of transgressions” to indicate that therapeutic role-playing is not simply a matter of eroticism, aesthetics, or economics, but preparation for a novel and deadly form of politics.¹⁴ At first, the leap from theatrical role-playing to historical transgressions seems to be an exercise in theatrics itself. There are many such sudden jumps from the remissive to the transgressive in Fellow Teachers. But Rieff’s point is that without interdictory forms, remissive conduct can easily become transgressive, especially in the case of politics because politics concerns the struggle for power.

IV.

For Rieff the barbarism of twentieth century Nazism, Fascism, and Communism was unprecedented because it was not carried out by fanatical believers. On the contrary, they were “anything but men of deep and settled convictions.”¹⁵ Totalitarian leaders, such as Hitler and Mussolini, were, if anything, preposterous and deadly actors. “As Mussolini grasped, fascism is not a creed but an opportunity.”¹⁶ Rieff picked up and advanced the counter-intuitive insights of George Orwell and Hannah Arendt that totalitarian politics was and is based upon the destruction of the capacity to hold firm beliefs, which is another way of referring to the elimination of “character” and “inwardness.” Orwell and Arendt were two of Rieff’s most important theoretical “predecessors.” In fact, Rieff wrote an early essay on the separation of belief from action in Orwell’s “post-liberal imagination.” As in the case of King, Rieff considered Orwell’s thought to be important enough that he wrote to his widow, Sonia Orwell, proposing that he edit her husband’s letters, only to be turned down. Likewise, Rieff was also quite familiar with the work of Arendt, having written a penetrating review essay of The Origins of Totalitarianism in the early 1950s. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff drew a clear link between Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism and the totalitarian potential he saw developing within therapeutic culture: “One of the most trustworthy guides to our time and its past, Hannah Arendt, put it profoundly…‘the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction, but to destroy the capacity to form any.’ That capacity destroyed, action is released from motive.”¹⁷ Under such circumstances, distinctions between the political right and left, or conservatives, liberals, and radicals, mean little. Politics becomes an exercise in mass theatre and spectacle. Mass conformity and external discipline replace the credal discipline of true believers. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff asserted that “the genius of mass political dramaturgy passed to the New Right in the nineteen-thirties; in the seventies, theatrical genius is entirely the prop of the New Left.”¹⁸ Can there be any doubt about where Rieff would locate the empty center of our omnipresent mass political dramaturgy today?

The mass political dramaturgy of the twenty-first century, whether of the so-called right or the so-called left, is defined by its violation of the “inviolate inwardness” of individuals. Rieff thought that he saw evidence of such violations in one of the last pieces he wrote in the 1990s on the Clarence Thomas hearings for his nomination to the United States Supreme Court. Rieff concluded that both Thomas and Anita Hill were subjected to character assassination by the political theatrics of the Senate committee. “Societies,” Rieff had argued in Fellow Teachers, “are vast public networks by which secret lives are linked one to another, and yet at a distance remote enough for each life to remain as it is, inviolate, secret from all others. Publicity…more and more exposes the secret life, as if under some mandate to ruin the only life worth living, which is not too well known, or necessarily too well liked, by others.”¹⁹ Contemporary politics only amplifies the transgressions of publicity.

Rieff’s influence on scholars of his generation, such as Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert Bellah, is well known. However, more recent attempts to draw upon Rieff’s legacy would be well advised to consider his refusal of the role of public intellectual in Fellow Teachers, particularly his determination not to be drawn into the “theatre of ideas.”²⁰ Rieff’s refusal to be politicized and his insistence that the interdictory discipline of high culture is very much a matter of the slow accretions of private character, rather than public pronouncements and polemics, defines a litmus test for preventing his theory from becoming just another ideology. Oddly enough, it has been faith-based intellectuals who have proven, in some cases, to be the most sensitive and, in others, to be the most oblivious to the nuances of Rieff’s work, along with the detached analytic social scientists who are clueless about the nature of our cultural crisis. Both the oblivious and the clueless would simply update our contemporary therapeutic theatre of ideas to incorporate a one-dimensional Rieff. However, Rieff is not so easily assimilated. In addition to resisting all attempts to sloganize and politicize his work, Rieff’s harsh denouncements were paradoxically balanced by a studied hanging back, double crossings of his own positions, a refusal to be backed into a historical/political corner, and careful distinctions between public and private life.

