A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #17: Jean van Heijenoort.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

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

17. Jean van Heijenoort

As I noted earlier, one of the baffling elements of Schuringa’s book is that in his footnotes, he makes several references to From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 edited by Jean van Heijenoort (see, e.g., Trotskyana.net, 2026), but he never once mentions van Heijenoort otherwise. Presumably, this is because van Heijenoort is yet another counterexample to his thesis that Analytic philosophers are never lefty enough. Or maybe, in this case, because he was the wrong kind of lefty (a Trotskyist).

In 1932, van Heijenoort was recruited by Yvan Craipeau to join the Trotskyist movement, and he joined the Communist League in the same year. After Trotsky was exiled, Trotsky hired van Heijenoort as a personal secretary and armed bodyguard. van Heijenoort spent seven years in Trotsky’s household, during which he served as a translator, helped Trotsky write several books and carried on an extensive intellectual and political correspondence in several languages. (When I visited Trotsky’s residence in Mexico City, I noticed photos on the wall that included van Heijenoort). He was also one of Frida Kahlo’s lovers. He was shot and killed by his 2^nd/4^th wife in Mexico city in 1986. He was literally the most interesting man alive. Why is Schuringa not writing about this guy? I think we know.

Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, and van Heijenoort

I suppose Schuringa might try to say that he omitted Van Heijenoort because he wasn’t really an Analytic philosopher, but this isn’t any sort of credible claim, as van Heijenoort’s article on Frege (discussed above) shows. The papers in his Handbook were selected with the help of Quine, Burton Dreben, and Hao Wang. Although Van Heijenoort originally studied mathematics, he apparently got into the philosophy of math and logic via the influence of Wittgenstein’s student Georg Kreisel. He seems to have had connections with all of my grad school philosophy professors. Isaac Levi took a course from him at NYU. Sydney Morgenbesser befriended him and visited him in his home on Long Island. My advisor, Charles Parsons, wrote an introduction to a chapter in his collection on mathematical logic. van Heijenoort taught philosophy at Columbia, and then at Brandeis. What did he teach? We don’t know what he taught at Columbia, but we do have records of some of his courses at Brandeis.

From the 1971–72 Brandeis University Bulletin, Jean (listed there as John) van Heijenoort is explicitly named as instructor for:

PHILOSOPHY 15a – Logic

Propositional calculus, quantification theory, satisfiability and validity, completeness, Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, many-sorted logic, theory of types.
Listed with: “See Linguistics Program and Mathematics 115a. Mr. van Heijenoort.

PHILOSOPHY 171a – Frege

An intensive study of major themes in Frege’s philosophy. … Philosophy 15a or 115a not prerequisite but would be of great value in taking this course. Mr. van Heijenoort. (Brandeis, 1971-1972)

Another strategy here would be to claim that van Heijenoort had abandoned the socialist cause by the time he took up philosophy in New York City. This claim is typically based on two documents that he wrote. One is an essay in which he raked Engels over the coals for his bad take on non-Euclidean geometry, and the second, more important document, is an essay published in 1948, called “A Century’s Balance Sheet” (Vannier/van Heijenoort, 1948). It was published under one of his many noms de plume—in this case, “Jean Vannier”—on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. It was also written in the wake of things going to shit in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP); his Morrow-Heijenoort-Goldman faction had lost to the faction led by James Cannon in 1946. Albert Goldman subsequently left the SWP in May 1946, and Felix Morrow was expelled in November 1946. At that point, van Heijenoort was done with the SWP, too.

van Heijenoort was done with the SWP, but was he done with radical socialism? Many argue that he was done with the SWP, with Marxism, with socialism, with all of it. This is certainly the view of the biographer, Anita Burdman Feferman. But a closer look at his own 1948 manifesto suggests that this is not what he said at all.

What van Heijenoort actually said is that “there is no necessary logical connection between Marx’s fundamental hypothesis and his economic doctrine,” where the fundamental hypothesis is something on the order of this: We can trust the proletariat to take us where we need to go.

Here is how van Heijenoort puts it:

Now this is a point that the commentators have never failed to emphasize; for most of them the Manifesto has in it all the certitude of natural science. Its fundamental hypothesis—that the proletariat can and must take the fate of society into its hands, snatch it from the catastrophe into which the bourgeoisie is leading it, and guide it toward communism—seems to them as solidly based, or nearly so, as the laws of motion governing the heavenly bodies. Without pausing to examine just what the modern physicist considers as truth in this domain, it is enough to observe that Neptune still follows the orbit marked out for it by Leverrier, whereas, unhappily, the course of the proletariat has, for more than a third of a century, been increasingly erratic. So much so that it is impossible today to shrug off the necessity of a systematic scrutiny of Marx’s fundamental hypothesis. (Vannier/van Heijenoort, 1948)

Two points here. First, van Heijenoort notes that it is an empirical hypothesis, and second, he claims it appears to be false. Why? Well, I suppose part of it has to do with the proletariat going in for Stalin, which was not the correct choice if you ask a Trotskyist (or anyone, honestly). But second, if the proletariat was all that it was cracked up to be, it would correct mistakes like this.

