The Politics of Apoliticism

Kieran Setiya reviews Christoph Schuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy.”

By Kieran SetiyaJune 10, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

IS THE FORM of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph Schuringa argues, with deliberate provocation, that the answer in each case is yes. His book presents itself as “ideology critique,” unmasking the hidden influence of liberal dogma on the scope and methods of “analytic philosophy.” This influence extends not just to moral and political theory but also to the study of mind and language, to metaphysics and epistemology: for Schuringa, analytic philosophy rests on a pervasive fantasy of free inquirers, justified in trusting “common sense,” which only serves to naturalize an unjust status quo.

There are precedents for this complaint. In 1957, a 19-year-old Perry Anderson, who would become a leading Marxist thinker, denounced his philosophy professors in a student magazine: “far from being a symposium of truth […] independent of time and place,” he wrote, Oxford philosophy was, “in the pristine sense of the word, a class ideology.” Two years later, Ernest Gellner published Words and Things, a brutal takedown of “linguistic philosophy” that saw in its pointless verbal minutiae a form of “conspicuous waste”: philosophers belonged to Thorstein Veblen’s “leisure class,” flaunting their economic and social surplus. In 2001, the historian John McCumber traced the apolitical “scientism” of analytic philosophy to a midcentury capitulation to McCarthyism, in which philosophy surrendered its mission of social engagement.

Schuringa is both more up-to-date and more ambitious than this. He tells the history of analytic philosophy from the turn of the 20th century to the present, saving particular scorn for contemporary metaphysics and for what he calls the recent “colonization” of Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory by analytic philosophers, as radical ideas are detached from culture and history, reduced to arid and abstract theory, and sapped of critical power.

To indict an entire discipline is to invite defensiveness. And to do so on the basis of a hundred-year history is to offer a wide target for enemy fire. There are local inaccuracies and moments of obnoxious sneering in Schuringa’s narrative, but to a first approximation, it strikes me as reliable, at least through 1970. Analytic philosophy was constructed retroactively, in the 1950s, by American philosophers drawing on three distinct sources: Cambridge University’s holy trinity of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore, devoted to the logical analysis of facts, in more or less technical forms; the logical positivists in Vienna, for whom science was the arbiter of truth and philosophy its sidekick; and the “ordinary language” school in Oxford, represented in different ways by Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin. (The later Wittgenstein, always a misfit, doesn’t quite belong to any of these camps.) The idea of a shared analytic method or vision was always a myth, but mythmaking flourished. In the 1970s, Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett would retell the history of analytic philosophy as unified by a “linguistic turn” indebted to the German logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), which gave priority to language over metaphysics.

These self-conceptions don’t hold up. What unified Cambridge, Vienna, and Oxford, and thus analytic philosophy, was little more than style—a focus on defining terms and making arguments explicit, sometimes using technical tools from logic—a shared hostility to “Continental philosophy” or post-Kantian thought in Germany and France, and control of the major institutions of the discipline, from elite university departments to prestige journals. The linguistic turn was no sooner named than it was disowned, as philosophers returned to metaphysical speculation in the 1970s and 1980s.

As to liberal ideology: Logical analysis was always apolitical; the logical positivists’ leftist leanings were repressed when they fled Europe for the United States on the eve of World War II; and ordinary language philosophy was by nature conservative, not radical. Marxist thought had limited impact on analytic thinkers, and when political philosophy was revived in the 1970s, its leading lights were liberal or libertarian, not socialist. Throughout, analytic philosophy was largely ahistoricist in both approach and self-understanding.

Critique is more than tempting here. However, Schuringa’s book does little to unmask hidden agendas. Instead, it’s a more or less standard intellectual history, focused on individuals and their ideas, spiked with potted biographies of analytic philosophers that emphasize (where possible) class privilege and private schooling. Social forces lying beneath the surface rarely emerge.

McCarthyism and its legacy play a role, as Vienna Circle émigrés sign loyalty oaths in the post–World War II era. The American Marxist Angela Davis is forced out of the UCLA philosophy department by the university regents in 1970. Yet what is most striking about the Davis case is that the UCLA philosophers fought (unsuccessfully) to keep her, and that she came to their attention because a paragon of analytic philosophy, Donald Davidson, tried to hire her to teach Marx at Princeton; when he could not do that, he taught the class himself. Equally intriguing is the discovery that several philosophers, including Davidson and his teacher W. V. Quine, had worked for the RAND Corporation, whose goal was to generate research in support of liberal capitalism during the Cold War. The formal theories of rational choice developed at RAND, individualist to a fault, went on to play a part not just in moral and political philosophy but also in the philosophy of mind.

None of this amounts to the shocking exposé we were led to anticipate. Analytic philosophers may have been ambivalent about the relationship of political theory to activism, but critical theorists were too. According to Angela Davis, her teacher Theodor Adorno “suggested that [her] desire to work directly in the radical movements of that period was akin to a media studies scholar deciding to become a radio technician.” And how surprising is it that American philosophers during the Cold War would be broadly sympathetic to liberalism, like most of their compatriots? We don’t need to unveil the hidden power of ideology to explain this.

