Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy

June 5, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/8FLHHK9F
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A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy
by Christoph Schuringa
Verso
2025

What Happened to Prewar Pluralism in American Philosophy?

If we surveyed the philosophical scene in the United States on the eve of the Second World War, we would find a garden of flourishing yet distinctive specimens. Realism, idealism, and the homegrown tradition of pragmatism were alive and well in American universities. We would also find more cosmopolitan cross-pollination, including philosophical interest in other prominent traditions in Europe (phenomenology) and Asia (Buddhism and modern Indian philosophy, for example). The wide-ranging and multidisciplinary work of Black radical theorist W. E. B. Dubois is one striking example of intellectual development that reflected this deeply pluralistic scene. Scholars concerned with his philosophical influences today consider everything from pragmatism and Marxism to German Idealism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. This picture of philosophy is hard to imagine in the United States today, where “analytic” philosophy is dominant in university departments and academic journals.

Christoph Schuringa’s stimulating and provocative book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, offers a detailed treatment of the origins of its subject matter, particularly through the 1970s. This book adds to the important and ongoing conversation about US philosophy’s drift away from its prewar pluralism and the costs of that process. Both a social history and ideology critique of intellectual thought, Schuringa’s project is ambitious (covering over a century of philosophical development) and polemical (a style that he executes in ten well-written chapters). Readers who wonder about the capacity of philosophy for diagnosis of or orientation within moral and political struggles of the twenty-first century will find that Schuringa’s book is well worth the read. Some readers (as I do) may doubt that Schuringa fully vindicates the claims of ideology critique set out in the book. Nonetheless, Schuringa’s text develops a perspective of analytic philosophy that affords readers the critical distance of historical context. That perspective, often in short supply within analytic philosophy, may be useful for analytic philosophers who, like Schuringa, worry that analytic philosophy is in crisis. In that regard, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is indispensable for those interrogating the past and possible futures of analytic philosophy.

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy contributes to and defends the view that what is now understood as analytic philosophy was molded from “a variety of differing approaches, all of them intensely methodologically self-conscious and opposed to each other on fundamental points.”1Christoph Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy (New York: Verso, 2025), 9. These currents include the ‘logico-analytical’ method of Bertrand Russell and the ‘commonsense analysis’ of G. E. Moore, whose lives and intellectual development were a central part of the Cambridge School of philosophy that Schuringa traces in the second chapter of the book. The next chapter explores another current, logical positivism, and its development in the Vienna Circle, a larger and more intellectually and politically diverse group of scientists who came together to discuss, among other things, philosophical questions that were foundational to their respective disciplines, including physics, mathematics, economics, and sociology. Several members of the circle (including Rudolph Carnap and Herbert Feigel) were among a larger group of émigrés, who, fleeing Nazism, were influential in the rise of analytic philosophy in the United States after the war.

The Making of Analytic Philosophy 

After the war, US philosophy saw a radical reconfiguration. In the late 1940s and 1950s, philosophy departments at leading universities increasingly hired philosophers who practiced the tradition of “analysis.” First at Cornell and Harvard, then at Princeton, and later at Yale and Chicago, “analytic” philosophy soon became philosophy’s dominant form in the United States. This institutional takeover begat journal capture: over time, prominent journals of the discipline shifted from their pluralistic editorial commitments to focus exclusively on analytic philosophy. In 1967, American philosopher Richard Rorty championed the rise of analytic philosophy as part of a “linguistic turn,” a revolutionary way of doing philosophy that eschewed speculative metaphysics and tackled philosophical problems as problems of language that could be clarified by conceptual analysis. Not long after, British philosopher Michael Dummett reconstructed the history of analytic philosophy and its linguistic turn as originating with the work of the German logician Gottlob Frege in the late nineteenth century.

