A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #18: Noam Chomsky.

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.

18. Noam Chomsky

While we are on the subject of Analytic philosophers that get ignored by Schuringa, it is perhaps a good time to talk about Noam Chomsky, who is only mentioned in this book in the context of Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. On what taxonomy is Chomsky not an Analytic philosopher? He was trained in Analytic philosophy and, using the tools and methods of Analytic philosophy, he engaged critically with many of the leading figures of Analytic philosophy, including Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Dummett, etc. He taught courses in philosophy at MIT. He was also a rabid critic of Continental philosophy (more on that below).

A lot of philosophers I know would easily put him in the top 5 philosophers of the 20^th Century. I can’t envision what the second half of 20^th-century Analytic philosophy would look like without Chomsky in the mix. The battles with Quine, Putnam, Searle, Burge, Dummett, Kripke were all classics, and his influence on Analytic philosophy of mind and philosophy of language has been singular. None of which is to say I agree with him on everything or even most things philosophical.

Chomsky(3^rd from left) marching on the Pentagon.

This takes us to Chomsky’s politics. I don’t want to go into too much detail about Chomsky’s political views except to situate them, as best I can, based on a vast array of lectures and publications and online interviews, as well as a few private conversations. In short, Chomsky identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist. He thus advocates a strain of socialism that is identified with Emma Goldman, the aforementioned Anton Pannekoek, and Anarcho-syndicalist Spain (1936–39); it is bottom-up socialism, rather than top-down socialism of the type imposed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. In fact, Chomsky refuses to even call those efforts “socialism,” because workers did not control the means of production; some higher authority did. On the question of Trotsky, Chomsky believes that Trotsky was a good guy until 1917, and a bad guy thereafter. That is when, on Chomsky’s view, Trotsky switched from being a bottom-up socialist to a top-down “socialist.” There is a potted political bio for you!

This leads us to Chomsky’s take on Continental philosophy post-1968; it is something like the inverse-Schuringa thesis. On Chomsky’s view, post-1968 Continental philosophy has been counterrevolutionary. And this has been due to its tendency towards what he views as obfuscation, and the idea that it has taken its eye off what should still be a principal concern of the left – economic justice.

Chomsky’s Critique of post-1968 Continental philosophy

The quotes that follow are reported to have originated in conversations in 1995 on an online bulletin board maintained by Z-Magazine. They are certainly consistent with what I have heard him say in public lectures and in conversation in the mid-1980s. These conversations are sometimes cited in the literature as (1995) “Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism” (Chomsky, 1995).

The first point of note is that Chomsky takes a dim view of what is popularly called “theory”:

As far as I do think I understand it, the debate was initiated by the charge that I, Mike, and maybe others don’t have “theories” and therefore fail to give any explanation of why things are proceeding as they do. We must turn to “theory” and “philosophy” and “theoretical constructs” and the like to remedy this deficiency in our efforts to understand and address what is happening in the world. I won’t speak for Mike. My response so far has pretty much been to reiterate something I wrote 35 years ago, long before “postmodernism” had erupted in the literary intellectual culture: “if there is a body of theory, well tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret,” despite much “pseudo-scientific posturing.”

To my knowledge, the statement was accurate 35 years ago, and remains so; furthermore, it extends to the study of human affairs generally, and applies in spades to what has been produced since that time. What has changed in the interim, to my knowledge, is a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call “theory” and “philosophy,” but little that I can detect beyond “pseudo-scientific posturing.” That little is, as I wrote, sometimes quite interesting, but lacks consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies. (Chomsky, 1995)

Two observations here. The first is that Chomsky believes that moral and political action can and should flow from what is obviously the correct thing to do. You don’t need fancy theories to understand what must be done. Second, what is produced and labelled “theory” has nothing to do with theory as it is understood by scientists. The word “theory” suggests to Chomsky that there are testable empirical predictions that flow from the theory. So, the word “theory” has been borrowed (misappropriated, in his view) to lend gravitas and credibility to what is in fact pseudo-scientific posturing.

The next part of his criticism stems from what he considers the unintelligibility of work by figures such as Derrida.

