To what extent is the “the story about the analytic turn” in philosophy a story about politics?
There’s been an increased discussion in recent years of externalist explanations of philosophy, and one such explanation that has gotten a fair amount of attention lately is the idea that McCarthyist anti-communism in the United States in the middle of the 20th Century played a significant role in analytic philosophy’s emerging dominance in the discipline at the time.
In the following guest post, Sander Verhaegh of Tilburg University, shows how the picture is quite a bit more complicated than that, casting doubt on how much the “McCarthyist thesis” can explain.
The post grew out of research Professor Verhaegh conducted for his just-published book, Logical Positivism: An American History (also here and here).
Analytic Philosophy and McCarthyism: A New Look
by Sander Verhaegh
How to explain the analytic turn in American philosophy? One controversial thesis, regularly discussed in the blogosphere, is that analytic philosophy’s dominance is a product of McCarthyism. On this view, anti-communist repression forced philosophers to abandon socially-engaged, humanistic modes of inquiry, and to a replace them with a technical, ‘politically neutral’ approach. John McCumber develops the theory in two of his books and the hypothesis recently resurfaced in publications by Christoph Schuringa and by Robert Hanna, who likens postwar analytic philosophy to “McCarthy-style anti-communist, big-capitalist politics”.
Critics have pushed back hard. Richard Hudelson and Robert Evans argue that McCumber “fails to give a historically or philosophically coherent account” of the analytic turn, while E. J. Spode compares Schuringa’s book to “A Turd in the Punchbowl”. Some contend that the McCarthyist thesis ignores simultaneous analytic turns in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, such that it offers an “American explanation for … a pan-Anglophone phenomenon”. Others point out that some of the best-known analytic philosophers of the period, Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, were hardly the apolitical figures the thesis requires; while the most notorious anti-Communist witch-hunters, Arthur Lovejoy and Sidney Hook, were humanist philosophers who had studied with William James and John Dewey.
In this post, I discuss archival evidence that sheds new light on the question. In the last eight years, I spent much of my research time in archives for a book on the history of twentieth-century American philosophy, working through a wealth of material from the period: departmental records, diaries, correspondence, personnel files, and hundreds of newspapers and magazines. The book, Logical Positivism: An American History, reconstructs how émigré positivists and their American students and allies rose to dominance at private and public universities; and it shows that the story about the analytic turn is more complicated than the McCarthyist thesis suggests. In what follows, I argue that the Cold War did play a role in the development of American philosophy, albeit in various unexpected ways ignored by proponents of the McCarthyist view. At the same time, I argue that it was not the only factor, let alone a sufficient explanation, for the analytic turn.
The McCarthyist Thesis
Before discussing the evidence, let us get clear about the explanandum. Though there seem to be as many variants of the McCarthyist thesis as there are historians who have written about the period, no one argues that analytic philosophy itself is a product of the Cold War. Proponents and opponents agree that the analytic tradition predates the McCarthy era, in Europe and in the United States, even if anti-communist pressures may have changed its character in the 1950s. The central question is not to explain analytic philosophy’s presence. It is to understand its hegemonic position by the early 1960s, since American departments and journals of philosophy had been dominated by non-analytic schools and movements before the Second World War.
Naturally, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sharply define what does and does not count as ‘analytic philosophy’. Still, even a cursory look at the composition of American philosophy departments, curricula, and journals, as well as lists of APA presidents and Carus lecturers reveals that something changed in this period. Nor is this an ahistorical projection. At the time, philosophers regularly observed and discussed the rapid transformation of their discipline (more on this below), even if it took a while before ‘analytic philosophy’ became the generally accepted label for the newly dominant approach.
Second, if we are to evaluate the McCarthyist thesis, we need to get clear about the supposed victims of anti-communist repression. Few people will deny that (former) communists and Marxist scholars were pushed out of the profession. The central question is whether the Red Scare also affected pragmatists, phenomenologists, and ‘continental’ philosophers more generally. McCumber and Schuringa answer in the affirmative, arguing that anti-communist pressures blocked out any alternative to the Cold War paradigm; Joshua Rayman and James A. Good deny that pragmatism was a target. George Reisch, finally, argues for the more subtle thesis that McCarthyism played a role but affected analytic and non-analytic philosophers alike. Whereas many logical positivists and their American allies had been politically engaged in the 1930s, they turned to the “icy slopes of logic” in the years thereafter.