Schuringa views “internal” explanatory factors like journal capture and increased institutional control as accurate but insufficient to explain the takeover of US philosophy by analytic philosophy. The subtitle of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, “How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy,” points to an “external” factor, a political explanation that serves as a foundational argument of the middle chapters of the book, one that Schuringa previewed in a 2023 Jacobin essay.2Christoph Schuringa, “The Birth of Analytic Philosophy Out of the Spirit of McCarthyism,” Jacobin, January 9, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/01/analytic-philosophy-mccarthyism-postwar-communism. Schuringa’s answer to these questions trains our focus on the historically specific conditions of analytic philosophy’s largest incubator and benefactor: the United States. More than internal factors, Schuringa argues that “the rise of analytic philosophy cannot be understood without an examination of the distinctive position of its homeland, the United States, at the end of the Second World War, and its concerted programme to reinvigorate liberal capitalism.”3Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 129.

It is hard to find a social history of ideas that doesn’t deal with its subject matter somewhat reductively. That is especially so in this case, given the ever-growing and increasingly specialized nature of the academic literature that analytic philosophers produce. The good news is that social histories are often useful precisely because they are reductive. Not all reductions are created equal; some are interesting and generative, others are not. A Social History of Analytic Philosophy belongs in the former category.

Schuringa borrows from Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists to define this (neo)liberalism as “the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world.”4Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), quoted in Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 129. Schuringa charts, more specifically, how this Cold War ideology, through the stifling negative pressures of McCarthyism, or through positive efforts like state sponsored research funding, have shaped the development of analytic philosophy. For this explanation, Schuringa’s social history weaves together literature on McCarthyism and its impact on US philosophy, and key events of ideological consolidation like the Walter Lippman Colloquium and the Mount Perlin Society, with biographical sketches of philosophers who were dragged in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, surveilled and visited by the FBI, or who worked on rational choice theory, among other Cold War projects, at the RAND institute.

In addition to Schuringa’s social history of the Cambridge School and the Vienna Circle, this chronicle of analytic philosophy during McCarthyism stands out as a high-water mark of the book. Schuringa situates his ideology critique of analytic philosophy alongside the messier political reality of the time, one where analytic philosophy departments often defended their colleagues from red-baiting smear campaigns (as in the case of Angela Davis). As the US state today lurches back toward authoritarian tactics of intimidation and repression at universities across the country, too often with the help (or feigned helplessness) of university administrators, revisiting the intellectual pressure-cooker that was the McCarthy era can not only help us better understand the history and development of analytic philosophy then, but also remind us that the future of philosophy in the United States may face similar challenges.

The Remaking of Analytic Philosophy

The mid-century making of analytic philosophy did not last long before there were efforts to remake it. Thus, the celebrated “linguistic turn” soon gave way to other attempts to reorient the discipline, including a “social turn” of more recent decades. Analytic philosophers contributing to the social turn have done so largely by employing various tools and methods of analytic philosophy and integrating these insights with intellectual traditions outside of it. In the final chapter of the book, Schuringa canvasses several of these trends in the literature: the development of Marxism with mainstream anglophone philosophy in the form of analytic Marxism, and similar integrations of feminist and critical race theory by analytic philosophers. Schuringa deploys short intellectual biographies of many academics familiar to analytic philosophers today: G. A. Cohen, Sally Haslanger, Rae Langton, Miranda Fricker, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Charles Mills.

Readers who are familiar with contemporary analytic philosophy may find the final few chapters of Schuringa’s book reductive. Moral philosophers who are skeptical of any substantial theoretical role for intuitions or thought experiments, let alone the viability of effective altruism, will object to these trends Schuringa takes as representative of the field in “Intuitions and Moral Mathematics.” And while Schuringa’s more detailed social history of analytic philosophy up through the linguistic turn allows for nuanced treatment of its leading figures and theories, his single-chapter treatment of many fields and philosophers of the social turn in “Colonizing Philosophy” portrays his subject matter at a grosser (and less satisfying) level of resolution.

