A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #6–Rudolf Carnap.

(Schuringa, 2025)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy

3. The Death of Moritz Schlick

4. The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society

5. Otto Neurath

6. Rudoph Carnap

7. Hans Hahn

8. Philipp Frank

9. Edgar Zilsel

10. Rose Rand

11. Susan Stebbing

12. Russell and Moore

13. Michael Dummett

14. Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations

15. Analytic Philosophy in the Cold War Deep Freezer

16. Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis

17. Jean van Heijenoort

18. Noam Chomsky

19. On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics

20. On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment”

21. The Horkheimer-Neurath Reconciliation Attempt

22. The Punch Bowl Revisited

REFERENCES

The following essay,* by EJ Spode,** will be published here in 22 installments; this, the sixth, contains section 5.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #6

6. Rudoph Carnap

Schuringa describes Philipp Frank and Rudolf Carnap, as “both of them rather moderate leftists,” and as you can probably guess by now, that is understating the reality of Carnap’s political beliefs. I suppose it all depends on what you mean by a “moderate leftist,” but I don’t know of any understanding of that label on which it would be true of Carnap.

Carnap once remarked to a friend: “If you want to find out what my political views were in the twenties and thirties, read Otto Neurath’s books and articles of that time; his views were also mine.” Well, we just took a tour of Neurath’s politics, and saw that it was a conception of socialism that was bottom-up, relied on an informed proletariat, and deployed a controlled economy that was to function without money. Is that what moderate leftism looks like these days?

Digging into the specifics, we can find that in many respects, Carnap’s were even more radical than Neurath’s in important respects, in that he advocated abandoning the State, and had a vision that would be the stuff of nightmares of right-wingers in the United States—one world government organized by socialist principles.

Carnap’s political identity started to emerge during and immediately after World War I. He opposed the war but served and saw heavy action on the front lines. Already, he was developing an opposition to nationalism and to the very idea of nation-states. His pacifism seems to have intensified after seeing war up close, and that pacifism stayed with him the rest of his life.

Schuringa notes that Carnap soon became a big fan of the anarchist Gustav Landauer (Horrox, 2026).

Carnap followed [his friend] Bittel in his admiration of the anarchist Gustav Landauer. In Bittel’s words, with which Carnap enthusiastically agreed, Landauer advocated “freideutscher socialism: against Marxism, materialism, centralisation, state socialism and for communal cooperative socialism in the spirit of brotherhood.” (Schuringa, 2025)

That is to say, Landauer was advocating a kind of decentralized, bottom-up socialism that rejected Marx’s materialism and the role of the State.

Landauer was an interesting case. He was a persistent critic of Marxism, but an outlier as an anarchist as well, since he was a passivist. I’m not sure how that went over with Kropotkin.

There is a famous quote from Landauer, which reads that

the state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.

People have puzzled over that quote because how could the way we relate to each other dissolve the state and form something new? But I think it does make sense. I suspect it made sense to Carnap as well. And I wonder if that thought wasn’t running in the background as he sought to engineer modes of communicating that had been expunged of metaphysics. Would that naturally lead to new forms of human relations?

In the Introduction to Revolution and Other Writings, Gabriel Kuhn with Siegbert Wolf observe that there has been an attempt to depoliticize Landauer, which is pretty remarkable, and also ironic, given the external attempts to depoliticize Carnap as well.

I suspect that there are two forces at work in this nerfing of political activists—and we will see both at work in this review. First, there are attempts to make intellectual figures seem “safe.” These are the people who play down the politics of people like Landauer and Carnap to make their other work more digestible. On the other hand, there are forces that dismiss the work as not radical enough, and thus not worthy of attention. Schuringa is definitely in the latter camp, as we will see. But it must be said that radical political thought comes in more than one flavor, and it is perhaps a mistake to think that Marx is the most radical option available, or that the iterations of Marx that followed him were actually radical, as opposed to merely derivative, and in some cases psychopathically inhumane.

What Schuringa doesn’t mention is that Landauer had been involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic with Neurath (you may have noticed that we name-checked Landauer earlier). However, things did not end as well for Landauer as they did for Neurath. When the SPD-controlled German army retook Munich, Landauer was captured. The end, as described by Rudolph Rucker, was grim.

One of [the soldiers] hit Landauer over the head with a whip handle. This was the signal to kill the defenseless victim. An eyewitness later said that Landauer used his last strength to shout at his murderers: ‘Finish me off – to be human!’ He was literally kicked to death. When he still showed signs of life, one of the callous torturers shot a bullet in his head. This was the gruesome end of Gustav Landauer – one of Germany’s greatest spirits and finest men.