As for the “deconstruction” that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can’t comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. (Chomsky, 1995)

Then there is this, which I think is the part that really gnaws at Chomsky:

[T]here is no effort that I am aware of to make it intelligible to the great mass of the population (say, to the people I’m constantly speaking to, meeting with, and writing letters to, and have in mind when I write, and who seem to understand what I say without any particular difficulty, though they generally seem to have the same cognitive disability I do when facing the postmodern cults). And I’m also aware of no effort to show how it applies to anything in the world in the sense I mentioned earlier: grounding conclusions that weren’t already obvious. Since I don’t happen to be much interested in the ways that intellectuals inflate their reputations, gain privilege and prestige, and disengage themselves from actual participation in popular struggle, I don’t spend any time on it. (Chomsky, 1995)

This then leads to the claim that the listeners may not have the correct “frame of reference” to understand what is being said, but Chomsky’s response is that while this is true, the people who don’t have the “right frame of reference” are not ordinary people with their social and economic problems, but the intellectuals that have been hyper-indoctrinated to the point that they cannot understand plain language about the suffering of other people and the available political solutions to that suffering:

John made the point that “plain language is not enough when the frame of reference is not available to the listener”; correct and important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent “theories.” Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that might be considered, all in plain language. I’ve never found that a problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it’s true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll. (Chomsky, 1995)

Finally, Chomsky makes a point that should bring us back to the projects of the members of the Vienna Circle, engaged in adult education in Red Vienna, or the public lectures given by Susan Stebbing. Why has the left abandoned projects like that? His concluding words, written 30 years ago, seem prophetic.

A final point, something I’ve written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like “mathematics for the millions” (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That’s not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That’s an organizer’s dream, as I once heard Mike say. It’s also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There’s a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion. (Chomsky, 1995)

Just to connect the dots, Chomsky was saying, in 1995, conditions were fertile ground if we wished to engage people in social action, but it was also an opportunity for “demagogues and fanatics” if the left did not accept its responsibility to speak plainly to the people, their problems, and their concerns. 30 years on, it appears that this responsibility was not accepted, and we are witnessing the consequences today.

Of course, you can’t blame just Continental philosophers here, as though they were the only ones that had this responsibility. Analytic philosophers have precisely the same level of responsibility. Everyone failed.

And let’s be clear. Chomsky isn’t criticizing Continental philosophy tout court; he is criticizing a certain form of Continental philosophy that we might call post-1968 Continental philosophy, and it isn’t even the philosophy that he is criticizing—it is the lack of direct engagement.

What happened to Continental philosophy? We think of the radical leaders of Continental philosophy, and we think of figures like Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and the philosopher/mathematician Jean Cavaillès. They were all key figures, first in the French resistance during WWII, and then (the survivors) pushing progressive economic issues after the war. But that isn’t what much of Continental philosophy looks like today. Forget about post-modern philosophy and its obscurity. The bigger problem is that the left has been swamped by the “nouveaux philosophes”—anti-Marxists like Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet.

Not your father’s French Philosophers. Above, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre protesting. Below: nouveaux philosophes Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann chum it up with French Ministers Rama Yade and Bernard Kouchner after their meeting with President Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace in Paris on November 24, 2007.

So, how did this happen? Chomsky offers another way to think about that question. Why was post-modern philosophy allowed to happen, whereas other forms of philosophy might not have been allowed? Chomsky’s idea is that postmodernism, and its obsession with theory, has

worked as a way of insulating sectors of a kind of radical intelligentsia from popular movements rather than actual activism and it served as an instrument of power. (Chomsky, 2017)

He then says he

suspect[s] that’s the reason why it is so readily tolerated in the universities. It’s all over the place. In the third world as well because of the function it serves. (Chomsky, 2017)

Chomsky is suggesting that centers of power hold the killswitch to silence certain forms of philosophical discourse, should they choose to do so (see the Cold War silencing of the Unity of Science Project). But in this case, they did not choose to use the killswitch. Why is the pomo stuff “tolerated?” In Chomsky’s view, it was “because of the function it serves.” And that function is to undermine the left’s pursuit of economic justice and its ability to organize popular movements in support of that goal.

