Philip Rieff and Fellow Teachers

Excerpt

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 Rieff’s 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. Rieff’s 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, Harper’s 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. …