With ""My Life among the Deathworks; Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority"", the renowned cultural theorist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff inaugurates a trilogy that signals the summation of his scholarly lifework. With this series, ""Sacred Order/Social Order"", to be published in consecutive volumes, Rieff both continues and supersedes the lines of thought that characterize the earlier, influential works upon which his reputation was forged. Readers familiar with Rieff's distinctive oeuvre will recognize central themes and find final recitations on the cultural impact of Freud and his creation ""psychological man"" or ""the therapeutic,"" which Rieff here renames the ""new man"". Whether conversant with Rieff's work or new to its unique interpretive power, readers of ""Sacred Order/Social Order"" will discover a series of provocative insights, illuminated by Rieff's wide-ranging expositions, theoretical advances, and stylistic innovations. In this first volume, Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations and unique juxtapositions, he displays remarkable erudition in drawing from such disciplines as sociology, history, literature, poetry, music, plastic arts, and film; he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history. Our modern culture - to Rieff's mind only the ""third"" type in Western history - is the object of his deepest scrutiny, described here as morally ruinous, death-affirming rather than life-affirming, and representing an unprecedented attempt to create a culture completely devoid of any concept of the sacred. For Rieff, culture represents the ""form of fighting before the firing begins"" in a literal life-and-death struggle for a particular type of world-creation. Having concluded in this final phase of his career that there is no neutral ground in this struggle, Rieff takes aim at many of the most significant ""deathworks"" in modern literature, art, and history - from Joyce's ""Finnegans Wake"" and ""Duchamp's Etant donnes"" to Hitler's death camps - in an attempt to undo them by using them against themselves. In so doing, he seeks to show the reader what really animates, and is ultimately at stake, in the contemporary ""culture wars"" raging over such issues as euthanasia, education, medical research, sexuality, race, class, and gender.

Philip Rieff earned recognition as one of the most profound social theorists of culture and authority of the twentieth century. Through such works as "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" and "The Triumph of the Therapeutic, " he proved himself an incisive interpreter of Freud and his legacy. His work now culminates with the long-awaited trilogy "Sacred Order/Social Order, " a three-volume work on social theory and contemporary culture.

Arnold Eisen chose the selections for the final volume of the trilogy in consultation with Philip Rieff. All of the selections bear on the nature of the "Jew of culture." Rieff explicitly and consistently identified with this ideal-type, named for the first time in "Fellow Teachers, " and crucial in one form or another to everything he wrote. For the rest of Rieff's long career, "Jew of culture" would serve as foil, countertype, corrective, and adversary to the "therapeutics" who represented both Rieff's analysands and his antagonists. The purpose of this collection of Rieff's writings, undertaken at his suggestion, is to trace the evolution of the "Jew of culture" over the course of his work. In doing so we gain particular insight into his distinctive theory of society and the self; we also come to better understand the theorist.

Philip Rieff earned recognition as one of the most profound social theorists of culture and authority of the twentieth century. Through such works as Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, he proved himself an incisive interpreter of Freud and his legacy. His work now culminates with the long-awaited trilogy, Sacred Order/Social Order, a three-volume work on social theory and contemporary culture.

In Volume 2, The Crisis of the Officer Class: The Death of the Tragic Sensibility, Phillip Rieff continues his assault against the deathworks of our modern age. Invoking his theory developed in Volume 1, he develops his critique of our current culture as distinguishable only by its rejection of any and all visions of sacred order.