Philosophy and Politics

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 03:00
“It is clear enough that McCarthyism and its legacy were sufficient to make life hard for a particular strand of opposition to the analytic mainstream, characterized by its general adherence to empiricism and liberalism: those who were broadly Marxists.” So writes Christoph Schuringa a philosopher at Northeastern University London, in an article in Jacobin. He continues: But its power in cementing the analytic mainstream went beyond this. The whole tendency of the period was to block out alternatives to a paradigm that stretched across disciplines. This paradigm, which consisted of methodologies developed for the purposes of Cold War research and development such as rational choice theory, operations research, and game theory, functioned to reinforce a vision of society, and of inquiry, reliant on the classical liberal idea of the autonomous rational individual as the fundamental unit of society. The article includes accounts of some philosophers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee or persecuted by the FBI.