Did McCarthyism make American philosophy analytic? Sander Verhaegh checks the files
A popular thesis holds that Cold War repression drove American philosophers into the political safety of logic and language. Sander Verhaegh's Logical Positivism: An American History, from Oxford University Press, spent eight years in departmental archives and finds something less dramatic: a generation gap, a hiring freeze, a postwar boom and a culture that worshipped science.
Widener Library, Harvard University · Wikimedia Commons
There is a story about American philosophy that has the shape of a good conspiracy, which is one reason it has lasted. In the 1930s, it goes, the discipline in the United States was plural: pragmatists, idealists, naturalists, a scattering of phenomenologists, all arguing about the good society and the meaning of experience. Then came the Red Scare. Under Senator McCarthy and the loyalty boards, philosophers who talked about society became liabilities, and the profession retreated into the politically harmless precincts of logic, language and the philosophy of science. Analytic philosophy did not win the argument; it survived the purge. John McCumber built the case in Time in the Ditch (2001) and The Philosophy Scare (2016). Christoph Schuringa's A Social History of Analytic Philosophy and the essays of Robert Hanna have recently given it fresh circulation on the left.
Sander Verhaegh of Tilburg University has now done what nobody in that debate had done, which is to go and look. Logical Positivism: An American History, published this year by Oxford University Press, is the product of roughly eight years in the archives: departmental records, personnel files, diaries, correspondence, and several hundred newspapers and magazines. It is a book about the émigré logical positivists and their American pupils, and about how they came to dominate the private and public universities of the United States. It is also, in one of its strands, a test of the McCarthyist thesis against the only evidence that could settle it, the paper trail of who was hired and why. Verhaegh laid out that strand in a guest post for Daily Nous on 29 September, and the summary below follows it.
His verdict is neither the thesis nor its mirror image. McCarthyism did real damage to Marxist and ex-socialist philosophers and made the profession cautious in public. But the files contain no evidence that it changed the composition of philosophy departments. What changed them was older, slower and less sinister.
Verhaegh begins by narrowing the question, which is where much of the previous argument went wrong. Nobody claims that analytic philosophy was invented by the Cold War; it was well established in Europe and the United States before McCarthy was a senator. What needs explaining is its hegemony by the early 1960s, given that before the Second World War the leading American departments and journals were in non-analytic hands. The second question is who, exactly, the Red Scare hurt. That communists and former communists were pushed out is not in dispute. The contested claim is that pragmatists, phenomenologists and "continental" philosophers were caught in the same net. McCumber and Schuringa say yes; Joshua Rayman and James A. Good say no; George Reisch, in , takes the subtler view that McCarthyism affected analytic and non-analytic philosophers alike, driving the politically engaged positivists of the 1930s onto what he called "the icy slopes of logic".
Rivka Weinberg's The Meaning of It All (Oxford, March 2026) argues that a life as a whole cannot have a point, that death is overrated as a threat to meaning, and that time is the real thief. A close reading, then the autumn's other titles: Ganeri's revised Indian philosophy introduction, Han, Žižek and Habermas.
Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.
How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science
The thesis has always had awkward facts to explain away. Analytic turns happened at the same time in Canada, Australia and Britain, where McCarthy had no jurisdiction. Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, the two most visible analytic philosophers of the period, were anything but apolitical. And the profession's fiercest anti-communists, Sidney Hook and Arthur Lovejoy, were humanists in the tradition of William James and John Dewey, not logicians. None of that refutes the thesis; it only shows that the burden of proof lies on the archive.
The analytic generation was already in the building#
The first thing the archive says concerns timing. When Herbert Feigl, the first of the Vienna Circle to reach the United States, arrived at Harvard in September 1930, he found a department already developing ideas "barely distinguishable" from the Circle's scientific world-conception, and a group of young people, W. V. Quine, Susanne Langer and Nelson Goodman among them, who seemed to talk about nothing but logic. C. I. Lewis noted in 1934 that logical positivism was easily first among his students' interests; a Princeton adviser in 1947 described a tendency that led students "to Wittgenstein and the other positivists".
Verhaegh's bibliometrics make the point quantitative. A network analysis of the philosophers most cited in American journals of the 1940s splits the literature into two clusters of roughly equal size: one citing the émigré positivists, the Cambridge analysts and younger Americans such as Ernest Nagel, the other citing the established American professors who thought the passion for "logical clarity" was draining philosophy of cultural value. The striking difference between the clusters is not doctrinal but demographic. The median birth year of the American philosophers in the first cluster is 1899; in the second, 1882. Seventeen years separate them, almost exactly a generation.