Finally, we need to get clear about the mechanisms through which the Cold War reshaped American philosophy. Since only a few, relatively minor philosophers were direct victims of McCarthyite investigations, proponents need a story about how the Red Scare affected the composition of journals and departments of philosophy. Most agree that anti-communist pressures created “a “climate of fear”, stimulating philosophers, journal editors, and university administrators to self-curate to prevent public controversy. But some add that there were carrots as well as sticks: Analytic philosophers were showered with funding and cushy advisory positions at institutes like RAND Corporation. Lastly, McCumber believes that there are conceptual connections between analytic philosophy and Cold War ideology. He argues that while pragmatists dealt with context-dependent problems of men, analytic philosophers saw truth as a property of sentences independent of context, thereby echoing the absolutist modes of thinking that were dominant in the period.
Analytic Philosophy Before the Red Scare
Let us turn to the evidence, starting with the state of American philosophy before the Cold War. Now, even if we accept that the McCarthyist thesis seeks to explain analytic philosophy’s dominance, not its existence or emergence, the timing is awkward: Analytic philosophy already had a solid foothold in the 1920s and 1930s. When Herbert Feigl, the first of the logical positivists to emigrate to the United States, arrived at Harvard in September 1930, it was already considered a flourishing “center” for logic-infused philosophy. Feigl found American colleagues developing ideas that were, in his words, “barely distinguishable” from the Vienna Circle’s scientific world conception, and he regularly attended meetings of a group of talented young philosophers, including W. V. Quine, Susanne Langer, and Nelson Goodman, writing that they were “almost always discuss[ing] logic” and it was “almost like in Vienna!” (letters from Dec. 6, 1930 and Apr. 5, 1931).
Harvard was not an isolated case. Even if American departments were dominated by non-analytic philosophers at the professor level, there is much archival evidence that the new generation had started to adopt the style of philosophy that was in vogue in Cambridge, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, and Berlin. C. I. Lewis wrote that “logical posi[vi]sm easily takes the first place in the interest and the discussions of our students” (letter, Dec. 1934). Cecil Currie was surprised how much the analytic movement had “caught on among the younger generation” (letter, May 1944), and an advisor for Princeton’s department wrote about “the trend which takes the students at this time to Wittgenstein and other positivists” (letter, Apr. 1947). Even Kant-scholar Charles Hendel, who deeply opposed the trend, wrote that “we ‘older boys’ have to take cognisance … of the enthusiasm and conviction of the younger logicians” (letter, May 1951).
These historical eye-witness reports are supported by bibliometric studies. A network analysis of the most-mentioned philosophers in American journals in the 1940s, for example, reveals that the literature of the period can be divided into at least two, roughly equally-sized clusters of discussion: (1) a set of literature mentioning mostly émigré positivists, Cambridge analysts, and young American philosophers such as Ernest Nagel and Charles Stevenson; and (2) a cluster mentioning American professors who felt that the focus on “logical clarity is producing a kind of sterility that has largely destroyed [philosophy’s] cultural value” (letter by Charles Cory, 1945). The most striking difference between the two clusters is a demographic one: The median birth year of U.S.-based philosophers in what we would now call the ‘analytic’ cluster is 1899, whereas the median birth year of the U.S.-based philosophers in the second cluster is 1882— a difference of seventeen years!
Considering this generational divide, it is much less puzzling that analytic philosophy boomed after the Second World War. In the 1930s, analytic philosophy was already popular among students and junior scholars. But this was not reflected in the hiring of the period. American universities faced severe budget cuts due to the Great Depression (in the 1930s) and the War (the 1940s), so there was little space to hire analytic philosophers. Only when departments could expand in the 1950s, they had the opportunity to catch up. Coincidentally, this is exactly the period when the older generation, educated in what they called “the Golden Age of American Philosophy” (the 1900s and 1910s), retired. In consequence, it was the new, more analytically-minded generation that could steer American philosophy in a different direction, a period when the U.S. student population grew from 2.7 million to 8.0 million in two decades. A study of the growth of eleven prominent philosophy departments estimates that they increased from 6.3 to 17.3 faculty on average, meaning that there was much space for new hires.