To seize and hold power the proletariat would have to demonstrate a minimum, a rather high minimum at that, of political capacity; more exactly, it would have to show a capacity to “secrete” a devoted and perspicacious leadership, to control that leadership, to change it with speed if the need arose – not thirty or forty years after a “betrayal.” A capacity for handling such problems is precisely what being “fit for political power” means after all. Without that aptitude, the fundamental hypothesis cannot hold.

In other words, because the proletariat was not able to resolve mistakes like Stalin (a mistake of its own making at that), Marx’s fundamental hypothesis is refuted. Again, this is an empirical claim.

But all this leads us to the more important point, the point that shows that van Heijenoort was not giving up on socialism. It is that “there is no necessary logical connection between Marx’s fundamental hypothesis and his economic doctrine.” Some people give up on socialism, others cling to the refuted hypothesis, but that is a false dichotomy. You can dump the fundamental hypothesis and continue the socialist project:

The problem of the fundamental hypothesis has provoked two opposed yet complementary attitudes. One attitude is to shun politics and to have no further aim than to forget as speedily and as completely as possible the years spent in the Marxist movement. The other is to take the fundamental hypothesis as an axiom and to refuse categorically to examine it. The two attitudes, one as false as the other, finally reinforce each other. It is the task of our reason, if this dilemma is ever to be resolved, to discover such possibilities of action as may exist, along with the most suitable means of realizing them. (Vannier/van Heijenoort, 1948)

In other words, it would be wrong to abandon socialism simply because the fundamental hypothesis is false; the task now is to discover alternative solutions. This leads to the following thought.

What is actually destroyed by the collapse of the fundamental hypothesis is the validity of an esoteric Marxist system standing in opposition to the totality of profane (read: bourgeois) knowledge. But that system was a construction of the Marxist epigoni rather than of Marx himself. Marx’s contribution should be considered in relation to our present body of scientific knowledge, and the value of any of its parts should then be determined by scientific criteria. (Vannier/van Heijenoort, 1948)

And that is a banger of a paragraph. For Marx, his project was scientific, and it was faithful to the science of his day. But that picture of science has ossified into an esoteric science that rejects anything that runs counter to it as “profane.” van Heijenoort’s point is that even socialism must be accountable to the realities of science. Marx himself saw it this way, even though his epigoni—a Marxist smack-talk reference, invoking the lesser sons of the Argive heroes of the first Theban war—could not see how conditions had changed.

Diego Rivera, Trotsky, Andre Breton, van Heijenoort.

This brings us to the most illuminating passage of van Heijenoort’s article:

The most to be hoped for by groups who claim to belong to the Marxist succession (I am not speaking of Stalinists, naturally) is for them to serve as a hyphen between past and future; to take in a way such a role as Buonarotti played between Babeuf and Marx. (Vannier/van Heijenoort, 1948)

This paragraph is the key to what van Heijenoort was thinking. It is a reference to Philippe (Filippo) Buonarroti’s book on Babeuf’s failed proto-communist uprising: Histoire de la Conjuration pour l’Égalité dite de Babeuf, suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu
(“History of the Conspiracy for Equality Called Babeuf, Followed by the Trial to Which It Gave Rise”), published in 1828. That book is a history or historical collection, documenting every ingredient of that revolutionary movement: the recruitment, its clandestine organization, the use of prints and songs, the infiltration by police spies, the arrests of Babeuf, Buonarroti and others, plus the long trial at Vendôme, plus Babeuf’s speech from the dock, and finally his execution. It also contained appendices with documents, manifestos, and letters from the conspirators. The book thus served as a resource for future revolutionaries like Marx.

The way van Heijenoort saw Buonarroti’s work is that it kept alive and systematized the memory and lessons of an earlier defeated revolution, so that it could feed into the theory and practice of a later, more developed socialist movement. And obviously, van Heijenoort is saying that his own revolution was defeated, and it was time for him to play the role of Buonarroti and preserve the record for future revolutionary movements. It was time to be an archivist, which is exactly what van Heijenoort became.

There is a famous passage in Archive Fever in which Derrida says that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” Van Heijenoort believed this as well, and he could hardly not have believed it based on his experience with Trotsky. They both knew that Stalin had plans to destroy Trotsky’s archive (and had already acted on it with some success), and they also knew that it was by virtue of having archival information that they were able to defend Trotsky against Stalin’s charges when the Dewey Commission met.