Does this sound tinfoil-hat crazy to you? Well, get ready to have your hair catch on fire, because recent FOIA requests have yielded a document from the CIA dated Dec 2, 1985, showing that this is exactly what happened. The CIA was aware of what was going on and was just as pleased as punch with what they saw, and they recorded their glee in a document entitled “FRANCE: DEFECTION OF THE LEFTIST INTELLECTUALS”:

The CIA likes what it sees!

The CIA document is available online in the CIA’s “reading room” (FOIA, 2026) and there is also a summary of the document by the Continental philosopher Gabriel Rockhill. (He teaches at Villanova University and Graterford Prison, and he directs the Critical Theory Workshop at the Sorbonne). His summary and analysis appears in The Philosophical Salon, and is entitled “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left” (Rockhill, 2017). Here are some passages from his summary:

Although the right had been massively discredited because of its direct contribution to the Nazi death camps, as well as its overall xenophobic, anti-egalitarian and fascist agenda (according to the CIA’s own description), the unnamed secret agents who drafted the study outline with palpable delight the return of the right since approximately the early 1970s.

It is in this context that the masked mandarins commend and support the relentless critique that a new generation of anti-Marxist thinkers like Bernard-Henri Levy, André Glucksmann and Jean-François Revel unleashed on “the last clique of Communist savants” (composed, according to the anonymous agents, of Sartre, Barthes, Lacan and Louis Althusser). Given the leftwing leanings of these anti-Marxists in their youth, they provide the perfect model for constructing deceptive narratives that amalgamate purported personal political growth with the progressive march of time, as if both individual life and history were simply a matter of “growing up” and recognizing that profound egalitarian social transformation is a thing of the—personal and historical—past. This patronizing, omniscient defeatism not only serves to discredit new movements, particularly those driven by the youth, but it also mischaracterizes the relative successes of counter-revolutionary repression as the natural progress of history. (Rockhill, 2017)

As Rockhill notes, the CIA not only are fans of Bernard-Henri Levy, André Glucksmann and Jean-François Revel, but the Agency positively adores Foucault.

They cite in particular the profound contribution made by the Annales School of historiography and structuralism—particularly Claude Lévi-Strauss and Foucault—to the “critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences.” Foucault, who is referred to as “France’s most profound and influential thinker,” is specifically applauded for his praise of the New Right intellectuals for reminding philosophers that “‘bloody’ consequences” have “flowed from the rationalist social theory of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the Revolutionary era.” Although it would be a mistake to collapse anyone’s politics or political effect into a single position or result, Foucault’s anti-revolutionary leftism and his perpetuation of the blackmail of the Gulag—i.e. the claim that expansive radical movements aiming at profound social and cultural transformation only resuscitate the most dangerous of traditions—are perfectly in line with the espionage agency’s overall strategies of psychological warfare. (Rockhill, 2017)

The CIA absolutely loves Foucault. Screenshot from their “research paper.”

Rockhill concludes by noting the uptake of French theorists in the anglophone world as coming with a “radical chic veneer” that is supposed to make it seem to “far surpass” to the crusty old socialism of Sartre and Marcuse.

The CIA’s reading of French theory should give us pause, then, to reconsider the radical chic veneer that has accompanied much of its Anglophone reception. According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. (Rockhill, 2017)

The consequences of this are what you might expect: the left has sidelined itself, and imperial projects march on without resistance.

According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia. (Rockhill, 2017)

At this point Rockhill shows that he’s not any sort of Analytic philosopher because he says that this new French “theory,” total shit though it might be (on his view), at least

had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy (Rockhill, 2017),

thus buying into the line of McCumber and Schuringa about the politics of Analytic philosophers. But following the evidence presented in the essay/review, this “pole of resistance” would be an error and not a feature of French theory, for the charges against Analytic philosophy are blatantly false, and because French Theory’s intentional obscurity and radical chic veneer pushed away natural allies in Analytic philosophy— Chomsky being a case in point. In other words, the Theorists were optimal agents in the service of the CIA’s goals because they not only moved the French intelligentsia away from economic critique and popular economic movements, but they also helped fracture what could have been a unified philosophical movement in the service of a shared political cause.

