A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #19: On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

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

19. On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics

Schuringa’s book has a background premise, which I am accepting for purposes of this essay/review, that neoliberalism and Austrian economics—as developed by Hayek, Menger, and Mises—are not good things. If you want to dispute this, that’s a topic for another day. The problem, here, now, is that Schuringa wants to pin neoliberalism, including Austrian economics, on Analytic philosophy, and in particular on the logical positivists. This leads to another case in which Schuringa must (and ultimately does) invert everything the positivists said and stood for, despite a massive historical record that runs counter to his narrative. Schuringa’s fetish for swimming against oceans of historical evidence is breathtaking.

Now, it must be conceded that there was a friend of the Circle, a French philosopher named Louis Rougier, who actually was a kind of founding father of neoliberalism. It must also be admitted that Rougier did help organize a Unity of Science conference in Paris with Neurath in 1933, and for sure, the mathematicians in the Vienna Circle liked the ideas that Rougier had about mathematics—he was a conventionalist about mathematical truths, working on Poincaré. And I think it is pretty obvious that the Circle members were hoping to make inroads into the French philosophy scene (that went about as well as you would expect), or, at a minimum, they were looking for an excuse to go to Paris.

What catches Schuringa’s eye is that in 1938, Rougie organized a separate conference, now called the “Walter Lippmann Colloquium,” which is considered the foundational meeting for neoliberalism. The only problem with Schuringa’s thesis is that this conference had nothing to do with the Vienna Circle, nor its goals and philosophical ideas, and no members of the Vienna Circle attended. Indeed, no positivists of any stripe attended. Attendees did, however, include several European businessmen, plus Hayek, Mises, and some academics, including future CCF fans Michael Polanyi and the omnipresent Sartre ex-roomie Raymond Aron.

Schuringa does his best to link the Lippmann Colloquium to the Vienna Circle, but the effort is sad, even by Schuringian standards. The main incriminating link, besides the fact that Rougier was an organizer for both, is that both conferences were in Paris! And only four years apart! What are the chances? Schuringa shoves mentions of both conferences into a single paragraph and counts on us to connect the dots in this conspiracy.

The problem for Schuringa is that we know that the Vienna Circle was absolutely not on the same page as the Austrian economists. The Left Wing of the Circle was all about planned economies. Nor was this just some superficial disagreement. The two projects were at odds at their very philosophical core. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ongoing battle between Hayek and Neurath. The two were fundamentally at odds about everything,

There is a very interesting discussion about the conflict between Neurath and Hayek in a paper by John F. O’Neill, entitled “Pluralism and Economic Institutions” (O’Neill, 2007). Here is how he lays out the dispute:

Hayek’s epistemic arguments against planning and in defence of the market are deployed against the claims of ‘scientism’, ‘objectivism’ and ‘physicalism’ in the social sciences. [On Hayek’s view,] These assumptions [‘scientism’, ‘objectivism’ and ‘physicalism’] illustrate a pervasive version of the rationalist errors underlying socialist planning They foster a form of social engineering which promises to achieve an optimal technical outcome through planning in which monetary calculation in the market place is replaced by in natura calculation in kind. One of the main objects of criticism was Neurath in whom, for Hayek, all these errors are gathered in one person. (O’Neill, 2007, my emphases)

If Hayek and the Circle were swimming in different directions, the other members of the Austrian School in economics were not even in the same ocean as the members of the Circle. I don’t think a debate with Neurath would have even been possible.

Carl Menger, who founded the Austrian School, was doing something like Aristotle might do in economics. He argued that economics can discover “exact laws” that follow from the essential features of economic phenomena, not just from statistics. These laws weren’t mathematical laws but necessary relations grounded in the nature of human action and goods. So, we get a cocktail of essentialism and realism about abstracta; exactly the thing the logical positivists hated. On Menger’s view, economic categories (goods, value, capital) picked out real structures, not arbitrary conventions. There were explicitly Aristotelian strands all through his methodology (essences, a priori knowledge, realism about types, etc.).

Ludwig von Mises, on the other hand, offended the positivists in other ways. He reinterpreted economics in Kantian terms—defining economics as a part of praxeology, the a priori science of human action. From the axiom “humans act” (purposeful behavior), you can supposedly deduce necessary truths about exchange, prices, interest, etc. In Epistemological Problems of Economics and later work, Mises argued that praxeological propositions are synthetic a priori: they’re not derived from experience. Again, this is not logical-positivist-forward thinking.

The way the Vienna Circle saw it, Austrian Economics was not even science. There was no empirical support for it. It was all just bullshit spun from talk of essences and a priori this and that.

Obviously, the Austrian economists and the Vienna Circle were not philosophically aligned. This is not to say that they didn’t have personal ties with each other; Vienna wasn’t that big! Hayek was some sort of cousin of Wittgenstein. Carl Menger had a son (Karl with a K) who was a playwright, physicist, economist, mathematician, and a member of the Vienna Circle. Ludwig von Mises had a brother, Richard, who was a regular member of the Circle. Apparently, this led to some interesting brotherly conflicts; when Ludwig was asked what he thought of his brother Richard’s book, the economist reportedly said: “I disagree with that book, from the first sentence to the last.”

All of this raises the question of how a conventionalist like Rougier fell in with the essentialism-loving Austrian school. It seems counterintuitive. And the whole story gets sadder and sadder. Rougier had a well-documented falling out with Neurath, but the reasons for the falling out are not so well-documented (as far as I know). There are, however, plenty of candidate reasons. One reason could be that Rougier was playing footsie with Neurath’s archenemy, Hayek. Or it could be that the falling out could have come first, leading Rougier into a revenge relationship with the Austrian school. Whatever the reasons, it initiated a downward spiral for Rougier, who ended up as an ally and collaborator with the Vichy government in France, and collaborating with Nazis was definitely not a way to win friends with the Circle members. In the 1960s, Rougier ultimately ended up in bed with Alain de Benoist’s neo-fascist political movement, the Nouvelle Droite. Trying to blame positivism for neoliberalism because of Rougier is like trying to blame Maoism for whatever it is that Bernard Henri-Levy and André Gluckman are today.

Neoliberalism is one thing, but Benoist’s new right is a whole different level of trouble. And if you have been paying attention to the news, extreme right-wing views— neo-fascist views, if we are being honest—have taken root in the United States, and metastasized in the form of the “Dark Enlightenment.” People like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and others in the Dark Enlightenment movement have challenged the merits of democracy, advocating instead for something much more like absolute monarchy. Too many people laugh about these proclamations, not realizing that they are, even now, having widespread uptake in the political realm. Curtis Yarvin’s ideas are infused throughout the Trump administration, and wittingly or unwittingly, they are driving the US Supreme Court’s drift towards a theory of a unitary executive. There are active voices that believe the American Revolution was not against the British Empire but against the British Parliament. The thesis is that the American revolutionaries were on the side of King George, and were against all that nonsense that emanated from the Magna Carta. That is where we are.

All that is disturbing, and I imagine that even now Schuringa is locked away somewhere, not seeking allies to fight this threat, but twisting the historical record so as to somehow implicate Analytic philosophy in the rise of the Dark Enlightenment. But these ideas did not come from Analytic philosophy; they came from the dark side of Continental philosophy. In the next section, we will examine the sources of these ideas, and then, I hope together, we can address this problem that we now all share.

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