Appointments in the McCarthy Era
Even if the timing and the swiftness of the analytic turn are partly explained by a generational shift and a fifteen-year dip in the job market, this does not entail that McCarthyism played no role in the process. So let us turn to academic hiring in more detail. Now, if the anti-communist climate of fear was an important factor in the analytic turn, one would expect deans, department chairs, and university presidents to reflect on the risks involved in hiring pragmatists, humanists, and existentialists irrespective of the candidates’ political ideas and activities. Yet, in my archival research on the hiring procedures of ten departments of philosophy, including both private (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale) and public universities (UC Berkeley, UMich, UMN, UIowa, and UPenn), I have not found a single example of a philosopher or administrator raising doubts about a candidate because of their philosophical affiliation.
Of course not every meeting is recorded. Moreover, it is well-known that repressive environments can be governed by tacit agreements on how to avoid public controversy. Yet it seems unlikely that the supposed political risks involved in appointing a pragmatist or a phenomenologist did not leave a single trace in thousands of pages of dossiers about possible hires, particularly since administrators often did voice concerns about other ‘liabilities’ involving race and religion. When Yale considered hiring Paul Weiss, the head of department openly shared his worry that he would be a risk because he was likely to have some of the “deficiencies that Jewish people labor”, most notably a “lack of social discretion” (letter, Oct. 2, 1945). And when Princeton was searching a new full professor, the president was openly warned not to appoint a Catholic because members of “the Roman hierarchy” could not “avoid being illiberal” (letter, May 1948). While the records show that some candidates were considered a liability because of their race or religious affiliation, I have encountered no discussions of potential hires who were considered a risk because they were pragmatists or phenomenologists.
Second, it is important to note that all these departments kept hiring non-analytic philosophers. In some cases, it was even an explicit criterion that a position should be filled by a pragmatist or continental philosopher. Jacques Barzun, provost at Columbia, urged the philosophy department to establish “a balance between ‘analysts’ and ‘humanists’” (letter, May 1960) and when Princeton could appoint two full professors, the president and the department agreed that one of the appointees had to be “broadly humanistic in his philosophical orientation” and that the other should be “logical and scientific in his outlook” (memo, Dec. 1954).
Naturally, these conclusions do not apply to philosophers who were suspect because of their political activities. Irving Copi’s personnel file at the University of Michigan contains a letter from William Frankena, defending the former Troskyite because he had “entirely renounced his questionable connections, opinions, and activities” (letter, Sep. 1948). And when the University of Minnesota refused to renew the contract of Forrest Wiggins in 1951, the department’s first Black instructor publicly announced that it was because his “Communist line” had cost the university money in the state legislature (Star Tribune, Dec. 13, 1951).
Cultural Momentum
Finally, let us turn the broader cultural conversation about philosophy. The standard focus on McCarthyism is rather one-sided because it has led historians to overlook other important elements of America’s cultural moment. The 1950s were not just marked by Cold War anxieties. It was also a decade of cultural optimism about science and technology. Science had not just helped the United States win the Second World War. It had also improved the life of average Americans through the introduction of new medical treatments such as polio vaccines, synthetic antibiotics, and ultrasound monitoring; as well as exciting consumer products such as portable television, credit cards, and long-playing vinyl records.