Now I’m not placing blame on Continental philosophers here. Cooperation and communication require two willing parties and they also require effort. Chomsky, who just celebrated his 97^th birthday, is past those sorts of efforts, and honestly, he was never that great at it in the first place. But others, I believe, are willing and able to cope with the idea that, in some hands, “theory” doesn’t mean what it means in Chomsky’s “theory of generative grammar.” Communication is possible.

Look, the two traditions are not that far apart. Chomsky, it must be noted, never said, in the Z-Magazine bulletin board posts quoted above, that Foucault said something false. He thought that, for the most part, Foucault was offering a lot of “truisms” (truisms that Chomsky felt he had been saying for 30 years). His objection is that Foucault was dressing it up in a whole bunch of bullshit about “theory,” and he objected to this because it was not speaking to the people that would benefit from the message and was not helping to organize anybody. In this, Chomsky was perhaps the last of the positivists, in the sense that he fervently believed in their efforts to bring the message to the people, like Neurath, Hahn, Rand and others had in Red Vienna.

A final note. There are, of course, Marxists that are having none of the Continental philosophy stuff, even from the OG philosophers like Sartre, etc. In their view, pointy-headed intellectuals of any stripe are not a sound source for Marxist doctrine. So, for example, we have the following passage from Joshua Sykes, writing in Fight Back! News:

An important factor in the development of postmodernism, therefore, was the trend in philosophy known as “Western Marxism.” This group of philosophers, largely from western Europe, from Karl Korsch and György Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre, all largely carried out, in one way or another, a reversal of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which demanded that theory’s source and aim was revolutionary practice.

Instead, these Western Marxists worked to divorce Marxism from the practical struggles of the working class and retreated into the academic ivory tower. Furthermore, as the Western Marxist academic Perry Anderson notes in his book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, they each attempted to merge Marxism with elements of non-Marxist (metaphysical and idealist) philosophy, such as with Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics or with Jacques Lacan’s psychoAnalytic theories. The result was a muddle, and by the 1970s most of Western Marxism was engaged in self-obsessed navel-gazing or had become narrowly preoccupied with cultural criticism and aesthetics. No wonder this is the “Marxism” promoted in the universities of the imperialist countries. (Sykes, 2023)

Here’s the most interesting thing about that quote. You will notice that in the middle of it, there is a reference to Perry Anderson’s 1983 book, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism.

I’m pretty sure Sykes is reading things into Anderson that aren’t there, but certainly Anderson does have reservations about the new French intellectuals.

Actually “reservations” is a mild way to put it, as Anderson definitely drops the hammer and sickle on them:

Today, Lévi-Strauss speaks of Marxism as a totalitarian threat even to the animal kingdom; Foucault applauds the literature of gulagism; Sollers and Kristeva of Tel Quel have rediscovered the virtues of Christianity and capitalism. Conservative or collusive as these positions may be, they have little actual edge or weight. It is less their iniquity than their fatuity that is striking. Reflections of a political conjuncture in an essentially unpolitical thought, they can alter again when the conjuncture alters. (Anderson, 1983)

Cold. What is interesting for our purposes is that Perry Anderson does come up in Schuringa’s book, but in the context of an essay that Anderson wrote as a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Oxford University, which took issue with the ordinary language philosophy then being conducted at Cambridge (circa 1957). What Schuringa does not observe, or apparently did not want to report, is that mature Anderson did not have any particular love for postmodern Continental philosophy either – particularly when fused with Marxism – and, as we saw, he dumps all over that unholy fusion in his book. But in the midst of this sea of philosophical despair, Anderson finds at least one bright light.

[I]n philosophy G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History—A Defence, bringing for the first time the procedural standards of Analytic philosophy to bear on the basic concepts of historical materialism, is clearly the landmark of the decade. (Anderson, 1983)

That would be the Analytic Marxist, G.A. Cohen that Schuringa dismisses without argument, but with a sneer.

Now, my point here is not that Analytic philosophy is somehow better than Continental philosophy at understanding or shaping or executing Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other radical progressive movement. It is rather to reject the counter-thesis that Analytic philosophy cannot do any such thing, whereas Continental approaches more naturally can. Both traditions leave plenty of room for radical thought and action, should you choose to move in that direction. By the same token, both have the resources to allow you to cosplay as a radical even if the reality is that you are, in Anderson’s words, “conservative or collusive.”

