"[T]his transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia"
Philip Rieff was an American sociologist and cultural critic, best known for his early-career work on Sigmund Freud and later criticisms of modern culture. He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until 1992 after briefer positions at the University of Chicago, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of a number of books on Sigmund
"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."
"[The United States and the post-Stalinist Soviet Union,] [b]oth issue from the assumption that wealth is a superior and adequate substitute for symbolic impoverishment. Both American and Soviet cultures are essentially variants of the same belief in wealth as the functional equivalent of a high civilization. In both cultures, the controlling symbolism has been stripped down to a belief in the efficacy of wealth. Quantity has become quality. The answer to all questions of “what for?” is “more.” ... Out of this redefinition, Western culture is changing already into a symbol system unprecedented in its plasticity and absorptive capacity. Nothing much can oppose it really, and it welcomes all criticism, for, in a sense, it stands for nothing."
"Surely the romantic and now permanent revolution against the ancient regime of reason is against a regime largely invented by the revolutionaries themselves."
"[To Freud], [t]he ascetic was limited, and often broken, in his organizational usefulness by a naïve dedication to principle."
"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."
"Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living."