In the 1930s, when Trotsky was dealing with “the Moscow Trials,” he began speaking directly about his archives and the party’s archives as a terrain of political struggle. For example, in The Stalin School of Falsification, he explained that his book was built out of documents rescued from party archives, and pointedly said it is “not at all a volume for the archives; it is rather a weapon in the political struggle” on behalf of Marx and Lenin against the epigoni (Trotsky, 1937). When the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB) broke into Trotsky’s Paris apartment and stole his papers, he explained why this mattered. In a 1940 letter, Trotsky wrote that no organization had a greater interest in destroying his archives than the NKVD, because those papers were proof of Stalin’s crimes and were crucial for the Dewey Commission’s exposure of the Moscow Trials as frauds. So, for Trotsky, the “archive of the movement” was not neutral storage; it was evidence in an ongoing civil war over the meaning of the revolution.

Dewey Commission hearings in Mexico. Van Heijenoort and Trotsky seated far left, Dewey seated center-left. Political joke not originally intended.

My concern here, and the reason I am banging on about it for so long, is because it seems very clear to me that while van Heijenoort believed he had been a participant in a defeated revolution, that did not mean he turned away from socialism. Like Buonarroti, he was serving as a bridge to the next revolution.

Just as importantly, it seems to me that whatever the nature of our revolutionary movement, even if it takes the form of philosophical revolution—whether successful or not—the critical thing is that we preserve the history of that movement. We cannot allow people like Schuringa to corrupt the historical record. If his plan actually is to flood the zone with shit, and if people get annoyed at our endless point-by-point responses, and even if they think it is excessive or mean or uncollegial, the record has to be preserved. In this respect, the greatest hero of the Vienna Circle may well turn out to be Rose Rand, who recorded numerous meetings and kept all the communications that came her way.

At the Dewey Commission hearings: van Heijenoort, Albert Goldman (acting as Trotsky’s lawyer), Trotsky, Natalia Sedova (Trotsky’s wife), Jan Frankel

Before we leave the topic of archives and their importance, I should take note of an article—a reminiscence of Trotsky—written by Pierre Broué, a French historian and Trotskyist who worked on the history of the Bolshevik Party, and wrote some biographies of Leon Trotsky (see Liszt, 2018). In 1977, he set up the Trotsky Institute to publish (in French) all of Trotsky’s writings (27 volumes have been published). He also founded and edited the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, devoted to the history of Trotskyism. What is interesting is that in his essay written on van Heijenoort’s passing, he called van Heijenoort the eminence gris behind his archival projects.

Although he has always rejected being mentioned, he was, as I jokingly called him, “the gray eminence” or “the damned soul” of the Leon Trotsky Institute, the demanding inspirer and at the same time the irreplaceable advisor of the Works and the Cahiers Léon Trotsky. The work of the Institute, my personal works, owe him an enormity: unfortunately, he can no longer prevent us from saying so. (Liszt, 2018)

As Broué notes, van Heijenoort worked to suppress talk of his activities when he was alive. We don’t know everything that van Heijenoort was doing, apart from what he wanted the public and the state to see (for example, when he dimed out the Stalinists that had infiltrated the 4^th International). The Mexican Trotskyists believed van Heijenoort was in contact with Molina. Was he? We may never know. Sometimes activism has to take place in the shadows, and van Heijenoort certainly had the opsec skills to work in the shadows.

But it has been 35 years since his passing. It is OK to talk about van Heijenoort’s project now—or at least what we know of it. So, the question is, why is Schuringa suppressing this story? It’s troubling, really. We are supposed to have a social history of Analytic philosophy but it is not really a history so much as an agenda, and when figures run counter to that agenda, their political activities are either underplayed, or the figures that don’t fit the agenda are written out of Schuringa’s history like Nikolai Yezhov, the “vanishing commissar” disappeared from the photo of him walking with Stalin along the Moscow–Volga canal.

Comrade Yezhov disappears, like a lefty Analytic philosopher written out of Schuringa’s book

One final note before we move on to another erased philosopher. For every star Analytic philosopher we examine, there are less well-known but ones who are following in their footsteps. This is almost certainly the case with van Heijenoort, and I can give an example. In 1977, a van Heijenoort student named Irving Anellis earned a PhD at Brandeis, defending a thesis titled Ontological Commitment in Ideal Languages: Semantic Interpretations for Logical Positivism. Anellis went on to have a storied career, exploring many branches of logic and doing important historical work in logic. He discovered that Charles Sanders Pierce had discovered truth tables two decades before Wittgenstein wrote about them in the Tractatus, and he makes the case that Peirce, like Frege, had a logic-as-language approach to the foundations of logic. But there is another element to Anellis’s work that few know about. That unknown work appears in the journal Studies in Soviet Thought (where he published dozens of other articles/reviews), and in one article, he criticizes van Heijenoort for his 1948 publication (Anellis, 1988). My point is that for every politically active Analytic philosopher that we are allowed to see, there are others that we do not see, and behind those, even more that are unseen.

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