For a project aiming to cover a century of intellectual history, the limitations of one book on the subject are understandable. Given, however, that the target of Schuringa’s ideology critique is analytic philosophy as such, scrutiny of his representation of the discipline is valid. These issues, in addition to the book’s polemical style, have attracted critical attention from other reviews of Schuringa’s book.5Pascal Engel, “A Just-So Story,” Philosophers’ Magazine, September 19, 2025, https://philosophersmag.com/a-just-so-story/; Nick French, “Is Analytic Philosophy a Class Ideology?” Jacobin, September 28, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/09/analytic-philosophy-history-hume-rawls. Kieran Setiya’s succinct observation is representative. “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.”6Kieran Setiya, “The Politics of Apoliticism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 10, 2025, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-apoliticism/.

Some of this “enemy fire” is a useful corrective for readers unfamiliar with analytic philosophy who are trying to weigh the merits of Schuringa’s ideology critique. Insofar as the fire is fueled by defensiveness, it risks tunnel vision that would overlook some of the achievements of Schuringa’s book. One would be hard-pressed to find an analytic philosopher with the working knowledge of continental philosophy that Schuringa displays in his book. The polemical style also sits alongside Schuringa’s clear admiration for many of the analytic philosophers in A Social History. This may seem strange, but it is not. A theoretical tradition can (let’s suppose) be ideological in some respects while also having much else to enrich the understanding of a prospective inquirer. It is also worth pointing out that this type of critical treatment presupposes an intelligibility and sophistication of its subject matter that several prominent analytic philosophers have historically denied the continental tradition: philosophy that is, apparently, impenetrable and incoherent, or poetry masquerading as philosophy, or even willfully fraudulent (though as Schuringa correctly points out, these attitudes are less common among analytic philosophers today).7Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy; for analytic philosopher Kit Fine’s accusations of widespread fraudulence in ‘non-analytic’ philosophy, see Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy 161 n. 26.

It is hard to find a social history of ideas that doesn’t deal with its subject matter somewhat reductively. That is especially so in this case, given the ever-growing and increasingly specialized nature of the academic literature that analytic philosophers produce. The good news is that social histories are often useful precisely because they are reductive. Not all reductions are created equal; some are interesting and generative, others are not. A Social History of Analytic Philosophy belongs in the former category. We might then ask: what is interesting and generative about Schuringa’s reduction? To give an answer to this question, I will explore the role that Schuringa’s Marxism (he is also the recent author of Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy) plays in his ideology critique, particularly as it applies to analytical Marxism. When we attend to Schuringa’s reduction—which, I argue, is primarily guided by certain methodological commitments—we will also be in a better position to critically engage with the merits of his ideology critique, particularly concerning analytical Marxism.

Method, Ideology Critique, and Post-Classical Marxism

Though he makes a single appearance in A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Perry Anderson, a predecessor critic of Oxford analytic philosophy in the 1950s, wrote several social histories of his own, including one on Western Marxism, an influential (and non-analytic) current of Marxism in Europe.8Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 12–13. As with Schuringa, the political context of the Cold War factors into Anderson’s exploration and critique of Western Marxism. For Anderson, the post-War era, defined by the resilience and growth of capitalism as a global economic system and the failures of international socialist revolution had a formative impact on this iteration of Marxist theory, namely, the “studied silence of Western Marxism in those areas most central to historical materialism: scrutiny of the economic laws of motion of capitalism as a mode of production, analysis of the political machinery of the bourgeois state,” and the “strategy of the class struggle necessary to overthrow it.”9Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso, 1979), 44–45. Anderson notes Gramsci as a notable exception to this rule. One result of this development for Marxist theory was that “a remarkable amount of the output of Western Marxism became a prolonged and intricate Discourse on Method,” a development that Anderson views as foreign to Marx’s own intellectual output.10Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 53.

While Schuringa’s social history of analytic philosophy stays away from the “social reproduction of institutional academic formations in general,” Andersons’s Considerations on Western Marxism studies the evolving conditions of a “structural divorce from Marxist theory and practice,” a divorce which gradually led Marxism into increasing degrees of political isolation within the academy, where knowledge production survived within capitalist countries and often unconnected from the politics of class struggle.

This seemingly intransigent conflict between analytical and nonanalytical Marxism, I would argue, is unnecessary and unproductive…In fact, it is not clear why analytical Marxists could not accommodate the use of a dialectical method. One needn’t view such a method as indispensable for historical materialism, but in a more pragmatic fashion, as potentially useful for certain questions.

