ABSTRACT
Philip Rieff’s admiration for Charles Horton Cooley operated at several levels. Cooley impressed upon him the obligations of a vocation that was in both of their historical moments still balancing the demands of the day (professional ambitions) with the life of the mind. Cooley’s optimism about a bustling society was balanced against Rieff’s uncertainty about the fate of therapeutic culture. Cooley believed in a canon of great literature that his concept of culture demanded. Rieff embraced this canon as well. Finally, both sociologists agreed across generations that methodology alone should not consume the education of sociologists. Rieff did not refer to Cooley specifically again in any of his later published writings. However silent he may have been in naming Cooley again in those writings, the spirit of Cooley always pulled him back from the precipice of despair.
