Is Analytic Philosophy a Class Ideology?

Christoph Schuringa insists that analytic philosophy serves as an ideological fig leaf for liberal capitalism. But his polemic distorts the discipline’s history and fails to draw persuasive links between its development and apologias for the status quo.

Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (Verso Books, 2025)

In 1932, in one of the more infamous exchanges between what eventually came to be known as the “analytic” and “continental” schools, the Vienna Circle’s Rudolf Carnap delivered a withering critique of Martin Heidegger’s approach to philosophy. In “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language,” Carnap charged that Heidegger’s profound-sounding statements about “the Nothing” were actually nonsense — confused attempts to us