For Marxists today grappling with legacies of twentieth century post-classical Marxism—whether Western Marxism or analytical Marxism—Schuringa’s social history, like Andersons’s, provides a useful mirror for self-examination. Schuringa’s mirror directs our attention to philosophical methodology, both in the self-image of analytic philosophy his social history debunks, and in the methodological unscrupulousness that this false self-image supposedly facilitates.

A closer look at how Schuringa deploys his critique against analytical Marxism both complicates this ideology critique and reveals deeper commitments about the role of method in historical materialism that make his position understandable, if not altogether convincing. Debates about method occupy a prominent place in analytic and continental divisions over Karl Marx’s thought, where the latter often hold that a defining feature of Marx’s historical materialism is a distinctive “dialectical method: of analysis, one that he inherits and modifies from G. W. F. Hegel.”11For one representative example, see Sayers’s “Marxism and the Dialectical Method.” Sean Sayers, “Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen,” Radical Philosophy,  no. 36 (1984): 4–13, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marxism-and-the-dialectical-method. In his book, Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, Schuringa argues that Marx’s recovery (and correction) of Hegelian dialectics is crucial to the success of his project to develop a theory of historical materialism.12Christoph Schuringa, Karl Marx and The Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 10.

In A Social History, we find that disagreement over the scientific legitimacy of dialectics was a principal source of conflict between the socialist and logical empiricist thinker Otto Neurath, and Max Horkheimer, a founding member of the Frankfurt School (one of Anderson’s progenitors of Western Marxism). We find it again in the discussion of analytical Marxism. Pioneered by G. A. Cohen and a group of other philosophers, historians, sociologists, and economists, analytical Marxism developed out of annual meetings and a commitment to the idea that “Marxism should, without embarrassment, subject itself to the conventional standards of social science and analytical philosophy,” thus rejecting the idea that “Marxism as a social theory deploys a distinctive methodology that differentiates it radically from ‘bourgeois social science.’”13Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History (New York: Verso, 1993), 5–6.

This jettisoning of Marx’s distinctive methodology is one case in point of Schuringa’s charge that analytic philosophy “colonizes” the radical traditions that it attempts to embrace. The relevant “colonization” in this case is the stripping away of Marx’s method from his substantive claims about the nature of the capitalist mode of production.

Does analytical Marxism’s jettisoning of a Marxian dialectical method have the colonizing effect Schuringa claims? Let’s consider Schuringa’s critique of G. A. Cohen’s conception of historical materialism, “a hyper-orthodox technological determinist Marxism in the style of analytic philosophy.”14Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 263. Schuringa borrows from Marxist historian and political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood in her critical review of Cohen’s work, arguing that Cohen’s law of historical development is “curiously ahistorical” and “so diluted it has no explanatory value.”15Ellen Meiksins Wood,  “Happy Campers,” London Review of Books 32, no. 2 (2010): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n02/ellen-meiksins-wood/happy-campers, quoted in Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy 263. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Wood is correct in her assessment of Cohen. Does the success of this critique vindicate Schuringa’s ideology critique of analytical Marxism? I don’t think it does. Let me explain. 

Wood’s critique of Cohen’s theory of history rests on her contention that there are two distinctive ways of conceptualizing Marx’s theory of history, one that “situates production relations and class within a larger, transhistorical context of technological development,” while the other “seeks specific principles of motion in every social form and its dominant social property relations.”16Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2016), 110. Wood attributes the former approach to Cohen (and, insofar as he builds on Cohen’s theory, analytical Marxist John Roemer) and the latter to Marxist historian Robert Brenner.

My point here is not to litigate the dispute between these views, but to point out that Brenner, in addition to Cohen, was also an analytical Marxist. Like Cohen, Brenner published in anthologies of Analytical Marxism and participated in the yearly ‘September Group’ meetings.17In his Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen discusses Brenner’s involvement in his recounting of the September Group membership. G. A Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), xix. Brenner and Wood both are often critical of Cohen, Roemer, and others, but their disagreement is evidence that analytical Marxism gave rise to a variety of different approaches to historical materialism, some of which remain useful for analytic philosophers today.

