A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #12–Moore and Russell.

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*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, #12

12. Russell and Moore

At this point, I probably don’t even need to tell you what Schuringa is going to do with Russell and Moore. Yes! How did you know? He is going to minimize their political activities. Of course, Schuringa can’t exactly ignore that Russell protested England’s involvement in World War I and went to prison for that, nor that G.E. Moore was part of a group (co-founded by Russell) that also protested the war. But he can poo-pooh it.

Schuringa assures us that we don’t have to be impressed by Russell’s political activism, because, after all, he was the brother of an Earl, and he got special accommodations in prison. Well, yes, he did. But he also went to prison. And the operative question has to be this. In what way was Russell in the tank for the establishment here? And the second question is, what was everyone else doing at the time?

The second question is particularly apt. Here we have a case where the Analytic philosopher, Russell, despite plenty to lose, protested the war, while his contemporaries at Cambridge, who were Idealists, were busy flying the Union Jack for the war. J.W.E. McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, a fellow at Cambridge’s Trinity College, got Russell fired from his lectureship at Trinity.

It is also somewhat bizarre to play up Russell’s connection with British aristocracy, and for several reasons. First, Russell did argue against the privilege of his class and the actions of the empire, and it might occur to someone that his background in Analytic philosophy gave him a framework from which he could see the flaws in the social order from which he came. He did not have to feel beholden to or rooted in an idealized conception of British culture. He was not compelled to defend British Imperialism. He was free to think in other, counter-establishment ways, just as the positivists had. Note: this is not to say he acted from a position outside of history; to the contrary, just as the members of the Vienna Circle were very much acting within their historical setting, by resisting what they saw, so too was Russell. It was not a view from nowhere; it was an ability to be critical of where you were standing.

Parenthetically, what are Schuringa’s potted biographies supposed to show us? We all know that Russell came from the aristocracy. That’s why he was called “Lord Russell.” But radical thinkers often come from the aristocracy, or at least from the Bourgeoisie. Engel’s father was an industrialist who owned several textile factories. Bakunin came from Russian nobility. Fidel Castro’s family owned a sugar plantation. Che Guevara came from the Chilean aristocracy. Even Mao and Pol Pot came from land-owning families (Pol Pot, famously, was able to study in Paris). Schuringa’s biographies are sometimes interesting, but he wants them to be more than interesting—he wants them to be evidence of the complicity of Analytic philosophy being in the tank for the establishment, thus he dishonestly spins the biographies to achieve his ends (we saw this in action with Susan Stebbing, but we will look at some additional interesting examples, later).

Schuringa’s general strategy here, as it was when he discussed the members of the Vienna Circle, is briefly to note the very courageous political stances that Analytic philosophers have taken and then dismiss them with a wave of a hand, not reflecting for even a moment on what their contemporaries were up to.

For example, while yes, the Russell and McTaggart incident is mentioned, Schuringa says that Russell lost his lectureship through “conniving” by McTaggart, but why isn’t McTaggart the one in the hot seat here? And I would have called it a flat-out “betrayal” myself.

In the same section, we are also told that G.E. Moore was not really a lefty lefty because he was only in The Union of Democratic Control (UDC) (“a moderate organization”). WTF is that? They were tarred as being pro-German, and the British government prosecuted UDC secretary E.D. Morel, who was imprisoned for six months in 1917 for sending a UDC pamphlet to Switzerland, allegedly an offense under the “Defence of the Realm Act.” The group was banned from holding meetings at Cambridge, so Moore took it upon himself to write to the University to get the meetings reinstated on campus. So, while it was true that the UDC was not the most radical organization in the world or even England, it was radical enough so that its meetings were banned, and one member went to prison for distributing their writings.

By the way, although Schuringa mentions Russell’s imprisonment for his anti-war activities in World War I, he doesn’t have another word to say about Russell’s political activities—a shocking omission, given the central theme of the book (i.e., that Analytic philosophers are allergic to progressive politics). The reality is that Russell was very much engaged in progressive political causes until the very end of his life.

Russell, after a brief dark period after World War II (we will come back to that), became a leading voice in the anti-nuclear movement. He co-authored the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 and was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1961, Russell was once again imprisoned (this time for a week) for his anti-nuclear protesting. He was 89 years old at the time. Given his age, the magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to “good behaviour,” to which Russell replied: “No, I won’t.”

Beginning in 1963, Russell began work on a variety of additional issues, including lobbying on behalf of political prisoners under the auspices of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. He also organized the Russell Tribunal to investigate American actions in Vietnam, which concluded that the U.S. had committed genocide:

The Committee of 100 was a British anti-nuclear organization that Russell helped create because he felt that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was not being aggressive enough. He felt that civil disobedience was called for, given the gravity of the situation.

Remarkably, none of this is even mentioned in Schuringa’s social history.