19 September, 2025

Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (Verso, 2025)

When in the early seventies of the last century in France I started studying philosophers from the tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Quine, my Marxist teachers (among them Louis Althusser) warned me: “Beware! Analytic philosophy is the dominant ideology of capitalism!” I failed to see how logic, the theory of meaning or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus could be part of capitalist ideology, and asked myself what this hidden influence could be, and why it was dominant, in spite of the fact that only a handful of people in France were interested in it. I was told that because analytic philosophy is dominant in England and America, it had to be the expression of bourgeois ideology. Asking for more evidence, it was mentioned to me that because Chomsky – a typical analytic philosopher, as everyone knows – had been funded by the Pentagon, it was evidence that generative linguistics was an accomplice of the American invasion in Vietnam. A few years later I heard Pierre Bourdieu addressing a group of sociologists from Chicago: “You use decision and game theory, therefore you are at the service of the ruling class.” I understood that in order to be subjected to these Marxist “explanations”, there was no need to display relations between the contents of theories and social or economic positions, but only to point out some suspected ties between some individuals and capitalist institutions.

I have been surprised to discover that, fifty years after, the same kind of sweeping explanations of the “dominance” of analytic philosophy are defended in Christoph Schuringa’s book. Its hegemony rests, in his view, on the fact that analytic philosophy, which claims to seek truth and knowledge through reason and argument and to be free from political commitments, is actually governed by a hidden agenda, the promotion of economic and political liberalism, and by an explicit objective, the colonization of academic philosophy. In order to show this Schuringa aims to give a “social history” of analytic philosophy. Unfortunately the history in question is neither social nor historical.

The epithet “social” makes us anticipate an examination of the institutions and groups (universities, publishers, journals, professional associations, students, professors) which have accompanied the development of analytic philosophy. But one finds hardly any such information in the book. Schuringa repeatedly complains about the inability of analytic philosophers “to come to grip with social reality”, but he gives us no hints about the ways through which the organisation of academic learning and of universities may have shaped the careers and the views of these philosophers. There are very few descriptions of their social backgrounds, except for suggesting that those from Oxford and Cambridge belong to the upper classes (whereas in fact most philosophers in the UK and the US come from the middle class). No analysis is given of the social and economic forces which are supposed to play a (causal?) role in the production of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century. Schuringa does not even try to use Bourdieu’s views about the “symbolic field” in social theory or various methods in intellectual history. The term “social” here consists largely in recalling various anecdotes about the professional habits of some philosophers. Thus Schuringa mocks the Oxfordian ploy of asking “What do you mean?” about any topic whatsoever, and takes it to manifest the scorn of dons towards those who are not insiders. Many will remember Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett’s satire of Oxbridge conversations.

Instead of a history we get a series of vignettes: Moore and Russell’s revolt again idealism, the Vienna Circle, Oxford linguistic philosophy, the progress of logical positivism in the US, the “linguistic turn”, the rise of modal metaphysics, the naturalistic wave and experimental philosophy, and the advent of analytic feminism. The narrative consists in glimpses of various cultural episodes, which can hardly pass for a history of analytic philosophy. Not much is said of the Brentano school and of Austrian philosophy, which have been very much studied. Nothing is said of analytic philosophy in Poland, where a genuine logical school has been one of the most active centres. Nothing is said of the progress of analytic philosophy since the 1950s in Continental Europe or in Scandinavia and of prominent figures as Georg Henrik von Wright and Jaakko Hintikka. No effort is made to explain the development of the ideas of analytic philosophers on such central topics as the nature of logic, of language and of mind (Russell’s theory of descriptions, which Ramsey dubbed “a paradigm of philosophy”, is hardly touched upon, and the subsequent development of the theory of reference is absent). Nothing is said about the philosophy of science of logical positivism, and the critique of it by Kuhn and others since the 60s. Equally ignored are the various theories of mind of analytic philosophers, from neutral monism to identity theory, functionalism and cognitive science. In a sense this patchy narrative is to be expected, since for Schuringa’s “analytic philosophy” is a mere umbrella term, covering a succession of disconnected fashions.