In order to understand the analytic turn, in particular the success of logical positivism, one has to incorporate this cultural optimism about modern science. Today, logical positivism is often associated with the dark sides of science and technology. Positivism is equated with the value-free conception of science that helped universities justify research that was used to sow death and destruction in Vietnam. But it is important to realize that these associations only emerged in the late 1960s, when the protest generation identified positivism as the ideology of the military-industrial complex. In the 1950s, logical positivism was still widely regarded as a model of modern scientific thinking, even in popular newspapers and magazines. Wallace David, a minister and gay rights activist, could note that we live “in a scientific age” and describe himself as a member of the “school of ‘logical positivism’” (ONE Magazine, June 1954). An Alabama newspaper could positively comment on a proposal to add logic to the state school curriculum, noting how comforting it would be to “listen to sermons or to political speeches and be able to say with the logical positivists that they fall short” (The Anniston Star, Mar. 15, 1957). And a political columnist could praise John F. Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis because he displayed “a harshness of which the intellect only of the logical empiricist intellectual is capable” (Times Argus, Dec. 3, 1962). None of these references reflect any real engagement with positivist views or arguments. But it does provide a window on analytic philosophy’s cultural momentum: logical positivism came to exemplify a modern scientific attitude in a period when ninety-four percent of U.S. citizens felt that science was making their lives “healthier, easier, and more comfortable”.
Pragmatism, meanwhile, often got negative press, in particular during the Sputnik crisis of 1957. After the USSR successfully launched the first satellite, American media were quick to blame the school system, noting that Russian children spent much more time studying science and mathematics. And some of them held the pragmatists responsible considering their outsized influence on American education. E. F. Hutton commented that the Russians “make their kids study!”, noting that Americans did the same “before John Dewey and his followers said children should never be made to do anything” (Houston Chronicle, Feb. 23, 1958). Admiral H. G. Rickover agreed, proposing to replace Dewey’s idea that “the school is primarily a social institution” with a new, more rigorous “education process” centering on the collection of “factual knowledge” (Omaha World-Herald, Mar. 24, 1958). Analytic philosophy was considered new and exciting and pragmatism old-fashioned and outdated, even if pragmatist ideas and perspectives still played an important role in shaping the views of analytic philosophers like Hilary Putnam, W. V. Quine, Ernest Nagel, and Richard Rorty.
* * *
McCarthyism severely affected the lives of Marxists and (former) socialist philosophers. Yet it played a very limited role in the development of American philosophy. Anti-communist witch-hunts may have led philosophers to be more careful in their political pronouncements. But there is no evidence that the Red Scare significantly impacted the composition of departments of philosophy. At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that Cold War culture was not a factor in the analytic turn. Although analytic philosophy had been on the rise since the 1920s, demographic and economic developments had halted its representation in philosophy departments. When analytically-minded philosophers finally had the opportunity to reshape the profession, the conditions were ideal: higher education was growing, the job market was booming, and the American public celebrated science, professionalism, and ‘neutral’ expertise.
A bibliography for this post can be found here. Check out Logical Positivism: An American History here.
Worth a read: Analytic Philosophy Is the Ideology of the Status Quo
https://walterveit.substack.com/p/analytic-philosophy-is-the-ideology
UPenn is not a public university.
In fact, UPenn is one of the eight Ivy League schools
That’s true, but being in the Ivy League isn’t what makes Penn private. After all, Cornell is also an Ivy and it’s a weird private-public hybrid. Philosophy is in the private part, but plenty of the schools at Cornell are public. I would be surprised if Cornell has no athletes from the public side of the university.
So I’d be surprised if there was anything in Ivy League regulations that prevent a public school being in the league.
That said, Penn is indeed private. I think it’s the only one where “University of [State Name]” is private, though there are a few, e.g., New York, Ohio, where “[State Name] University” is private.
Other similar cases are the (private) College of Idaho (which was for a while Albertson College and then Albertson College of Idaho before switching back to the original name of College of Idaho) and, arguably, University of Southern California. Also, Princeton was original the College of New Jersey and didn’t officially change its name to Princeton until 1896 (It had moved to the town of Princeton many years earlier, and the university is named after the town, not the other way around, I guess.)
There is also the private university Washington University, which is not named after the state, nor after Washington DC, nor is it located in either, and which is not to be confused with the public University of Washington, Central Washington University, Western Washington University, Eastern Washington University, or Washington State University, nor with the private George Washington University, which is located in one of the Washingtons, but which is not named after that location, but rather after George Washington, who is also the namesake of Washington University (and the namesake of the Washington in which George Washington University is located and in which Washington University is not).