The thrust of this point is not that Schuringa has misrepresented his target.18It is also, to Schuringa’s credit, difficult to evaluate analytical Marxism as such given the diversity of its thinkers, and he is not the first to develop a critique of analytical Marxism that pits political Marxists like Wood and Brenner against Cohen, Roemer, and others. Marcus Roberts, in his Analytical Marxism: A Critique, makes a similar move (though Roberts’s critique is not an ideology critique). Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (New York: Verso, 1997). Rather, his critique depends on a strong conceptual connection between the methodology of historical materialism and its ability to retain its historical specificity; in other words, to retain its diagnostic or explanatory power regarding the laws of motion unique to the capitalist mode of production. Yet the plausibility of political Marxism, a competing version of historical materialism to Cohen’s technological-determinist view, does not depend on the truth of a Marxian dialectical method. Wood’s complaint about Cohen (and Roemer) is typically a complaint that they attribute a transhistorical explanatory significance to the productive forces of society that is in fact unique to the capitalist mode of production. It is the “determinative primacy” of class struggle over the technological development of society’s productive forces that puts the ‘political’ in political Marxism.19Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 108.

Following Anderson, these views do not place a dialectical method at the center of historical materialism (more on this later).20When it comes to relative political isolation from class struggle, analytical Marxism does even worse than Western Marxism, though the former never had those political aspirations to begin with. Anderson’s own reflections about the shortcomings of Western Marxism, in fact, can sound eerily like the analytical Marxist refrain that historical materialism, to maintain its scientific aspirations, must continue to subject itself to contemporary developments in the natural and social sciences.21Compare Cohen Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxvii–xxviii and Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 113. One is a physicist, not a Galilean or Newtonian, and for this reason Cohen laments that Marxism was not called scientific socialism, a term coined by Friedrich Engels. This analogy has limits. Cohen is clear that while good physicists needn’t read the primary texts of Newtown or Galileo, “the study of Marx and Engels remains an indispensable element in a scientific socialist’s education.”

These disagreements within analytical Marxism complicate Schuringa’s ideology critique. To the extent that Marx’s dialectical method is indispensable for a viable theory of historical materialism, one may find Schuringa’s critique compelling. Yet this version of the argument is different from one that charges analytical Marxists, and analytic philosophers more generally, of either a false sense of methodological unity or, failing that, myopia induced by self-confidence in analytic philosophy as “just philosophy” outside of any historically specific intellectual tradition. A closer look at analytical Marxism in fact reveals a striking amount of critical self-consciousness about methodology (though we can leave open to what extent among analytic philosophers these Marxists are an outlier).

The ecumenical attitude of analytical Marxism, at least historically, only extends so far: it does not include room for the use of a dialectical method. The slogan of analytical Marxism—“No-Bullshit Marxism”—makes clear their view of the viability of a dialectical method. While this slogan has more local origins in G. A. Cohen’s confrontation with Althusserian Marxism in the 1960s, Cohen and others subsequently use it to dismiss the relevance (or, for that matter, the mere coherence) of a dialectical method for historical materialism.22Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxii–xxiii; Wright, Levine, and Sober, Reconstructing Marxism, 6.

This seemingly intransigent conflict between analytical and nonanalytical Marxism, I would argue, is unnecessary and unproductive; at best, it has outlived its twentieth century usefulness. In fact, it is not clear why analytical Marxists could not accommodate the use of a dialectical method. One needn’t view such a method as indispensable for historical materialism, but in a more pragmatic fashion, as potentially useful for certain questions. For instance, a dialectical method may be useful for theorizing about certain concepts, like alienation, but less relevant for the empirical study of capitalist social formations or theories of institutional design for economic democracy. Perhaps a little coquetting is in order.23Karl Marx, Capital, “Postface to the Second Edition,” 103.