Who is paying the piper now?

In the CIA “research paper” cited above (FOIA, 2026), there is much applause for the new French intellectuals, but there is no evidence that, in 1985, the CIA was actively involved in funding the new intellectual movement. They mostly seem to be delighted that it fell into their lap for free. But that doesn’t mean that money wasn’t coming from somewhere in the empires of the West, whether governments or corporations, or from billionaires with skin in the game. And we have to ask this question because we know that in the past, the CIA has funded anti-left cultural movements. We have already looked at one such case: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, which sucked money away from the Unity of Science projects in the 1950s. But if we look at the CCF then we also need to take a closer look at funding that streams towards Analytic philosophers, beginning with the aforementioned role of RAND funding research by Quine, Davidson, Reichenbach, and others.

We begin with a closer look at the case of the CCF. We already discussed a bit about the origins of the CCF when we discussed Sidney Hook urging Carnap to support a conference on World Peace. We also discussed the CCF in the context of the Rockefeller Foundation preferring to give money to the CCF instead of the “Vienna Boys,” but ultimately, it seems, not all the money was flowing from the Rockefeller Foundation, and quite a bit of it was coming from the CIA (although sometimes funneled through funding agencies like the Ford Foundation). And we know this because in 1967, the curtain was pulled back on the operations of the CCF, and honestly, even the people with tinfoil hats had not seen this one coming. The whole business is written up in a book by Frances Stonor Saunders called Who Paid the Piper? (Saunders, 2000)—

The revelations began when Ramparts magazine published an exposé in March 1967 about the CIA’s secret funding of the National Student Association (NSA, but not that NSA). The article documented the CIA’s elaborate funding network through various foundations. That information came from an insider source—a former NSA (not that NSA) official named Michael Wood, who had records not just about the NSA, but other related fronts that the CIA had established. Wood had given the information to Ramparts despite pleas from other NSA officers who argued that exposing the story would hurt both the NSA and the “enlightened wing” of the CIA. When Ramparts learned that the NSA was about to preempt their story by announcing it had severed CIA ties, its infamous eye-patch-wearing editor, Warren Hinckle, purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times that detailed most of the exposé before the March 1967 issue even came out.

This was quickly followed by a massive investigation by corporate media, driven by Tom Wicker at the New York Times, who assembled a team of reporters to follow the money trail from the CIA-connected foundations named in the Ramparts article. The Washington Post jumped in with its own reporting team. Turning up new connections almost every day, the newspapers described how legitimate tax-exempt foundations laundered millions of dollars from the CIA.

Some of you who are old enough may remember a CNN show called Crossfire. Some of the early versions of that show featured a “liberal,” Tom Braden, squaring off against a conservative—alternatively Pat Buchanan or Bob Novack. What you may not have known was that Braden was an ex-CIA officer, and, adjust your tinfoil hats, people, he was the guy at the CIA running this whole CCF business. I shit you not. You don’t have to take my word for it. He said so himself!

Tom Braden, the man behind the curtain.

In May 1967, Braden, the onetime head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, tried to respond to these revelations, writing an article published in the Saturday Evening Post, with the eye-grabbing title: “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral’” (Braden, 1967). Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized magazines like Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and that one of its staff was a CIA agent, embedded within the CCF. His article was not an apology. He made it very clear that he was proud of his (“immoral”) accomplishment. His words:

I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra’s tour and the magazine’s publication came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter. The agents could not only propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from “American foundations”? As the agents knew, the CIA-financed foundations were quite generous when it came to the national interest. (Braden, 1967, my emphases)

The CIA has subsequently authored an internal document confirming all of this, entitled “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-1950” (Warner, n.d.). Like Braden, they expressed pride in the operation (albeit addressing CIA operatives, not the public), noting that it was “widely considered one of the CIA’s most daring and effective Cold War covert operations.” Their document also showed the enormous role that Sidney Hook played in the birth of the CCF, and the key role that the Waldorff conference played in triggering this (again, recall the hostile Hook-to-Carnap letter).

CIA’s own history of how they started the CCF.