I did my undergrad degree at Washington University and worked for a while on campus doing tech support, and at one point we received a phone call from someone who was asking for help with a projector in a classroom, although neither I nor my coworker had ever heard of the building they were in, nor of the nearby buildings they were mentioning in order to give us directions. It gradually became clear that they were calling from Seattle, and specifically from the University of Washington.
Some years after graduating college I began to receive communications from the University of Washington alumni association inviting me to events. You can imagine what sort of mistake I assumed they were making. I eventually learned, however, that they had gotten my contact information because I donate money to KEXP, a Seattle radio station that was once owned by the University of Washington, and KEXP used to (and perhaps still does) share its donor information with the University of Washington alumni association, probably according to a principle something like “these people perhaps have some connection to Seattle.”
I did happen to live in Seattle for much of my childhood, but having lived there is not overly relevant to why I donate to KEXP. Often when I tell people I grew up in Seattle and went to Washington University (or, rather, I say I went to Washington University in St. Louis, since that is the official name, the “in St. Louis” having been appended in 1976 for reasons that you can probably guess) they respond by indicating they think I went to university near where I grew up, and the time it typically takes to disabuse them of this notion is almost always in excess of what it would make sense to devote to doing so.
In general, confusion about universities with appended place names seems to dog me wherever I go. My present university pays what I hope is not very much money to a company that compiles profiles of each professor’s research. (Behold my profile.) This company is wildly incompetent. Among the many ludicrous things it does, it compiles a list, university-wide, of which universities our faculty most often co-author papers with. The leading university in the list is “University of California,” a university which does not exist. (Please do not mention Berkeley; I did my PhD at the University of California, San Diego, and thus I do not truck with the notion that one of the other UCs gets to use an unqualified name for itself.)
Although I say I did my PhD at University of California, San Diego, the university’s brand guidelines direct us to omit the comma (“contrary to other University of California campuses”) and to therefore call it University of California San Diego. I typically defer to such guidelines, but the official University of California guidelines direct us to include the comma when referring to all UCs, San Diego included. If I don’t think Berkely should get to call itself the University of California, consistency directs me to be disloyal and to also hold my university to the same rules that all the other UCs follow. So, I typically use the comma, although not with much conviction.
Thanks, Sander—this was an interesting read, and I appreciate you bringing (much needed) archival data to bear on this debate. Some aspects of the McCarthyist thesis have long struck me as bad critical theory. I agree that the causal significance of McCarthyism specifically is overblown, and that the Cold War culture is more explanatory.
I have one question (or objection) about the hiring evidence. You note that you found no cases of anyone raising doubts about a candidate because of their philosophical affiliation. That seems to disconfirm a version of the McCarthyist thesis on which non-analytics were targeted *as such*. But there’s a proxy version that this lack of evidence doesn’t obviously disconfirm: McCarthyism worked as a filter on politics, so if political radicals tended to be non-analytic in philosophical orientation, then the filter would select for analytic philosophy without anyone ever needing to connect philosophical orientation to political affiliation.
Of course, the proxy version depends on there being a correlation between political affiliation and philosophical orientation, and some of your data offers reason to doubt that. So my question: in your archival work, did the politically flagged cases skew one way or the other in terms of philosophical orientation? Thanks.
Thanks Conner, interesting suggestion! I guess the list of philosophers targeted by Red hunters is too short to draw any firm conclusions. But even this short list does include multiple analytic philosophers: Rudolf Carnap and Philipp Frank were investigated by the FBI (see Reisch 2005) and former Troskyity Irving Copi, targeted at the University of Michigan (as discussed in the blog), was a logician. A lesser-known case is William T. Parry, who was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Parry was a member of Susanne Langer’s logic circle at Harvard and had visited Carnap in Prague in 1933.
More generally, I don’t think there was a strong correlation between radical politics and philosophical affiliation in the direction you suggest. In fact, the opposite may be true, as (1) the analytic approach was particularly in vogue among the younger generation (as I argue in the blog) and (2) younger academics were generally more radical in their politics, at least in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether the same holds in the 1950s, I cannot say.
