Running notes on Schuringa's A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, pt. 1
I attended a modest party on the second floor in a pub — it was a cash bar — in London’s fashionable City of Westminster area to witness the launch of Christoph Schuringa’s (2025) A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso; hereafter A Social History). Schuringa (Northeastern) is probably best known to my readers as the author of Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy or, perhaps, his essay, “The Birth of Analytic Philosophy Out of the Spirit of McCarthyism,” in Jacobin.
I bought my own hard-copy, and shared pictures on social media of its stylish cover and the lavish blurbs/praise by Spivak and Žižek. Unusually many of my most loyal readers responded to these pictures by suggesting they can’t wait for my review here at D&I. Now, not to be all too nitpicky, but none of my digressions, even the most unironic ones, are best thought of as a review. As it turns out
(MIT) already reviewed the book in LA Review of Books (here). So that leaves me at liberty to create a series of running notes on Schuringa (although I will also comment on Setiya’s review).Today’s post is on the Introduction. The “Introduction” introduces analytic philosophy as “the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking word and beyond.” And Schuringa asserts that analytic philosophy speaks, as if from nowhere, and [I] “thus operates as a tradition that manages to think of itself as no tradition at all.” (p. 1)
The first purported aim of the book to [A] “directly challenge this self-image, by demonstrating how analytic philosophy is the product of, and has continued to be shaped by, the social world in which it finds itself” (p. 1) Schuringa exhibits here a curious faith that in showing the causal dependence of a self-image on factors extrinsic to this image the image can somehow by undermined, even altered. A few pages later Schuringa names this, faith ‘ideology critique.’ (p. 3) That is, a kind of unmasking.
I use ‘curious,’ because it seems very likely that the analytic self-image was constructed by people — regular readers know I call such characters ‘philosophical prophets’ — who were fully aware of such social factors and constructed the self-image to facilitate their students’ and more distant followers’ navigation of the complex social and political ecology that gives rise to their practice. To put it as a serious joke: judging by the response of Setiya — one of our leading analytic philosophers — it doesn’t seem the unmasking had much of an effect on Setiya, who writes with the proverbial shrug:
Of course, ideology critique has multiple functions: first, it is a move in the credit economy of academic Marxism (which partially overlaps with academy as such); but, second, it is also a recruitment tool to be directed at newcomers to or those disenfranchised in the field.
It’s clear this second feature is part of Schuringa’s polemic. Because one way he sets up the task of [A] is highly un-Marxist; Schuringa describes one of the book’s strategies as follows:
To a significant degree, it focuses on the field’s charismatic leading figures. This might seem surprising in a social history, but it deliberately reflects a thesis the book seeks to bear out – namely, that analytic philosophy, far more than its self-image would like us to believe, promotes a cult of the personality. (p. 4)
That is to say, one of the charges against analytic philosophy’s self-image (and so the wider practice) is that [B] the self-image of analytic philosophy is philosophically and intellectually pernicious even if one is unmoved by the Marxist ideology critique. (I return to this below.)
Of course, if the self-image can be shown false, then there may be intrinsic reasons to abandon the self-image of analytic philosophy by practitioners. This gambit is offered by Schuringa when he argues that the self-image is caught up in a “fantasy about the purity of philosophy.” (p. 1) This purity means that philosophy can have (II) “more than any other field, a purely ‘internal’ history, driven entirely by ideas.” (p. 1) Schuringa’s ideology critique presupposes (II) is false and Social History aims to exhibit its falsity.
What’s astounding about all of this is that Schuringa — an erudite and sophisticated intellectual — doesn’t seem to recognize that for the survival of analytic philosophy’s self-conception its own history is wholly irrelevant. (For a more scholarly version of this argument, see the introductions to Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy and Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol. II) No amount of historical myth-busting will shake its core. For example, few readers come away from, say, Jonathan Schaffer’s (2010) "Monism: The priority of the whole." Philosophical review, which is one of the most cited papers of the last few decades or Michael Della Rocca’s (2013) "The taming of philosophy" (Philosophy and its history) with the impression that the purported defeat of British idealism was well-grounded in killer arguments (if judged purely intellectually), yet these works and their subsequent research programs (entrenched at Rutgers and Yale no less) did not undermine analytic philosophy’s hegemony. Nor, I hasten to add, did Dummett’s realization of the extent of Frege’s antisemitism or my own sense of Russell’s embrace of racialized eugenics (and the list could go on) create such an earthquake that the foundations of analytic philosophy were thereby undermined. Simply put: (1) the practice of analytic philosophy is in a certain sense inoculated against historical unmasking.
To be sure, the previous paragraph should not be thought of as insisting on a total historical inertness within analytic philosophy. Historical arguments (e.g., Wiggins on Locke and the subsequent rise of essentialism; Anscombe on Modern Moral Theory and the subsequent rise of virtue ethics) can be generative in analytic philosophy. Keep that in mind.
Be that as it may, Setiya somewhat unfairly implies that Schuringa isn’t wholly clear on what he means by ‘ideology critique.’ This criticism is odd because Schuringa distinguish between “rude” ideology critique (which he rejects), which match “ideas to pre-set patterns” or…“monolithically conceived sets of class interests,” that is the practice, in which historical agents become “mere mouthpiece of class interests.” (p. 4) Rather, the more sophisticated (“less crude”) ideology critique that Social History practices aims to show that [C] analytic philosophy conveys certain class interests. In particular, Schuringa thinks that “once it is recognized that analytic philosophy, like its cousins behaviourism and neoclassical economics, serves to perpetuate a picture that is central to bourgeois liberal ideology – that of an inert realm of ‘fact’, simply given to the subject to be passively received, against which realm that subject stands as supposedly autonomous and spontaneous – it is seen that no passage in its history escapes ideology-critical treatment.” (p. 4) Notice that one need not turn to the history of analytic philosophy to engage in [C].
