This is my third post on Christoph Schuringa’s (2025) A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso; hereafter: Social History; my first post (recall here); the second (here).) I focus on chapter 2, titled, “The ‘Rebellion Against Idealism.’” This is a chapter focused primarily on Cambridge: Russell, G.E.
The further your exposition of the book progresses, the more it appears that the answer to this question is found in who the book's publisher is: Verso, the book publishing imprint of New Left Review, the journal of the British 1960s New Left. The story that Schuringa tells is very much the same story which NLR and the people running it have been telling about analytic philosophy, British analytic philosophy more specifically, and British culture more generally, for more than 60 years.
The story is about there supposedly being a standard Marxist model of societal development which continental countries such as France or Germany went through, but which Britain somehow failed to go through, and which means that British culture and British politics are somehow eternally fated to remain conservative, empiricist, hostile to any form of Marxism, and generally "boring". The history of philosophy is treated not as something worth our study on its own merits, but as merely one of the many different manifestations of this general failure of Britain to be an exciting continental country, and to have something like the French Revolution instead of the Glorious Revolution.
And the thing about this is that the story never changes. Its most classic and widely read statement is found already in the essays published by Perry Anderson (who edited NLR for 23 years and has been centrally involved in it ever since 1962) in the 1960s, such as "Origins of the Present Crisis" (1965) and "Components of the National Culture" (1968). And the most classic attack on it too was offered already by 1965 in E. P. Thompson's equally canonical essay "The Peculiarities of the English".
That there has since been an explosive growth in scholarly research into the history of early analytic philosophy, and that the historiographic picture of it has been growing ever more nuanced for several decades now, is something that totally passes by the NLR worldview. So from what you've written about Schuringa's book so far, it appears that the reason it "does not destabilize existing histories of early analytic philosophy" is (well, not totally, but largely) that it is rooted in a system of thought that was well established long before those existing histories were even written.
Well, Thompson never commented on the history-of-philosophy side of it. What I meant is really a general sensibility that runs through the entire text whenever people from within the NLR circle comment on analytic philosophy, regardless of whether it's Anderson or whoever who carries the task of personifying this sensibility. The tone of voice in the verbatim quotes you've included from Schuringa, with its uninhibited use of invective, is very much the NLR tone of voice.
I wonder if there's anything on Popper in the book, by the way. For easily understandable political reasons, there has been a tendency in the NLR way of thinking to portray Popper as much more of a mainstream figure in post-war British philosophy than he really was; as if he had been some kingmaker like Ryle or Ayer.
"But I do wonder who this book is for."
The further your exposition of the book progresses, the more it appears that the answer to this question is found in who the book's publisher is: Verso, the book publishing imprint of New Left Review, the journal of the British 1960s New Left. The story that Schuringa tells is very much the same story which NLR and the people running it have been telling about analytic philosophy, British analytic philosophy more specifically, and British culture more generally, for more than 60 years.
The story is about there supposedly being a standard Marxist model of societal development which continental countries such as France or Germany went through, but which Britain somehow failed to go through, and which means that British culture and British politics are somehow eternally fated to remain conservative, empiricist, hostile to any form of Marxism, and generally "boring". The history of philosophy is treated not as something worth our study on its own merits, but as merely one of the many different manifestations of this general failure of Britain to be an exciting continental country, and to have something like the French Revolution instead of the Glorious Revolution.
And the thing about this is that the story never changes. Its most classic and widely read statement is found already in the essays published by Perry Anderson (who edited NLR for 23 years and has been centrally involved in it ever since 1962) in the 1960s, such as "Origins of the Present Crisis" (1965) and "Components of the National Culture" (1968). And the most classic attack on it too was offered already by 1965 in E. P. Thompson's equally canonical essay "The Peculiarities of the English".
That there has since been an explosive growth in scholarly research into the history of early analytic philosophy, and that the historiographic picture of it has been growing ever more nuanced for several decades now, is something that totally passes by the NLR worldview. So from what you've written about Schuringa's book so far, it appears that the reason it "does not destabilize existing histories of early analytic philosophy" is (well, not totally, but largely) that it is rooted in a system of thought that was well established long before those existing histories were even written.
Anderson is noted (so you are surely on the right track), but different essays than you mention. I don't see a citation of E.P. Thompson.
Well, Thompson never commented on the history-of-philosophy side of it. What I meant is really a general sensibility that runs through the entire text whenever people from within the NLR circle comment on analytic philosophy, regardless of whether it's Anderson or whoever who carries the task of personifying this sensibility. The tone of voice in the verbatim quotes you've included from Schuringa, with its uninhibited use of invective, is very much the NLR tone of voice.
I wonder if there's anything on Popper in the book, by the way. For easily understandable political reasons, there has been a tendency in the NLR way of thinking to portray Popper as much more of a mainstream figure in post-war British philosophy than he really was; as if he had been some kingmaker like Ryle or Ayer.