In the context of these different readings of analytic philosophy, it might even be the case that my optimism and Schuringa’s pessimism are not as divergent as they appear. For this is not optimism about a paradigm-altering and unified philosophy of “analysis,” nor a tradition-less tradition that needn’t justify itself, but instead an optimism that analytic philosophy might continue to develop a more pluralistic character catalyzed by its social turn.

Schuringa’s ideology critique depends on elevating the question of method to a first-order question of historical materialism. Disagreement about this first order question, no doubt, will make some readers skeptical of Schuringa’s ideology critique. Schuringa’s dismissal of analytical Marxism returns the favor. Yet to the extent that analytical Marxists reject a dialectical method wholesale, they join Schuringa in according a centrality to method it does not deserve. To borrow a lesson from Anderson, we might question the first-order importance of methodology. To promote the intellectual health of historical materialism in the twenty-first century, it would be a good place to start.  

Pessimism and The Future of Analytic Philosophy

Whether ordinary language philosophy, modal realism, or analytical Marxism, Schuringa’s ideological culprit remains the same: they are eighteenth-century liberal empiricist commitments, however refined or reworked their twentieth or twenty-first century versions may be. Whereas Schuringa plausibly criticizes the ahistorical and apolitical approach of mid-century Oxford philosophy as a distraction ideology—“silence is always the most vociferous supporter of the status quo”—the same cannot be said of analytic philosophy after the social turn.24Schuringa is here quoting Perry Anderson’s ideology critique of Oxford Philosophy. Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 13. Silence is no longer the issue. For Schuringa, analytic philosophy, when it attends to the social world, becomes a “colonizer” of the radical traditions that it encounters, borrowing from nonanalytic thinkers’ concepts or theories and then “defanging” them of their emancipatory power and significance.

Schuringa’s concern that underlies his use of the metaphor of colonization is understandable. The conceptual tools developed by analytic philosophers are situated within a complex of web of goals, working assumptions, theoretical virtues, and strategies of justification. Applying some of these tools—theories of metaphysical explanation, or game theoretic models of rationality, for example—to “novel” topics or extant literatures is a tricky business. It invites problems inherent to the challenge of synthesizing distinctive intellectual traditions with quite different assumptions, goals, and priorities. When the traditions in question have explicitly emancipatory aims, as is the case with many varieties of critical theory, including Marxism, these challenges have political stakes as well.

The claim of Schuringa’s ideology critique however is stronger than this cautionary point. There is something about analytic philosophy that will inevitably lead to the pitfalls of “colonization.” In fact, the efforts of analytic philosophers to theorize the social world open them up to “ideology critical treatment of the purest kind.”25Schuringa, A Social History of Analytical Philosophy, 5. Beating a retreat is not going to help either; a return to a priori analysis would be a return to the studied silence that is a “vociferous supporter of the status quo.” What is striking about this critique, more than the relative aptness of its target, is its pessimism about the future of analytic philosophy.

My suggestion that analytical Marxism may benefit from the use of a dialectical method might betray an optimism about the future of analytic philosophy that Schuringa would likely reject. Would the selective and pragmatic use of a dialectical method inevitably lead to the imperialist defanging about which Schuringa worries? Would it lead to the absurdity of an “analytical dialectics?” I don’t think so. The point I wish to emphasize is that the salience of these questions varies highly depending on one’s understanding of analytic philosophy itself. In his review of A Social History, Tim Crane offers a view of analytic (and by contrast, continental) philosophy that diverges from Schuringa’s account. Crane writes that

Analytic philosophy emerges, not as the house philosophy of neo-liberalism, nor as the favored intellectual exercise of a certain obnoxious personality type, but rather as a contingent, historical sequence of texts, together with a way of reading them. This is a somewhat deflationary view of the tradition, lacking the totalizing vision of Schuringa’s Marxian approach. But it seems to me that only this way of thinking can account for the lack of unity among the themes and doctrines of analytic philosophy while simultaneously explaining how it hangs together as a tradition.26Tim Crane, “Bloodless Pedantry,” Ideas Letter, October 16, 2025, https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/bloodless-pedantry/.