All of this leads to the question of what they were funding and why, and that is a long story in which there are plenty of both Analytic and Continental philosophers who were caught up in CCF activities. The central theme was to establish a “non-communist left.” They thus enlisted all sorts of academics who were left-wing, but who were not fans of the Soviet Union. Their founding meeting in Berlin in 1950 was attended by Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Jacques Maritain. Benedetto Croce was an “honorary president.” Their money funded plenty of left-wing causes, including Isaiah Berlin’s Non-Communist Left (NCL), which was promoted through the CCF. This was certainly a dark period for Bertrand Russell who only broke off his ties with the organization in 1956, when he began campaigning for nuclear disarmament.

It is doubtful that many of the philosophers knew the source of their money, but everyone—Analytic and Continental alike—ended up looking dirty. Of course, some people knew exactly what was going on, including Sidney Hook, who the CIA featured by beginning their history of the CCF, using a quote from Hook as an epigraph. On the Continental side, the Hook counterpart was the famous anti-Marxist and former Sartre college roommate (you cannot make this shit up!) Raymond Aron, who in turn appears to have acquired a tight relationship with Tom Braden’s embedded CIA agent Michael Josselson. Josselson, for his part, arranged funding (including CIA pass-throughs), recruited and networked intellectuals, and orchestrated journals, conferences, and exhibitions across 30 or more countries. Josselson was a kind of “fixer” and was credited with bringing in figures like Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Michael Polanyi, etc., to wage a “war of ideas” against communism under the banner of “cultural freedom.”

Anti-Marxist French philosopher (and former Sartre college roomie) Raymond Aron (left) and his wife Suzanne on vacation with CIA agent Michael Josselson and CCF executive Denis de Rougemont (right).

As I said, everyone looks bad here, and every type of philosopher was roped into the mess: existentialists, pragmatists, phenomenologists, idealists, religious philosophers, Analytic philosophers, and on and on.

All of this raises the inevitable question: could this be happening again? Is someone, right here, right now, funding philosophical research to some hidden political end? We might never know. But the most honest take is that all money is dirty money here. Even if your money is coming from your university’s general fund, that money is, to some degree, beholden to the interests of alumni donors and, if state funding is involved, the political interests of the state (a phenomenon that we witnessed in Trump’s recent campaign against elite universities).

It is pointless to get into disputes about whose money is dirtier. The correct strategy is to understand the source of your own money and to be reflective about the fundamental interests of that source of money and the ways in which it is coercive and deflecting your work from where it otherwise might have gone. Even if you are independently wealthy or somehow living in a communist paradise and have no need for remuneration, you are still beholden to the system that allows you to live as you do. It does not hurt to be mindful of how that steers your work.

This is also a good time to turn to the issue of the philosophers at RAND, and the question of whether the money they accepted was coercive or otherwise immoral. Into this bucket we can also place the funding that Chomsky received from the Office for Naval Research (ONR) and, later, from the defense department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later to become DARPA, which, among other things, gave us the Internet). If you read Chomksy’s early linguistic work (e.g., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax), you will find footnotes acknowledging funding from the ONR.

Chomsky has, unsurprisingly, taken some heat for this funding and has responded in the following way. First, it was basic science research. In the 1950s – 60s, the Office of Naval Research was one of the few places in the U.S. government that would just give fairly open-ended grants to do foundational work in math, linguistics, psychology, and computation. MIT was of course full of that money. If you were at MIT, you were getting that money either directly or indirectly (still true today). Chomsky’s point was that the funding agencies weren’t asking him to build weapons or even develop strategies; they were funding theoretical work in basic science. Second, this was research that he could publish freely. I suppose one could also add that it was better for the money to go to his research than to developing new kinds of napalm.

