New book dissects whether philosophy can be ‘apolitical’
Christoph Schuringa’s book, “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” examines why even apolitical thinkers cannot ignore the context in which they work.
LONDON — Is it possible, even for those who profess to reject politics and pledge to remain outside of its influence, to be untouched by the political context of their time?
Christoph Schuringa, an associate professor in philosophy at Northeastern University, does not seem to think so.
In his book, “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy,” the London-based thinker spends 328 pages unpacking almost 130 years of history to examine the philosophical movement’s assertion that it is apolitical.
While analytic philosophy is not a term likely to be bandied about at the dinner table, Schuringa explains that it is “the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world and beyond.” It has tended, he writes, “to think of itself as removed from the changing scenes of history.”
But if analytic philosophy benefited from U.S. military funding after World War II and was unified as a concept during a Cold War era when communism and other left-wing ideologies were feared, with many of its greatest minds fleeing the threat of the Nazis, can it still be said to be apolitical?
Schuringa quickly lays out his answer to that question in the introduction of his book, which is published by Verso and has caused ripples within the academic philosophy community. He argues that analytic philosophy, what he refers to as the “dominant way of doing philosophy,” is the “product of, and has continued to be shaped by, the social world in which it finds itself.”
The aim, says Schuringa, was to produce a “narrative-driven” book that looks at how analytic philosophy developed and to explore its history by producing a study of its greatest minds, which include the likes of British thinker Betrand Russell, who is credited with publishing the first work of analytic philosophy in 1898, and American philosopher David Lewis.
“In the book, I tried to do an ideology critique,” Schuringa tells Northeastern Global News, “which is to say give it a kind of Marxist treatment, where the idea is to look at the social and political cultural forces in society, and see how those have shaped this movement in philosophy.
“And that, particularly to me, was interesting to do because part of the idea of analytic philosophy is that it’s ahistorical, so it tries to abstract away completely from its own historical situation.
“It’s like, ‘Well, these are the eternal questions that we are trying to ask and the political and cultural context just doesn’t matter.’ The idea is that you can evaluate arguments by just looking at how good the arguments are and not thinking about the context of the people that are making them.
“The book is trying to show that … actually, even the very idea of this very pristine, highly abstract conception of philosophy is itself a reflection of a particular historical set of circumstances. So in that sense, I think it’s deeply shaped by everything that goes on around it.”
Analytic philosophy became “dominant and one unified thing” in the United States after World War II ended in 1945, Schuringa says.
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“America emerges completely victorious from the war, it’s the one unrivaled victor,” he says. “And it sees itself as pitted against its nearest rival, which is the Soviet Union and the Soviet sphere of influence. It becomes really important to underwrite America’s position in the world ideologically, basically, in terms of liberalism. There’s this big revival of liberalism as an ideology.”
This liberalism resurgence, mixed with the emerging discipline of game theory, helped establish an “individualistic” way of thinking, adds Schuringa. “Game theory,” he explains, “was a powerful tool for doing things like calculating how the U.S. could outsmart the Soviet Union. And game theory is an inherently very individualistic way of thinking about how agents work.”
The rise in U.S. defense spending during the Cold War not only worked its way to the military but also to philosophers, Schuringa found, through the RAND Corporation.
“RAND came out of American military strategy research during the war,” explains the author. “In the post-war period, it became basically an organ of Cold War strategy. And analytic philosophers play this key role at RAND because they were recruited to do a lot of this game-theoretical work. In that period, you get the quite powerful influence of this very specific American set of conditions.”
These U.S.-based analytic philosophers in the 1950s brought together British and Austrian philosophical thought — including that by logic-devotees Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivists from Vienna, who wanted to forge philosophy with empirical science — and melded it into a single methodology.
It was the post-war political climate in the States that may help to explain the movement’s desire to consider itself as an apolitical way of doing philosophy, Schuringa suggests. It was “largely” made up of emigrants from Europe, a number of whom had fled Austria during the 1930s because they were either Jewish or left-wing and so were under threat following the far-right Nazi takeover.
The U.S. had entered into the McCarthyism era, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy. The period, from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, was characterized by intense anti-communist suspicion and accusations, often made without proper evidence.
Schuringa says analytic philosophers were scared off from any past radical left-wing views due to an anxiety that they could come under suspicion, either from McCarthy’s investigators or even their own universities.
“There is a migration of people but, whereas in Vienna a lot of them had been quite political, in the U.S. this politics gets completely squeezed out and they become basically apolitical,” Schuringa says. “A large part of the explanation for that is McCarthyism because there is an enormous climate of fear.”
Since becoming a single movement in the mid-20th century, analytic philosophy has been able to remain the dominant form of the subject because it keeps refreshing, Schuringa argues.
“The power of analytic philosophy is that it can keep reinventing itself,” he says. “Because really what it is about is a set of techniques rather than a set of actual substantive commitments to some doctrine or other.”
That staying power has not always necessarily been a good thing, however, he concludes. Its commanding status means that “radical currents of thought” — he name-checks feminism and critical race theory — are “suppressed” when put through the lens of analytic philosophy.
Schuringa explains: “I think that those radical impulses, when they come into the analytic philosophy space, they get neutralized. They’re robbed of some of their radical force.”
Despite this, he says that analytic philosophy, even though many have prophesied about its end, does not look like being usurped by a rival school of thought.
“I think people don’t really see an alternative,” he says. “It is difficult to see a way out when certain patterns of thought are so entrenched — there is an inertia that keeps it going.”