Schuringa makes fun of analytic philosophers for asking, with an air of snide superiority, “Now what exactly do you mean by …?” This practice was alive and well in Oxford, he bemoans, “as late as 2007.” I am sorry to say that requests for clarification are still “a thing” in analytic circles, and that I am about to issue one. What exactly does Schuringa mean when he says that he’s engaged in “ideology critique” of analytic philosophy? He doesn’t define terms explicitly, but I would think he must mean, at least, that he’s exploring how liberal ideology affects what analytic philosophers study, or how they study it, in ways they fail to recognize—or how their work plays an unwitting role in sustaining liberal ideology, suppressing radical dissent.

It’s hard to find support for these historical claims in Schuringa’s account of analytic philosophy. He turns up evidence of ideological self-awareness in a talk by the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price in 1939: “Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic and authoritative mood, to every sort of ipse dixit,” Price proclaimed, and “the same live-and-let-live principles, the same dislike of humbug and of the ipse dixit sort of authority, are characteristic of Liberalism too.” For Price, empiricism and liberalism are openly and mutually supporting: nothing is hidden. (Forty years later, the eminent analytic philosopher P. F. Strawson would describe himself, without apology, as an “elitist liberal bourgeois.”) McCarthyism was an overt pressure coming from outside the discipline, not a covert force within it. And questions that might uncover cryptic ideologies go unasked in Schuringa’s book. Why was analytic philosophy so indifferent to the flowering of interest in race, gender, and sexuality that transformed the other humanities in the 1970s and 1980s, for example?

Schuringa’s critique picks up steam and specificity only in the wake of these developments. But as it nears the present, it becomes more sociologically suspect. Schuringa is derisive about appeals to “intuition” in philosophy, taking at face value the self-understanding of philosophers who treat intuitive verdicts as data to which philosophy is answerable, like observational data in natural science. “The results are unsurprising,” he writes: “a ‘philosophy’ whose wheels spin idly in the service of well-entrenched patterns of thought. Here analytic philosophy wears its social function on its sleeve.”

While Schuringa is aware that this conception of philosophy is contested, he doesn’t give readers an adequate sense of the contemporary dispute or why it matters. On the most salient alternative, talk of “intuition” serves merely to flag one’s premises, acknowledging that arguments start somewhere—one cannot give reasons for every claim one makes in a finite work—and indicating (for what it’s worth) that one does not think one’s premise is perverse. This is certainly how some of us use the phrase, and when we do, Schuringa’s critique falls flat. Here’s how a key passage reads with “intuitions” replaced by “premises”:

It is not difficult to see that reliance on [premises] is a symptom of philosophical degeneracy. It is a form of dogmatism, and thus the antithesis of philosophy. Philosophy advances grounds for claims. To appeal to [premises] is to admit that explanation has run out, and that we are merely relying on something for which no better support can be given than that it is intuitive, or what I, or you, or some group, think anyway.

Giving arguments with premises is not a mark of degeneracy or dogmatism, nor is admitting what one is up to—in fact, the opposite—and this practice has nothing to do with a dubious epistemology on which the fact that one believes something, or that others do, is the primary evidence for its truth. (Nor can it be said that contemporary metaphysics is conservative, even if it is largely apolitical: radical ontologies are rife.)

When it comes to the analytic “colonization” of feminism, Schuringa’s complaints revolve around the influence of Catharine MacKinnon, with whom the likes of Rae Langton and Sally Haslanger—my colleague at MIT—have a constructively critical relationship. Schuringa is not a fan of this work, finding it insufficiently liberatory: “Since MacKinnon defines women as those who, because they are the fucked, are thereby subordinated, and for her society is divided into the two categories of those who fuck and those who are fucked, what are women to do?” But if the problem traces back to MacKinnon, who is not an analytic philosopher, it doesn’t fit the model of analytic “colonizers” sapping the original power of critical thought.

Schuringa is impatient with the compromises made by analytic feminists, writing for two skeptical audiences: nonanalytic feminists and analytic philosophers not yet convinced that feminism matters to what they do. He ends his book with pounding rhetoric: analytic philosophy “rightly trembles at the wrath that might be unleashed by the powerful critical forces that its hegemony helps to keep suppressed.” But the image is unrealistic to the point of being naive: the critical forces are not so powerful, and they won’t be unleashed in philosophy without the kind of hard, patient, imperfect work analytic feminists, and others, are doing.

Schuringa’s book concludes with further case studies, but I won’t scrutinize them here: even if they are sound, they amount at most to data points for ideology critique. He does not develop a social theory on which the ideology of liberalism or its material correlates serve as cryptic causes or effects of analytic philosophy. Nor does he point the way to liberation. Being told to tremble at the wrath to be unleashed if one’s hegemony fails is not an invitation to dialogue. For Schuringa, analytic philosophy cannot participate in its own undoing: the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.

We need a revolution then—but there is no mass movement behind it, and the institutions of analytic philosophy are powerfully homeostatic. According to a mordant joke retold by Fredric Jameson, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. If Schuringa’s conjecture is right, it’s easier to imagine the end of academic philosophy than the end of its analytic form.