I would add here that there are popular strains in Continental philosophy and “humanistic” American philosophy that are highly conservative/reactionary (Heidegger, Adler) or apolitical (the individualist version of existentialism that became popular due to folks like William Barrett, some versions of Husserlian phenomenology). The idea that there’s some close political tendency between these very broad groups of philosophers has always struck me as nonsensical, a product of either ignorance or wishful thinking.
“…[A] political columnist could praise John F. Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis because he displayed ‘a harshness of which the intellect only of the logical empiricist intellectual is capable’ (Times Argus, Dec. 3, 1962).”
I understand why this is quoted in the post, but in retrospect and from a substantive standpoint it’s a weird remark. JFK chose to impose a naval blockade, which was a less aggressive action than the air strikes that some of his advisers, particularly the generals, were urging.
Interesting! I guess the suggestion is that Kennedy outsmarted the Russians. In the paragraph just before the quoted passage, the author cites Thucydides: “It must be thoroughly understood … that war is a necessity; but that the more readily we accept it, the less will be the ardor of our opponents”. This is immediately followed by: “In this … manner, the President confronted the Soviet with starkest harshness of which the intellect only of the logical empiricist intellectual is capable. As the Soviet Union backed away, leaving Cuba isolated and alone, it amounted to nothing less than a diplomatic revolution”.
So ‘harsh … intellect’ should probably be read as ‘strategic thinking’.
Update: The author of the article taught international relations at Norwich University, a military college. So it is not unlikely that he associated logical empiricism with game theory.
I suppose it’s also relevant that the column was published only a couple of months after the missile crisis, when information about the internal deliberations among JFK and his advisers was not yet available (afaik) and when the reciprocal character of the resolution — i.e., USSR withdrew missiles from Cuba and U.S. withdrew missiles from Turkey — was not yet publicly known. That didn’t become publicly known until the late 1980s (hat tip Google).
Another problem with the McCumber thesis is that that one of the the principal victims of of pre-McCarthyite red-baiting was Bertrand Russell, a standard-bearer for (and one of the co-inventors of) the analytic tradition in philosophy. In 1940 he was hounded out of a job and reduced to near destitution because of his moral and political opinions. (This was not his first rodeo. He had earlier been deprived of his Lectureship at Trinity College Cambridge because of his opposition to World War I.) It is odd to suppose that people were frightened into philosophising in the style of Bertrand Russell in order to avoid the fate of – er, well … Bertrand Russell.
However, I want to suggest a speculative explanation of the relative decline in the fortunes of Deweyite pragmatism after Dewey’s own death in 1952. This is part (but only part) of the cultural phenomenon that Sander Verhaegh seeks to explain, namely the relative rise and triumph of analytic philosophy. One of Dewy’s problems, I suggest, was the god-awful sludge of his abominable prose stye. He was the kind of philosopher who needed an official spokesman who could translate his ideas into readable prose. And he had one, in the person of Sydney Hook, a gifted Deweyite with enough ideas of his own to season the mix. Hook was apparently happy to identify himself as ‘Dewey’s bulldog’. Furthermore he outlasted Dewey by several decades and like Dewey himself, he was intellectually active right up to the end, and hence in a position to develop and defend Dewy’s legacy in the post-war period. But despite his initial Marxism, and despite or perhaps because of his Trotskyist period, he evolved or devolved into a dedicated Red-baiter. (When reading his stuff, which is often well worth reading, it is difficult to see the point where he crosses the line from being a courageous opponent of Stalinism to being an out-and-out persecutor, but at some point the line was definitely crossed.) He always said he was not a not a McCarthyite but the differences between his brand of militant anti-Communism and McCarthy’s were difficult for others to discern. Anyway, here’s my speculative thesis. In the post-war period, Deweyan pragmatism was discredited in the eyes of many philosophers by the red-baiting activities of of its leading spokesman. It was because its principal flag-bearer was a dedicated Cold Warrior that Deweyan pragmatism fell into disrepute. Thus it was not because it was associated with Left-wing politics that Deweyan pragmatism fell into relative disfavour but because became associated with a particular brand of Right-wing politics.
