Philip Rieff is remembered today—if at all—as the one-time husband of his former student Susan Sontag, and a crankily conservative observer of American society, which he saw as violent, stupid, and doomed. The sociologist is appreciated by some thoughtful figures on the right today as an advocate against what he perceived as the misguided “liberations” of the 1960s and ’70s, for a return to “repression” and respect for the “sacred.”