I am sympathetic to Crane’s deflationary view. As Crane suggests, this view of analytic philosophy also makes it more difficult for Schuringa’s ideology critique to gain traction. My point here is not to criticize Schuringa, but to make evident our different starting assumptions. In the context of these different readings of analytic philosophy, it might even be the case that my optimism and Schuringa’s pessimism are not as divergent as they appear. For this is not optimism about a paradigm-altering and unified philosophy of “analysis,” nor a tradition-less tradition that needn’t justify itself, but instead an optimism that analytic philosophy might continue to develop a more pluralistic character catalyzed by its social turn.27Kevin Richardson’s blog essay “The Social Turn in Analytic Philosophy” gives a recent overview of the social turn. Kevin Richardson, “The Social Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Promises and Perils,” Daily Nous (blog), August 8, 2023, https://dailynous.com/2023/08/08/the-social-turn-in-analytic-philosophy-promises-and-perils-guest-post/. Indeed, the development of this pluralistic character would stand to benefit from ideology critique, albeit in a more local fashion.

Given my emphasis on Marxism within and outside the analytical tradition, my reasons for optimism are also more specific to this background. Whereas many philosophers or key texts remain separated by the gap between analytic and continental philosophy, this is not true of Marx, whose texts can be found in the historical sequence of texts in both traditions. If someone interested in Marx today finds value in the critical reception of his texts in both philosophical traditions (not to mention in other academic disciplines entirely), it may be because the contingent nature of these traditions renders the modifiers “analytic” and “continental” less important than the substantive insights they glean from critical engagement with Marx’s body of work.

Another source of optimism are recent developments by Marxists in analytic philosophy who have constructively engaged with, and improved upon, the first generation of analytical Marxist literature. One notable example is the work of Nicholas Vrousalis, whose recent work on exploitation defends the view that capitalist exploitation is an unjust form of structural domination.28Nicholas Vrousalis. Exploitation as Domination: What Capitalism Makes Unjust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192867698.001.0001. Vrousalis’s work on exploitation reconnects the notion of exploitation to domination, something that will be familiar to many Marxists but was rejected by John Roemer in his influential treatment of Marx’s concept of exploitation.29Vrousalis, Exploitation as Domination, 55–59. Vrousalis’s compelling account of structural domination also marks a welcome departure, along with much of analytic social philosophy today, from the methodological individualism ardently defended by Elster.30Brian Epstein’s The Ant Trap is one example of a sustained and compelling critique of methodological individualism in analytic philosophy. Brian Epstein, The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Another example is Jan Kandiyali, whose work has helped revived interest in alienation and in Marx’s view of human flourishing that underlies it (a topic that was neglected by many analytical Marxists).31See Kandiyali (2020) “The Importance of Others” and Flourishing Together.  Jan Kandiyali, “The Importance of Others: Marx on Unalienated Production,” Ethics 130, no. 4 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1086/708536; Jan Kandayali, Flourishing Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198917731.001.0001.

Schuringa’s pessimism, even so, has something to recommend it. Many analytic philosophers are pessimistic about their own discipline (though the reasons vary widely).32Liam Kofi-Bright offers an interesting perspective in “The End of Analytic Philosophy.” Liam Kofi-Bright, “The End of Analytic Philosophy,” Sooty Empiric (blog), May 23, 2021, https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-end-of-analytic-philosophy.html. A Social History should provide a perspective on analytic philosophy that will be generative for any analytic philosopher thinking critically about their own discipline and its uncertain future.

Readers familiar or unfamiliar to analytic philosophy can learn a great deal from Schuringa’s book, including many scenes throughout that display the frustration and acrimony that frequently occur when analytic and continental philosophers have tried to engage with one another’s work. One does not need to believe that analytical Marxism reigns supreme as the “non-bullshit” Marxism in order to fruitfully reconstruct Marx’s claims about capitalism using contemporary social scientific methods; nor does one need to endorse the conclusion that analytical Marxism makes itself “available to ideology-critical treatment of the purest kind” in the absence of a first-order commitment to a dialectical method. At least in the case of historical materialism, we needn’t repeat these twentieth century failures that Schuringa’s book poignantly illustrates.

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