Thanks Charles, I very much agree with you on Russell.
The decline of Dewey’s school is an interesting story. In the book, I reconstruct how Columbia’s department of philosophy split into two factions in the forties and fifties: A minority group, led by Nagel, that wanted to combine (Deweyan) naturalism with analytic philosophy; and a majority group, led by Randall Jr., that was “convinced that philosophical analysis would if it could kill the philosophical enterprise completely” (Randall, 1951, in a letter to Hook). In 1959, an external committee tasked to evaluate the state of Columbia philosophy concluded that
“a majority of senior professors in the department have little reputation outside New York. Most of them were trained by either Dewey or Woodbridge— to one or the other of whom they seem to have … a ‘father fixation.’ They have not only been living largely upon the reputation of their teachers, but have tended to build up a department that is seriously inbred”
The suggestion was that the department had failed to adapt to the postwar climate. Indeed, the report cites the majority as complaining that the analytic minority (Nagel) overemphasized “the philosophical fashions of the day: the philosophy of science and symbolic logic.”
I like your suggestion that political associations may have played a role, too. But a complicating factor is that Hook was most closely associated with Nagel. Indeed, in his response to Randall’s above-cited letter, Hook writes that “if a battle-line is to be drawn between ‘respectable philosophic positions’ … there is no doubt in my mind that it is on the side of the analytical philosophers that I belong”. Later in the letter, he contrasts analytic philosophy’s “careful and clear statement[s]” with the “Bentleyan Deweyites” who tend to create “metaphysical wind-eggs, disguised in language whose apparently profound burden covers what are never more than platitudes”.
These subtleties may have been lost on the community outside Columbia, which perhaps did see Hook as Dewey’s most significant successor. But note that the post-Sputnik comments cited in the blog also suggest that the Dewey school was associated with a ‘soft approach’ rather than with the strong anticommunist rhetoric of Hook.
Thank you Sander for your thoughtful response. I am glad to find that – in the view of a real expert – my speculative hypothesis may have at least some shaky ‘legs’. You are right, of course, that though happy to describe himself as Dewey’s bulldog, Hook was not unfriendly towards analytic philosophy. He had a fairly chummy correspondence with Russell which lasted for decades and only terminated because of political disagreements in the 1950s. (See Griffin ed. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: the Public Years, Letters 536 and 537. Hook denounced Russell for not going along with Hook’s red-baiting of Corliss Lamont, and Russell cut up rough.) Ruth Barcan Marcus (an analytic philosopher if ever there was one) describes Hook with respect and a modicum of affection in her memoir (he was one of the teachers urged her to do graduate work in philosophy):
‘The chair of the NYU Philosophy Department was Sidney Hook, one of the former Marxists whose God had failed. He was now a Deweyan pragmatists and pragmatism dominated the department. Hook was a persuasive lecturer. Under his tutelage the scientific method was now advanced above all others in the pursuit of knowledge. Dialectical materialism had long since been abandoned. His celebrated course was Philosophy of History and Civilization, a subject which has waned. The steps of the experimental (or scientific) method, proceeding from doubt to warranted assertability, were often intoned like a mantra. It was to me a plausible epistemological view. In the department, pragmatism thrived in harmony with logical positivism and its variants, logical empiricism and scientific empiricism. But the positivists, unlike the pragmatists, did not frown on the pursuit of truth or certainty. (Carnap said of philosophy that it is “the logic of science, i.e., the logical analysis of the concepts, propositions, proofs, theories of science,” which meshed well enough with Dewey’s pragmatism.) Pragmatists and positivists were later amply represented in the Encyclopedia of Unified Science side by side.’
So although Hook was definitely a Deweyan he was not (so to speak) an anti-analytic philosopher. But that does not mean that his public activities could not have brought Dewey’s philosophy into disrepute.