Are these answers adequate? There is an article and a book about this by Chris Knight, and he argues that the answers from Chomsky and others are not adequate (Knight, 2018). But it seems to me that Knight’s thesis rests on the dubious premise that Chomsky’s linguistic work in the 1960s had direct military applications. It didn’t, even if people in the DoD might have said otherwise. This is a rare topic area in which I am somewhat qualified to speak, because I spent 1983-1985 at MIT as a visiting scholar in linguistics, and then worked as a contract engineer for a defense contractor (Honeywell) in 1985-1986. Honeywell sent me around the world to study existing natural language processing and machine translation technologies. Their interest was in enlisting machine translation to help with translating documents like service manuals for thermostats, not telling airplanes what to do. Even then, it was clear that theoretical linguistics was a long way from being useful for natural language processing, much less being useful for defense industry applications. Chomsky’s project wasn’t an engineering project; it was a basic science project. Some would say that Chomsky’s work was never going to be useful to that end, and now has been superseded by work on large language models, which are better equipped for any form of natural language processing applications. All this has been said, I have no issue with people raising this issue, and I have linked to Knight’s article in the REFERENCES at the end of the essay (Knight, 2018). It is always OK to question the source of your money. I’m just saying Knight is not correct about the applications of Chomsky’s linguistics work.

This takes us to the philosophers who worked for RAND during the Cold War. I’ll begin with the research that was classified at the time, and I suppose the work that has the bullseye on its back involves the two then-classified papers that Reichenbach produced in 1949—“General Form of the Probability for War” (RAND D-515) and Rational Reconstruction of the Decision for War” (RAND D-539). Now, to be clear, I think it is entirely fair game to criticize this sort of work, in part because it was originally classified. But I also think that the criticism should be accurate, because hallucinated or otherwise invented, pictures of what Reichenbach was up to are not going to be helpful.

When you read Schuringa, you get the idea that Reichenbach was a regular Doctor Strangelove. But it is surely not accurate to say, as Schuringa does, that

Reichenbach was, ostensibly, attempting to lay the groundwork for real-life calculations to be made in the supposedly always impending war with the Soviet Union. (Schuringa, 2025)

An accurate characterization of the work was that the Pentagon wanted to model Soviet doctrines in a kind of decision tree, assigning probabilities of them acting on each doctrine (or combination of doctrines), so that one might know what actions could unwittingly trigger World War III. That is, the paper had nothing to do with calculations to be made in a war, but calculations to be made so as to avoid a war. This is somewhat obvious from the titles of the papers themselves.

Hans Reichenbach and Dr. Strangelove. Not the same project.

Now, there are two ways to look at this. The positive way is to say that the work could have helped us to unwittingly trigger a nuclear holocaust. The negative way is to say that this work could be used to understand just how far we could push the Soviet Union before a nuclear response was triggered (e.g., would a blockade of Cuba trigger a nuclear response?). Thus, it could have enabled riskier actions by the US. What we don’t know is how decision-makers utilized this information or if they used it at all. What we do know is that it is consistent with the basic work that the philosophers were doing at RAND— reasons were causes, etc. In this case, if you give the Soviets the right reasons, you may be causing World War III. Again, it is a perfectly good topic on which to have an ethical debate. But please, for the sake of all that is holy, can Schuringa please stop inventing a bunch of bullshit about it?

All this being said, absolutely any scientific discovery and any new technology can be useful to the defense industry, even if it involves building superior toilets and refrigerators. And for that matter, absolutely any domain of human creativity can be deployed as a “weapon” in asymmetric warfare—even the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as Tom Braden observed. Everyone receiving funding through the CCF had been weaponized during the Cold War.

Right here, right now, I am not in the business of judging the ethics of where people get their funding. For now, I am just calling for mindfulness, noting again that almost all money is dirty at its source, and that any product of human ingenuity and human creativity can be weaponized.

With this happy thought in the background, let’s return to those RAND philosophers. Were they war-gaming for the Pentagon? It would be more accurate to say that they were engaged in basic science, but a form of basic science that was clearly of interest to the Pentagon. What Davidson Suppes, and McKinsey were doing was working within a new branch of science—modern choice theory and the beginnings of experimental decision theory. And it was not a science solely of interest to generals and admirals. Nor was it the creation of these philosophers alone. Sorry to say, but there were bigger contributors, such as von Neumann, Savage, Arrow, Nash, and Harsanyi. The work of the RAND philosophers became part of the background of choice theory.

