Social philosophy? (2025)

Book Review from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. By Christoph Schuringa. Verso, 2025.

This book describes the social history of philosophers, not philosophy. It is an interesting, blow by blow account of Western philosophers and their schools, mainly around the turn of the 20th century. But it takes the position of philosophy, that the activity is valid – that there is such a thing as philosophy to be found. This is the most socially historical aspect of the book – that the author, a philosophy professor, must start by accepting uncritically that professing philosophy is a valid thing to do. As Upton Sinclair noted, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it’.

In the Western tradition, a society of élite men, nominally confronting each other as equals beneath constitutional monarchs or in republics, felt capable of eyeballing God from their armchair or bathtub. Western philosophy is the sublime arrogance of thinking that one is one, and one can ‘know’ – that, for example, if all one has is sense perception, then all that exists is sense perception, rather than saying what a less privileged person might say, which is that you just don’t know and should instead just write down what you see as such. Just as the hand mill gives you feudalism and the steam mill industrial capitalism, so the ruling ideas of that epoch are echoes of the experience of elite life under these conditions.

This book contains much material that could be used for such a study of the social history of philosophy: but by taking philosophy seriously, it is not that study. Its relentless disdain of the Bloomsbury group, for example, is just gossip, while the real differences in background of this group, and Cambridge scholars, and Viennese scholars, and women trying to enter the debate, could have been measured against the social conditions of the various states in order to gain real insight. In short, to write this work adequately, one would first have to break with philosophy. Until this is done, all that remains is a discussion of events of the day, and a skeleton description of this philosophical history instead of the real animal.

In the last chapter (the book really needs a conclusion), Schuringa describes one of the most infamous encounters of Marxism with philosophy, that of G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. In it can be seen everything that is wrong with using analytical philosophy to describe Marx’s work. The background of Cohen and the rest of the September group, and their encounters with Marxism: the group’s intellectual trajectory, under pressure of the universities they were in, their peers, publication, the development of the idea that ‘dialectics is bullshit’, and repudiation of Marxism; all would provide data for a fascinating case study, but receive a mere two pages. But this would be to question the validity of philosophical thought, which in the introduction Schuringa says he refuses to do. As such, it’s not clear with which Marxist tradition he is in line. Certainly not one that Marx could inhabit.

SJW

Blogger's Note:

Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.