On the more general topic of whether analytic philosophy got some sort of cultural boost from the Cold Warriors, there is an interesting data point from the other end of the world. In 1952 an intellectual nobody and academic humbug, named Sydney Sparkes Orr (who was later dismissed for ‘gross moral turpitude’) was appointed the Chair of of Philosophy at Tasmania over a slew of candidates and potential candidates who subsequently went on to distinguish themselves including John Mackie, Kurt Baier and (as someone who expected to be invited to apply but go no invitation) Paul Grice. Cassandra Pybus in her book Gross Moral Turpitude: the Orr Case reconsidered, makes it clear that the reason Orr was preferred to Mackie et al was because they were regarded as analytic philosophers – vaguely associated both with logical positivism and Rylean linguistic philosophy – and that therefore they could not be expected to take a strong stand against communism. So far from benefitting from the Cold War culture, the Cold Warriors of the University of Tasmania did them down.
Of course, it may have gone the other way in other cases.
Oh just a note for those interested. Hook’s side of the Hook /Russell spat can be found in Shapiro ed. The Letters of Sydney Hook, pp 246-253.
I also think that one of the most fruitful exchanges in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell is that between Hook and BR on the hilosophy of history.
After 26 years, I was surprised to see my Time in the Ditch still drawing criticisms. I have a few quibbles with Verhaegh, most of which I will forego here (as he has forgone mention of virtually-every major thesis of my Philosophy Scare: the use of stealth in hiring,, the rapprochement between rational choice theory and philosophy, their coincidence with the Allen Plan, etc., etc. Instead, I will present a couple of the quibbles and then move to a general point.As to the lack of reflection on hiring, I discuss this on p. 44 of Philosophy Scare. Philosophers did, as I document in the previous couple of pages, share their frustration with “external” demands on hiring, but only in letters to friends. Public admission that
political forces were distorting department hiring would have been highly embarrassing. This goes for formal department meetings where notes are taken, but even in less formal settings, such talk could get back to the dean when the “sense of the discussion” was conveyed to him (they were all men). Since the pressure to hire philosophically safe professors came largely from deans, open discussion of political pressures would be a mistake.
At this point, I should express my dissatisfaction with the category of “externality” in regard to this set of topics. External pressures on philosophy departments were of two very different types: those external to the university, such as the religiously-inspired letter campaign protesting the hiring of Max Otto to the UCLA philosophy department, and pressures external to departments but internal to the universities in which those departments are housed (such as Dean Raymond, B. Allen’s pressures, channeled through the California Plan.)
Verhaegh writes, “McCarthyism severely affected the lives of Marxists and (former) socialist philosophers; Yet it played e a very limited role in eh development of American philosophy.”
But to exclude Marxists and socialists from philosophy, or even to curtail their productivity by making it hard for them to publish (no or very few journals) is already to play an important role in the development of American philosophy. Academic departments are not neoliberal aggregations of individual scholars, such that what happens to the one doesn’t affect the others. They are more like interconnecting webs of mutual influencing. I found this out when my doctoral committee, in Canada, had two members of the Canadian Communist Party on it. Their presence kept me (somewhat) honest about whom I was helping and whom I was harming in writing my dissertation. Marxism and socialism were voices which were driven out of American philosophy, to its impoverishment.
Finally: I agree with Verhaegh and other critics that McCarthyism was not the only reason for the rise of analytical philosophy.. The early analytical philosophers were indeed clearer than their colleagues on the Continent, and clarity of writing goes along with democracy.
Similarly for rigor. I buy into both these virtues myself, though my writing is often dense, with the result that according to the norms of the profession circa 1955, I myself am an analytical philosopher.
What distinguishes the political hypothesis (occasionally called he “McCumber thesis,” though I have no idea what that even is) from the others is that out of all these explanations for the rise of analytical philosophy, only the possibility of a political dimension had gone wholly unmentioned and undiscussed. It was to provoke such discussion that I wrote these two books.From that standpoint, the books posed a moral challenge to American philosophy.The ensuing discussion, even those parts of it which disagree with me, shows that philosophers have seen and met that challenge. Well done, philosophers! From the friendly confines of the German departments where I spent the last half of my career, I salute you.