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“Analytic” philosophy and the McCarthy era

Brian Leiter

Every few years this same story gets recycled (the latest iteration, complete with the non-sequitur that "because" [sic] analytic philosophy benefitted from McCarthyism it is not apolitical).  This story confronts an obvious problem:  "analytic" philosophy triumphed elsewhere (Britain, Australia) without McCarthyism.  Even in America, many of those fired were proto-analytic philosophers working in logic and philosophy of science. 

A more plausible story is the one suggested by Carl Schorske about the rise of the "new rigorism" across all disciplines after WWII, itself a continuation of the specialization that Weber had identified as the hallmark of the modern research university at the start of the 20th-century.  In addition, of course, there was the influx of logical positivists fleeing Hitler, many of them Marxists or Marxist sympathizers, who were no doubt more congenial to the loosely Deweyan naturalism that dominated American philosophy than NeoHegelians like Marcuse.  And then, of course, there was pure chance.   Harvard dominated American philosophy in the 20th-century, and Quine had joined that department in the 1930s.  He exerted increasing influence as the older generation retired (although, amusingly, he wanted to appoint Walter Kaufmann from Princeton in the 1950s–he could be catholic that way!).   As Harvard became solidly analytic it was inevitable, given the professional networks at the time, that other schools would move in that direction as well.  (John Wild, an enthusiast for phenomenology and existentialism, left Harvard for Northwestern in the early 1960s, probably a fateful mistake with respect to influencing the composition of the profession.)

ADDENDUM:  Comments now open, sorry about that.

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7 responses to ““Analytic” philosophy and the McCarthy era”

  1. AcademicLurker

    It seems that the general science-envy of the era is a more likely explanation. During the first few post war decades everyone was jealous of the government largess and public and academic prestige enjoyed the the natural sciences (physics most of all). Several disciplines decided that the best way to get in on the action was to give themselves a makeover to resemble the natural sciences as much as possible. Certainly this was the case with sociology and various other social sciences.

    If you were a philosopher in the 50s and wanted to show the public, and potential funding agencies, that what you were doing was just as rigorous as what the physicists were doing, the analytic school seems like a better option than most others. So maybe it's not surprising that analytic philosophy thrived during this period.

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  2. Anonymous

    I don't quite get the McCarthy-ian analysis. I mean, Frege makes these big developments in Logic extending back to Aristotle. This creates a lot of interest in understanding both analysis and language, and Russell and Wittgenstein are basically taking off from this intitial development. So I think the emphasis on these things in Russell/Wittgenstein/Moore comes from an interest in analysis and logical structure and not really from science envy or something. There's not a good way to describe the rise of Analytic Philosophy without attention to Frege in my view.

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  3. AcademicLurker

    To be clear, I wasn't positing science envy as an explanation for the development of analytic philosophy intellectually, but rather as a possible factor in its rise institutionally.

    Certainly analytic philosophers had their own reasons for being interested in the things they were interested in, but for the question "Why did this particular style of doing philosophy become institutionally dominant in the anglophone world during this particular era?", I think that the very high stock of all things science related at the time might be relevant.

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  4. Robert C Hockett

    Perhaps some support for both Brian's and AcademicLurker's observations in this work, published some 20 years ago. Quine's moving in some of the same circles as von Neumann, Rawls's having co-taught with Arrow, etc. https://www.amazon.ca/Rationalizing-Capitalist-Democracy-Rational-Liberalism/dp/0226016544

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  5. Matt

    I wonder if you (or other informed commenters) have a view on John McCumber's rather more fine-grained argument, in *The Philosophy Scare* (Chicago, 2016), about the significance of Cold War political dynamics for the particular institutional shape of "analytic" philosophy in the United States, especially in California departments…?

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  6. Brian Leiter

    I do not. Having read his prior work, I find him unreliable and wholly ignorant of analytic philosophy, while at the same time very hostile to his image of it. But if someone has read this, please feel free to comment!

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  7. Charles Pigden

    I haven't read McCumber's 'The Philosophy Scare' but I am reposting herewith my critique hs earlier book 'Time in the Ditch'.
    McCumber argues that the triumph of the unduly disengaged school of analytic philosophy in the USA was due to McCarthyism. It is a moot point whether analytic philosophy IS unduly disengaged (Russell, Ayer and Hart, for example, were notable as as public intellectuals and one reason that so many logical empiricists had to flee to America was because of the anti-fascist tendencies of their thought) , but whether it is or not, McCarthyism can't be the chief explanation of its triumph in America since analytic philosophy *also* triumphed in other Anglophone countries where McCarthyism was either muted or non-existent. The book is typical of one of the two ways in which American scholars tend to go astray. Because America is such a big, powerful and important country, they find it hard to keep the rest of the world in focus. As a result they are prone to two opposing errors: seeking a global explanation for what is mainly an American phenomenon or seeking a specifically American explanation for what is a global phenomenon. McCumber gives an American explanation for the triumph of analytic philosophy which is global or at least a pan-Anglophone phenomenon (though one should not forget the triumph of analytic philosophy in countries such as Sweden and Finland). There is the further problem that analytic philosophy had largely triumphed in America BEFORE the political advent of McCarthy whose glory days were from 1950-1954. Now you can get around this difficulty by defining McCarthyism more broadly to encompass the red-baiting anti-radical and anti-Communist hysteria (often with an anti-New Deal agenda) that began in the nineteen-thirties and found institutional expression in the House Un-American Activities Committee which began its sessions in 1938 as well as the its predecessors such as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee whose co-chair, Dickstein, turns out (hilariously) to have been in the pay of the NKVD. But in that case the theory becomes even more bizarre as the most high-profile victim of this kind of proto-McCarthyism was Bertrand Russell, one of the founding fathers of analytical philosophy, who was blocked from a job at CUNY in 1940 because of his social and sexual radicalism and his anti-religious writings, reducing him temporarily, to near destitution. So McCumber’s thesis metamorphoses into the claim that philosophers sought to avoid the fate of Bertrand Russell by philosophizing in the style pioneered by, well, …. Bertrand Russell. Well, that’s not quite right (someone might reply); the point is that the triumph of analytical philosophy is to be explained by the fact that philosophers sought to avoid the fate of Bertrand Russell a) by philosophizing in the style of Bertrand Russell whilst b) *eschewing the public role that Russell had played for so many years as an activist for left-wing causes*. But then it seems that what McCarthyism (in this extended sense) explains is not the triumph of analytic philosophy (which was well on the way by 1940 and which happened elsewhere without the aid of McCarthyism) but the relative silence of left-leaning philosophers on social issues that was characteristic of American philosophy in the forties and fifties. In other words, what McCarthyism explains is not the triumph of analytic philosophy in America but the retreat of those triumphant analytic philosophers to the ‘icy slopes of logic’. (This is confirmed by the fact that in other countries, where McCarthyite tendencies were relatively weak, you get the triumph of analytic philosophy without the retreat to the icy slopes: Russell, Ayer and Hart were all pretty vocal on social issues in the forties, fifties and sixties.) But this is Reisch’s thesis as developed in ‘How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Science’. I have reservations about Reisch’s book but at least it isn’t as obviously silly as McCumber’s

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