Of course, although their work was of interest to the Pentagon, it was also of interest to everyone else, because everyone is interested in how to make better decisions, even Marxists! This is perhaps not shocking, given that Davidson himself was a Marxist, and I find it hard to believe that Reichenbach did not retain any socialist sympathies from his earlier days in Berlin. I don’t know the politics of McKinsey, but it is worth noting that he was fired from RAND for being gay, and then took his life a few years later. Whatever the political inclinations of the RAND philosophers, either directly or indirectly, they ultimately influenced rational-choice Marxism/Analytic Marxism

Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski, Erik Wright, Jerry Cohen, and others used the tools of Analytic philosophy along with choice theory and game theory to reconstruct Marxist themes like class, exploitation, collective action, and socialist strategy. Their primary hope was that once Marxist claims were given clear microfoundations, you could explain how individually rational behavior would generate the kind of class-wide political agency Marx predicted. However, much of the modeling revealed something else: it highlighted free-riding, coordination problems, reformist equilibria, and incentives that don’t reliably produce revolutionary proletarian action. Przeworski used the term “autophagia” to characterize what happened to the Analytic Marxist project: Once you apply strict rational-choice, game-theoretic tools to classical Marxist claims, those very tools end up undermining the Marxist predictions they were meant to vindicate. The research program thus ended up dissolving Marx’s teleology rather than vindicating it, and the “Analytic Marxism” project eventually fragmented as its practitioners moved into adjacent work.

Earlier in this review/essay, I spent a lot of time talking about van Heijenoort’s 1948 essay in which he expressed despair at the “increasingly erratic” behavior of the proletariat. That failure, in his view, refuted Marx’s fundamental hypothesis. If he was correct, we might say that the contribution of the Analytic Marxists is that they showed why the fundamental hypothesis failed. They showed that what might be the rational outcome for a group may not be consistent with the rational behavior of individual members of the proletariat. There is no point in poo-poohing this result as methodologically defective, as Schuringa does, for there is no reason to reject the method other than the thought that it runs counter to what Marx predicted. But that is not a methodology. Or if it is a methodology, as van Heijenoort said, it is the methodology of the epigoni. Marx utilized the science of his day, just as any serious revolutionary movement must.

So here we are. As van Heijenoort observed, the central hypothesis had been refuted. We now know why it was wrong. That is progress. The question is, what comes next?

Part of the problem that the radical left faces is that there is a strain of technophobia that runs through it, with the result that it is forever “outgunned” by the technophiles of the right. There are paths forward, however, if the technophobia can be brought under control.

One line of investigation would be to revisit the anarchism of figures like Bakunin, who foresaw the centralizing tendencies of Marxism. The challenge for any anarchist movement is the problem of coordination, but recent developments in blockchain technology have shown that technologies exist that enable decentralized yet coordinated activities. The technology isn’t just about cryptocurrencies. It is about coordinating human activities without top-down leadership. Whether such technologies are useful to anarcho-socialism is an open question, but such ideas are being pursued and even discussed online on platforms like Blockchain Socialist (TBS, 2026). My point here is not that this must be the future but that it is a possible path forward, and that progressives should not let technophobia rule out the exploration of technologies that enable decentralized yet cooperative action. (Full transparency, I have worked part-time for a blockchain technology company.)

There is a fascinating article by Nick French in Jacobin Magazine entitled “How Analytic Philosophers have Made Sense of Capitalism” (French, 2023). French makes the case that leftists/Marxists cannot afford to reject technological developments because they do not square with what Marx was saying in the 19^th-century. Tools like rational choice theory, in the hands of Analytic Marxists, have helped us to understand capitalism and why revolution is so difficult. Rational choice theory and technologies that enable decentralized action could be part of the toolkit of the next revolution.

French sums it up like this:

One of Marx’s most-quoted lines, from his Theses on Feuerbach, is: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” We should not interpret this dictum as suggesting a wholesale abandonment of clear and systematic thinking about society. Rather, we should ask, what theoretical approach will help socialists today change the world?

The answer must be one that penetrates the mystifying appearances of capitalist society without depriving itself of the theoretical tools that this society has produced. Doing the latter, socialists must recognize, entails an intellectual regression rather than an advance.

Embracing the best of what “bourgeois” theory and philosophy has to offer can allow us to explain what we find morally objectionable with today’s society and to offer an appealing vision of a better world. In advancing this project, the insights of Analytic philosophy and Analytic Marxism will be essential to building the emancipatory theory we need. (French, 2023)

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