This is a review of Christoph Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy (London/New York: Verso, 2025).
I’m not sure if Verso has its own department for determining book titles, but they do a good job at it. Numerous of their titles outshine the contents, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (reviewed on this blog) might be the most notable examples of recent years. Now, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is, admittedly, no killer, but the subtitle isn’t bad at all: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy.
When I was a philosophy student in Austria in the 1990s (Austrian philosophers feature prominently in this book), you fell either into the (political) postmodern/poststructuralist camp or the (apolitical) analytic camp. (There were also some traditionalists who liked German idealism and such but they weren’t very popular.) However, I do recall that one of the analytic fellows, who was active in a left-wing student group, liked to emphasize the socialist underpinnings of the Vienna Circle, the highly influential group of thinkers from the Austrian capital who would go on to shape analytic philosophy. And, indeed, in Christoph Schuringa’s “social history of philosophy” (I’m not sure if there are “few” such histories, as Schuringa suggests – one could argue that the likes of Michel Foucault only wrote such histories), Red Vienna – the reformist-revolutionary experiment of the Austromarxists – provides an important backdrop to analytic philosophy’s evolution. Economist Otto Neurath (heavily featured in another Verso release reviewed on this blog, Half-Earth Socialism) became an important player in the Bavarian Council Republic of 1919.
For anyone interested in how the line of thought that started with the Vienna Circle turned into “the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world,” this book is enlightening. That it considers both the social/political context of this development and its relevant ramifications is a valuable bonus. The figures you’ll encounter frequently are no surprise: Frege, Moore, Russell (another big leftie, of course). Wittgenstein is called a Jew, which is only correct if you employ an ethnic argument, as he came from one of the (many) “assimilated” Austrian-Jewish families who had adopted the country’s dominant creed, Catholicism – well, that’s a side note. For the history outlined in Schuringa’s book, Wittgenstein is of particular interest, as he was one of the few analytic helmsmen who also was embraced by postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers. Cutting across the aisle! (Less expected people to get a fair bit of attention are Angela Davis and Catharine MacKinnon – go find out why!)
The final chapter, “Colonizing Philosophy,” is an attempt to assess the political implications of analytic philosophy today. It touches, among other things, on feminism, critical race theory, and decolonization. It’s hard to imagine that readers without any interest in philosophy would find it gripping; those who share this interest, however, will walk away with additional knowledge and a new idea or two.
Gabriel Kuhn
(October 1, 2025)