Schuringa’s touristic trip among a few philosophical landscapes leads him to a series of surprising pronouncements. He claims that Russell and Moore’s notions of analysis, the positivists’ and Carnap’s ideal of explanation, Quine’s program of logical “regimentation”, Austin and Strawson’s version of linguistic analysis, Davidson’s and Dummett’s project of a systematic “theory of meaning”, and David Lewis and Saul Kripke’s modal semantics have nothing in common. By the same kind of move one could assert that there is nothing in common between the various notions of dialectic in Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Adorno. Schuringa completely misses the role played by the notion of analyticity from Frege to Quine, and why rejecting it led to a naturalist turn, which often took the form of an alliance with cognitive science. Equally baffling are Schuringa’s claims that Dummett “invented” the role of Frege as the father of analytic philosophy of language and that Davidson’s program “came to nothing”. It is hard to know whether these pronouncements are issued for the sake of provoking or whether they are the product of sheer ignorance. Dummett did not say that Frege invented the whole subject fully formed all at once, but that his contributions, even about logic, were decisive and shaped the issues – about sense and reference, the nature of truth and meaning, indexicality and compositionality – even if it took twenty years after his death for analytic philosophers to realize his contribution. Davidson’s programme was fashionable in the 70s and 80s, and the fashion died, but it did not come to nothing, for a lot of Davidsonian views – about truth, meaning, action, logical form, intentionality, saying that, etc. – are still alive.

Schuringa also tells us that analytic philosophers, always occupied in mimicking the scientific style of research, have had no interest in the history of their doctrines and a “remarkable lack of methodological self-scrutiny”. This assertion will itself be found remarkable to those who have even a cursory knowledge of discussions by Russell of the “scientific method in philosophy”, by Moore of the “paradox of analysis” (if analysis is correct, it’s trivial, if it is informative it is false), by Carnap on the nature of explanation, by Strawson on the purposes of “descriptive metaphysics”, and of numerous recent debates about the “philosophy of philosophy”. If Schuringa had paid a bit more attention to the actual history of analytic philosophy, which has been studied by historians of Austrian philosophy and by many other scholars, he could have seen that analytic philosophy and phenomenology have a number of common roots. He is right that the so-called “great divide” between analytics and Continentals is just a slogan, but his book gives no indication that many issues in ontology, the theory of intentionality and the nature of values which are central to contemporary analytic philosophy were also present in Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl, and are still alive in continental philosophy today. But the shallowness of his review makes him blind to the real differences between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, which have to be traced back to the gloomy influence of Heidegger on the latter. Moreover, many philosophers trained in analytic philosophy have practised the history of philosophy, in particular concerning Plato and Aristotle and early modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. There have been disputes about this kind of scholarship, but one cannot pretend that it is non-existent or that analytic philosophers have never thought about the relation of their views to those from earlier periods of the history of philosophy. Schuringa is right that some analytic philosophers have portrayed themselves as having no tradition, but he is wrong to have taken their word for it. Today analytic philosophers fully acknowledge their tradition, studied in journals such as the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy and in a large body of scholarly work.