That turns the postwar explosion into something close to arithmetic. Analytic philosophy was already the choice of students and junior staff in the 1930s. The Depression and the war then froze hiring for a decade and a half, so the preference could not register in appointments. When departments could finally expand in the 1950s, the generation formed in the so-called Golden Age of American philosophy was reaching retirement. Enrolment in American higher education rose from 2.7 million to 8 million in twenty years; the average size of eleven leading philosophy departments went from 6.3 to 17.3 posts. The younger cohort got the jobs because there were suddenly jobs to get.
The core of Verhaegh's case against the McCarthyist thesis is a survey of appointment records at ten departments: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale among the private universities, and Berkeley, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Pennsylvania among the public ones (a reader of the Daily Nous post noted that Penn is private, a slip that does not affect the argument). Across those files he found not one instance of a philosopher or administrator treating a candidate's philosophical orientation, pragmatist, phenomenologist or otherwise, as a political risk.
The silence is telling because the same files are anything but reticent about other "risks". At Yale in 1945 a head of department, considering Paul Weiss, worried in writing about liabilities he associated with Weiss's Jewishness. At Princeton in 1948 the president was warned against appointing a Catholic, on the ground that members of the Roman hierarchy could not be liberal. Prejudice of race and religion left a thick paper trail; political fear of a philosophical school left none. Departments went on hiring non-analytic philosophers through the decade, sometimes as a matter of explicit policy. A Princeton memorandum of 1954 wanted one of two new chairs to go to someone "broadly humanistic". When politics did intrude, it did so by name and not by school: at Michigan, William Frankena defended Irving Copi, a logician, against suspicion arising from his Trotskyist past; at Minnesota in 1951 Forrest Wiggins, the department's first Black member, lost his post in circumstances he attributed to his politics costing the university money in the state legislature.
Verhaegh does not pretend this closes the matter, and the discussion under his post shows where the thesis can retreat. Conner Schultz proposed a proxy version: if radicals were disproportionately non-analytic, then political filtering would select for analytic philosophers without anyone having to say so. Verhaegh's answer is that the radicals may in fact have skewed analytic, and that the list of philosophers actually targeted is too short to support either conclusion. McCumber himself replied that hiring pressures were discussed privately rather than in files, and that the exclusion of Marxists impoverished American philosophy regardless. Both points are fair. Neither is evidence.
The thesis's deepest blind spot, in Verhaegh's telling, is that it remembers the 1950s only as the decade of the loyalty oath. It was also the decade of the polio vaccine, antibiotics, television and a public that told pollsters, by a margin of 94 per cent, that science had made their lives better. Logical positivism is now associated with the dark side of that optimism, the "value-free" science that the protest generation of the late 1960s blamed for Vietnam. In the 1950s it was something closer to a civic ideal: Verhaegh's newspapers treat logical positivism as the model of modern scientific thinking, the habit of mind a well-run republic ought to teach.
Pragmatism, meanwhile, was getting bad press, and after Sputnik in October 1957 it got worse. When the Soviet satellite went up, American commentators blamed the schools, and some of them blamed the schools' philosophy, Dewey in particular, for the weakness of science education. Analytic philosophy looked new and rigorous; pragmatism looked like the thing that had just lost a race. That the pragmatist inheritance was in fact alive inside analytic philosophy, in Quine, Nagel, Putnam and later Rorty, was not a point the newspapers were equipped to make.
Verhaegh's conclusion is the sort that satisfies neither camp, which is usually a sign that it is right. The Red Scare injured individuals and chilled public speech; it did not reshape the discipline. Cold War culture, on the other hand, did matter, not through fear but through enthusiasm: a booming job market, a public that revered expertise, and a profession that could present logic as the neutral science of good reasoning. The analytic generation had been waiting since the 1920s. The 1950s gave it the posts, the students and the applause.
The book will be read first by historians of philosophy of science, who have been waiting for a full account of the émigré positivists' American careers since Reisch's. But its argument reaches further. Every discipline carries a founding story about why it looks the way it does, and the stories are usually told by the losers. The McCarthyist thesis was attractive because it explained the triumph of a style that many found arid by appeal to something external and shameful. Verhaegh's alternative is less consoling. The analytic turn in America was, on this evidence, what the young wanted, delivered late by a hiring freeze and a war. Readers of this site's autumn books survey will find it the most quietly contrarian history of the season. It does not acquit the Cold War. It simply declines to let it take the credit.
Herman Cappelen and Rachel Sterken's open-access collection asks whether what passes between a person and a language model is communication at all. Sixteen chapters, one of which argues the volume's own premise is false. A review of the arguments, and of what the book declines to notice.
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