It seems to me that Carnap carried a number of Landauer’s ideas with him for the rest of his life. Certainly, his pacifist beliefs, his rejection of the state, his socialism, but also Landauer’s idea that if we just relate to each other correctly, the state will, as it were, wither away.

We know that Carnap subsequently admired Kautsky and Austrian social democracy and was no Bolshevik. He was certainly no Stalinist. He believed socialism had to be democratic, parliamentarian, and scientific. As I said, it was bottom-up socialism. However, in his diaries, he did entertain a Marxist reading of his paper “Überwindung der Metaphysik” or as we know it, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (Sse Rudolph Carnap Papers, 025–75–10, Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library.)

In the 1930s, his immediate concern was the rise of fascism, and he bravely took public stands against it. Thus, in April 1933, Carnap was one of the signatories of the “Declaration of the 93” (“Aufruf der 93”—a petition protesting the dismissal of Jewish and liberal professors and the politicization of academic appointments).

Carnap moved to Prague in 1935, and then to the United States in 1936, where he took a position at the University of Chicago. There is a kind of received view that the surviving members of the Vienna Circle became apolitical when they arrived in the United States.

Schuringa certainly perpetuates that narrative, and we will examine it more closely later, but whatever we might say about that narrative, it does not describe Carnap’s political trajectory.

Once in Chicago, Carnap renewed his ties with socialist groups, and supported anti-fascist refugees.

In the 1940s through the 1960s, Carnap actually became more political, not less. This is when he further developed his ideas that the nation-state system causes war, and argued that we should abandon the idea of nation-states and move toward peaceful supranational institutions. He was thus an open supporter of the World Federalist Movement and postwar efforts to create stronger global institutions. I’m not saying that these were good ideas; I’m only saying that they were political ideas and that they flew in the face of where America was during the Cold War.

Also going against the flow of the politics of the 1950s, Carnap supported desegregation, liberal immigration, and was openly in opposition to McCarthyism. He signed petitions defending politically targeted academics. He refused a job at UCLA until they lifted their loyalty oath. He became an anti-nuclear activist, signing petitions and joining campaigns for scientific responsibility. He continued to engage in discussions of the role of philosophy in preventing war.

While it was true that Carnap was never publicly a Marxist, he certainly respected Marx as a social scientist. What he rejected in Marx was not the social goal, but what he regarded as the problematic metaphysics—he rejected dialectical materialism as metaphysical. He also recoiled from the centralizing tendencies that were latent in Marx’s thought (as Bakunin observed). He did support socialist economic planning of the sort Neurath advocated, so long as it was, in some way, bottom-up.

Of course, the best way to understand someone’s politics is by seeing what their political enemies say, and Nazis had a LOT to say about Carnap and, as we saw in the aftermath of Schlick’s death, the Vienna Circle itself.

Paul Krannhals, a Nazi philosopher, wrote an essay on “German Philosophy and the National Revolution.” In that essay, Krannhals attacked Carnap (by name) as

the theoretician of a rootless scientific worldview (wurzellose Wissenschaftlichkeit) that denies the Volk, history, and destiny.

If that wasn’t enough, he continued to say that “Such men must be excluded from German intellectual life” (McLaughlin, 2009: p. 39)

We will look at some further evidence of Carnap’s political activism a bit later (I want to save the best for last), but in the meantime, we need to address a question. Why do people think he was apolitical? In cases like Schuringa’s book, it is pretty obviously a disinformation campaign. But sometimes the depoliticized vision of Carnap is not intentionally hostile. Sometimes it was just people trying to protect him. And sometimes department chairs, deans, and university presidents sanitize the politics of their stars to avoid scrutiny from right-wing politicians. And so too, there is a kind of media filter in which the media sanitizes academics to make them palatable, or perhaps less of a threat to the social order. Here is the nerfed Carnap they wanted you to see. (probably not from a newspaper, but a U of C publication):

The bottom line is that Carnap was anti-militarist, socialist-democratic, anti-nationalist, anti-fascist, pro–world government, pro–civil rights, anti-nuclear proliferation. All visibly so. In the Cold War! And Schuringa is calling him a “moderate leftist.”

My point here is that Carnap was not some apolitical logician. In fact, he was never apolitical. As we will see, he did not become apolitical when he moved to the United States, nor when the FBI investigated him, nor when Cold Warriors threatened him. As we will also see, he was deeply political until his last dying day. He was not a “modest liberal.” He was not “bloodless.” He was not, as in Schuringa’s formulation, “removed from the changing scenes of history.” He was not acting as if he was “pursuing … questions from a vantage point situated nowhere in particular, unaffected by social and political reality.” He was not ignorant of or uninterested in “culture, politics, anthropology, psychology, sexuality, religion, literature.” Those are the accusations of his political enemies. And they are false.

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