Schuringa would probably justify the huge lacunae of his “history” by saying that he did not mean to do historical scholarship as such, but only, as he says, an “ideological critique” in the sense of Marx’s critique in the German Ideology. His project also reminds us of Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth (1994) which shows how modern science emerged from the English institutions science in the seventeenth century, and whose narrative has an eliminativist stance: just as in Shapin’s book truth itself disappears under the history of the institutions which carry it, in Schuringa’s book analytic philosophy disappears under the revelation of the contingent character of its productions. Indeed, the rise of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century owes much to events such as the emigration of many members of the Vienna Circle in the US. But is it true that, as John McCumber once claimed (Time in the Ditch (2001)), analytic philosophy has benefited indirectly from McCarthyism, which according to him is responsible for the de-politicisation of American philosophers since the fifties and the loss of their jobs by some Marxist philosophers? These sorts of accusations are grotesque, not only because a number of positivist emigrants like Carnap had leftist leanings and did not keep quiet about them but also because a number of analytic philosophers, like Putnam, were Marxists or sympathetic to left-wing ideas. Moreover, a number of them had political commitments: Dummett worked in defence of refugees, Bernard Williams chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship in the UK, and Russell had a very active political life. Schuringa recalls these episodes, but is unimpressed because he holds that the apolitical nature of analytic philosophy is rooted in its very ideal of reaching “a view from nowhere”, free from the vagaries of social and economic life. This is certainly true of much of analytic metaphysics as it has been pursued by philosophers like David Lewis and Saul Kripke, and of some Oxford philosophers, who led quasi-conventual lives in such Colleges of Pure Reason as Princeton and All Souls. But it is surprising to learn that philosophers like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel or Martha Nussbaum, who addressed public issues and built complex moral and political arguments, are also representative of this estrangement from real life. Jerry Cohen, the main analytic Marxist, and Rae Langton and Sally Haslanger, the leading analytic feminists, fall into the same trap, according to Schuringa, because their analytic “techniques”, which shed light on limited topics such as pornography or race, fail to come to grip with the social world as a whole. Susan Stebbing, one of the rare women who played a historical role during the pre-war period of analytic philosophy, and whose merits were ignored due to the misogyny of her colleagues, is considered here as getting no “purchase on the real world”. She was not a feminist by today’s standards, and even denied that being a woman had anything to do with her philosophical views, but she was very aware of the fallacy of letting issues about politics invade matters of metaphysics and logic.

Analytic philosophy necessarily fails to impinge on the real world, according to Schuringa, for three reasons, which are, in my view, misguided.

First, despite its empiricist leanings, it adopts the classical attitude of rationalism: thinking all matters in an abstract, often logical, way, without considering the whole of social reality. But what is really wrong with thinking in abstract terms? Unless one wants to remain only at a descriptive level, one has to formulate theories and to try to confirm them. Analytic philosophy is very conceptual, but so is all of classical philosophy.

Second, analytic philosophy relies on common sense and on “intuitions”, and multiplies thought experiments and puzzles. To this Schuringa objects, quoting Gramsci, that “There is not just one common sense” and that intuitions are unreliable. He mocks the “Gettier industry” of examples and counterexamples, which has produced thousands of pages of discussions about the difference between justified belief and knowledge. He is right that such an industry has existed but completely ignores the background of important theories of knowledge which this literature has produced. The idea that there are many common senses runs the risk of relativism, which is actually well illustrated in the project of experimental philosophy, which rejects the a priori style of classical analytic philosophy and is hardly philosophical at all. Schuringa seems to think that one must sidestep intuitions and ordinary judgments, and that one can move directly to the “concrete social reality”. But one must start somewhere, either in arguing or in formulating theories. Even Marxists have to acknowledge this.

Third, Schuringa says that in promoting the ideal of discussion and openness, analytic philosophers are just following the lead of liberalism and of its ideology of a free market of ideas. Arguing and disagreeing to death is indeed a form of scholasticism, from which analytic philosophy does not always escape. But what is wrong with arguing, and with aiming at clarity and at getting things right?

Russell and Moore reacted, in their early period, to Hegelianism and they promoted atomism and individualism in ontology and in epistemology. This is unacceptable for Hegelians and Marxists, who subscribe to a holistic conception of the world and of society, where totalities are prior to individuals: for them ontological individualism leads inevitably to social and political individualism. This is why Schuringa rejects the views of analytical Marxists such as Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer, who tried to revive Marxism on the basis of methodological individualism. They were guilty of a kind of apostasy. But what’s wrong with revising certain Marxist principles? Since its origins Marxism has had a problem with dogmatism.