Equally important, Rieff would be the first to say that his theory may take us in directions that he did not necessarily intend or envision: Rieff’s criticism of abortion rights and sexual unrestraint applies equally well to gun rights and vigilante violence, to Roe v. Wade as well as District of Columbia v. Heller. When Rieff argues for “our third force in defense of culture, neither technological nor sensualist, but a cadre of teaching interpreters,”²¹ or states that “we have to fight it out, our own special way, here, in this vast horror, without feeling holy about our decision,”²² or explains that “our defenses must be different, neither sectarian nor quarrelsome,”²³ he is addressing, first and foremost, those fellow teachers, present and future, who grasp that their true vocation is to cultivate some truth of resistance in their students to the constant assaults of experience, sexual, political, economic, and otherwise. Once cultivated and developed in the lives of individual students, what Rieff once called “the nimbus of resistance” to the social order and its corruptions may then spread outward into the larger society in the hope of saving others from their second death.

Rieff was clearly possessed by that “higher discomfort” of high culture that he aimed to enliven in his students, sometimes to the point of excess and arrogance.²⁴ That arrogance of the spirit, what Rieff would later call “spiritual snobbery,” a hypertrophy of the interdictory, is clearly present in Fellow Teachers, as it sometimes was in his classroom. But it is an understandable and forgivable arrogance given the immensity and importance of the task that Rieff set before himself. Rieff’s final great opponent was not Freud, but Nietzsche. I distinctly recall sitting in my first graduate seminar with Rieff, fifty years ago in the fall of 1974, as we “unpacked” Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil line by line, word by word, over the course of the semester. When we finally (after several weeks) advanced to Nietzsche’s passage in the Introduction concerning the struggle against Plato and Christianity creating “a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known,” proclaiming that “with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals,” I remember Rieff imitating an archer pulling back a bow to shoot for a distant goal as he gave what he called a “lecturette” on the “magnificent tension of the spirit.” It was at that point I began to understand that Rieff was talking about himself as much as Nietzsche, and that in his own spiritual struggles the central figure might well be Nietzsche because he feared that Nietzsche might unintentionally unbend the bow. Rieff was no longer an analytic sharpshooter, but a spiritual archer. During this first seminar, I gradually began to understand that Rieff aimed to impart to us as his students that same “higher discomfort” of the spirit that Charles Horton Cooley associated with the construction of the “ideal self,” Thomas Garrigue Masaryk with “spiritual culture,” and Max Weber with “vocation.”

As three of Rieff’s most important theoretical predecessors in sociology, Cooley, Masaryk, and Weber played a critical role in defining Rieff’s own authority as a “presiding presence,” both inside the classroom and out. They illustrate Rieff’s contention that high culture is an inheritance that must be reclaimed by each generation, especially in a culture as autobiographical as our own in which all creeds have failed. In his own scholarship and teaching, Rieff discerned that Cooley’s “God-term” of the “primary group” is the key to understanding Cooley’s moral intensity as a sociologist who grasped the failure of all creeds at the dawn of the twentieth century, even as the idea of the primary group has since become just another empty concept for fellow teachers and students of sociology today. Likewise, Rieff grasped that Masaryk was perhaps the last great credal defender of democratic liberalism in his titanic struggle against Marxism and its heirs in Central Europe (Lenin’s comment that Masaryk was his “most serious ideological antagonist in Europe” indicates the stakes of the fight). As the founder and first president of the republic of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk successfully combined the vocations of science and politics, of teacher and leader, in a manner that neither Weber nor Rieff thought any longer possible.²⁵ However, this did not prevent Rieff from meeting Weber’s “demands of the day” in response to the dark times of his generation in his vocation as a scholar-teacher. If, as George Steiner has contended, “there have been few attempts to relate the dominant phenomenon of twentieth-century barbarism to a more general theory of culture,” then Rieff’s theory of culture must surely rank as the single most important shot at such a daunting target to date.²⁶