Schuringa is not claiming here, as Setiya suggests in his review, that “liberal dogma” has an influence “on the scope and methods of “analytic philosophy.”” (Setiya is not wrong to attribute this claim to Schuringa because Social History does suggest that “liberalism drives the development of modal logic.” (p. 5)) Rather, the way to understand Schuringa’s broader more important claim is that analytic philosophy is a part of (what the Marxists call) the superstructure of society, and, in fact, helps stabilize some essential ingredients in it.
So, rather than being an effect of liberal ideology, [D] analytic philosophy causes, in part, the stability of liberal ideology. So, the point of the sophisticated ideology critique, then, becomes to direct one’s attention to this functional role that analytic philosophy serves in key buildings of the superstructure (and try to disable it).+ I think I am on the right track in my reading of Schuringa because it follows from this approach that neoclassical and analytical Marxists are pretty much stooges of the ruling class. (I just took a look — thanks to extraordinarily helpful index — to pp. 261-265, and it seems that is what Schuringa goes on to imply in chapter 9.)
Interestingly enough, Schuringa is not the first to suggest that analytic philosophy has an affinity to neoclassical economics in this ideological fashion. On 21 March 1979 (recall), in lecture of 10, of what became Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault also went down this route, although he left it hanging an a kind of analogy.* But Foucault never developed the thought (partially because his own relationship to Marxism had grown tricky).
Okay, this Digression is getting longer than Schuringa’s Introduction. So, I will give up on my plan to write on chapter 1 today, too. In closing, I do want to alert the reader to two interesting moves in the Introduction and one unfortunate mistake.
First, Schuringa sharly distances his own approach from the sociology of knowledge. And that’s because Schuringa does not want to explain away knowledge as something merely “putative.” (p. 3) This matters because it shows that Schuringa wants to contribute to philosophy as a knowledge-involving enterprise. (It will be interesting to see if he sees any tension in this with his own revolutionairy aims.)
Second, while drawing on post-Kuhnian historiography of science, Schuringa contrasts philosophy with science in sociological terms: he gives two formulations of his idea: “Scientific research programmes tend to attain a level of circumscribed specificity, and of shared purpose among researchers, that is foreign to philosophy.” (p. 2) And then in accompanying note he adds, “there is never, in philosophy, sufficient agreement on the shape of the solution a problem demands for researchers to work with common purpose on finding it.” (p. 2, n. 2) In chapter 1, the interesting consequence of this observation follows that within analytic philosophy (but it may be true for other programmes as well), “Each contributor is expected to occupy their own position in ‘logical space’ – a space in which every conceivable position, however implausible, is assigned its place.” (p. 11; original emphasis) And Schuringa then goes on to note:
Each position must diverge from the positions occupied by others (if only in some minimal respect). Credibility is thus lent to a view on the basis of its incredibility. It is somehow not noticed that the need for each person to distinguish their view from all others must surely reduce the likelihood of anyone’s being right. (p. 11; emphasis in original)
I doubt the second quoted sentence follows from the first or is implied by the practice. But I actually suspect the conclusion here is something untroubling to analytic philosophy understood as a collective enterprise. As a collective enterprise, extended in historical space, analytic philosophy does not guide its individual practitioners to the truth. This could be a problem for some. So it is not an untroubling thought.
However, we each understand that implication quite well. Rather, if there is any rightness or truth that is produced by this otherwise odd practice of occupying or squatting in bits of logical space, it is at the level of the collective practice. As the tradition moves on it retreats from or discards some of the logical possibilities because they are not individually or jointly fruitful. Anyway, I return to this point before long.
Finally, Schuringa recognizes that his own stated ambition has a surprising anticipation. I quote the full paragraph:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have been few social histories of philosophy. Where such an approach has been tried, the attempt has sometimes simply caved in under the purity myth: despite the author’s best intentions, what we end up with, when all is said and done, is after all an internalist narrative. One such author is Bertrand Russell, who gave his 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy the subtitle And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. In contrast to what his subtitle promised, Russell in fact offered – with a heavy irony, given his professed animus against Hegel – a strikingly internalist narrative on a Hegelian pattern, in which the deficiencies of one set of ideas led those ideas to give birth to others in which those deficiencies were overcome, and so on, interspersed with passages on social and political developments. Russell’s story is that of the self-moving development of pure philosophy, with the social dross thrown on as a kind of unappetising garnish. (pp. 2-3)
This shows that Schuringa has not read or remembered Russell’s History with care. For example, in the chapter on Locke (and I pick it because Russell treats Locke as the fount of liberal ideology [as Schuringa recognizes on p. 30 n. 13]) when explaining the relative failure in uptake of Filmer’s Patriarcha, Russell trots out a theory that implies there are social conditions under which it might have some success, but “Stuart England had passed this stage.” And (recall) Russell goes on to explain the uptake of a view like Filmer’s would succeed even in “modern Japan.” In fact, in Russell there are a number of assumptions about how societies develop toward civilization and modernity (these need not be the same) in which certain views are more naturally specific to a particular stage. Russell’s aims are not Schuringa’s, so not much hangs on this as such. But it does provide a hint that Russell did think that uptake conditions matter to a philosophical program, and so we should not underestimate the role he conceived for analytic philosophy’s self-image.
To be continued.
+This is why it makes sense for Schuringa to focus on “logic, metaphysics and epistemology” and not political philosophy. (p. 4)
Off-topic, but I'd be interested in something spelling out your views on Locke and liberalism. If he isn't the fount of liberalism, he is surely the fount of something influential (particularly USian) political thought. What do you see as this something, and what is its relationship to liberalism?
Will try to complete a scholarly paper on it this summer