Schuringa’s chief objection to analytic philosophy in all its forms is that it is everywhere ahistorical and apolitical, thus serving the ideology of liberalism. This was probably what Althusser and Bourdieu meant, when they warned us of the reactionary character of analytic philosophy. Some positivist thinkers, like the French Louis Rougier, who organised the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, and some analytic philosophers, like Robert Nozick, who defended hyper-individualist political views, may indeed be counted as right-wing liberals. But it is hard to understand why analytic philosophers have to be such. It is true that some of them have endorsed political liberalism – notably Russell and Rawls – but the connexion between these commitments and their views in ontology or epistemology is moot. Russell himself denied that there was any link between his work in logic and mathematics on the one hand and his progressive political thought and activities on the other. It has been said that there is some link between Plato’s views on the state and his stay in Sicily, and that Aristotle’s philosophy was at the service of the politics of Philip of Macedon, but who could find the trace of the latter in his metaphysics and in its ethics? It is questionable whether a philosopher is bound to get into politics – or to refrain from it – when he works on the philosophy of language or in epistemology. The Oxford philosopher Richard Hare said that reflecting upon his war experiences led him to think about moral philosophy. But he could just as well have adopted a realistic stance in metaethics instead of defending an anti-realist view according to which all moral claims are prescriptive.

      Schuringa tells us that there is no definition of analytic philosophy in the style of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, and that analytic philosophy today no longer exists in the sense in which it used to exist. One can agree on this, but how can a discipline with such vague boundaries be dominant? We are told that it has “colonized” philosophy. In the usual sense, a colony is a place where a population is subjected by external rulers, who exploit its production. Evidence for this is supposed to be the fact that issues of race and gender, which used to be out of the scope of analytic philosophy, are now part of their toolkit and operate in a way which Americanizes and Europeanizes these issues. But we are not told who are the rulers, how they operate and who are the victims. The argument looks like those conspiracy theories which tell us that some occult influence manipulates a whole field and serves the interests of some powerful group. As far as I know continental philosophers who work along more traditional lines have not been put in minority or expelled from the surface of the earth. Indeed in many “continental” departments (in the geographic sense) they are dominant.

In his wholesale rejection of analytic philosophy, Schuringa barks up the wrong tree. He fails to see that a lot of what passes for “analytic philosophy” today is only vaguely or indirectly so: people refer to some authors but actually work along different lines. For instance, a lot of Wittgensteinian scholarship or Wittgenstein-oriented work is hostile to analytic philosophy in its “scientific” style and has only loose connexions with its tradition. What is perhaps dominant is a sort of mixture of continental philosophy and of analytic philosophy, but serious work on both sides or outside this divide is not dominant. Schuringa also fails to see that many of the defects that he attributes to analytic philosophy are not proper to it, but to a wider system of academic learning, in which research and teaching have been reorganised in novel ways since the rise of internet. The fact that academic philosophy as a whole has become a market, with its networks, its stars, its opaque refereeing system, its pressure to publish more and more in order to get grants and funding and to chase jobs has nothing special to do with analytic philosophy. Like everywhere, the necessity to publish more and more, at a high speed, and without much control, has led to the production of much mediocre work. More worrying is the tendency of students in analytic departments to ignore any work which is not written in English, and even more worrying is their ignorance of ancient languages and of the history of philosophy. But the fact that the world of learning and of academic philosophy is not in a healthy state is not due to the dominance of analytic philosophers. It is due, in addition to the contemporary organisation of research, to the fact that many academics have abdicated their traditional independence, that academic freedom is no longer guaranteed and that the present organisation of science has made universities much less free.

Pascal Engel is a directeur d’études emeritus in philosophy at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and the author of numerous works in French and English. Recent books include Foucault et les normes du savoir (2024) and Manuel de survie rationaliste (2020). His books in English include Truth (2002) and The Norm of Truth: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic (1991).