Customer Reviews

Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era

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This book finds a connection between the McCarthy witchhunts of the early 1950s and the decline of American philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. McCumber argues that accusations about communist sympathies drove many American philosophy professors into analytic philosophy and away from metaphysical questions. In the years following the McCarthy witchhunts, American philosophy drifted apart from European philosophy, while at the same time American philosophy departments shrank. Philosophy in America had less and less to do with the practical considerations of everyday life. In the latter half of the book, Professor McCumber reviews the course of western philosophy through the entire 20th century and lays out a program for a revival of philosophy in America that will restore it not only to a central position in academia but to a vital role in the life of the republic. I strongly recommend this book to anybody interested in 20th-century American thought.

I read this book when it came out and have used it to hone the edge of my irritability with the discipline of philosophy for the past few years. It was good then; it gets better with time.

If you need to make sense of why and how philosophy has devolved into the academic and theoretical vacuum it has, lash yourself to the mast, stuff your crew's ears with bees wax, and have them row slowly between John McCumber and Bruce Wilshire. Afterwards you'll be able to shake off the Trojan wasteland of the last 100 years and return to the company of human life, there to enjoy the wine of conversation and the company of good and decent friends. -- and if you can't parse out the metaphor here, then you really really need to read this book.

I loved this book. It basic idea makes so much sense of what has happened in this country to philosophy. I would have just emphasized two things more. One, that the turning away from questions of metaphysical meaning in philosophy, in long-term reaction to McCarthyism, not only circumscribed philosophy itself, but emboldened various reactions to that impoverishment. And, second, this reaction took different forms on the left and right. On the left it emboldened the vast hermeneutical floridness which buried the likely decent concerns under a mountain of intellectual refraction. On the right, it gave a sort of cover for revival of almost childish "returns to religion" under whatever conceptual scheme that could be cobbled together for that effort. It is particularly egregious on the right, because it has provided a real evidence to which they can point, and say they are in fact saving philosophy itself, from itself. McCumber deserves credit for having the honesty to have actually provided the etiology for the disease. The disease has allowed monied interests to fill in the gaps, and that is the story for for many phenomena in universities. But the etiology, was actually the bizarreness of the McCarthy era.

In search of histories of recent (analytic) philosophy I came on this book, which pursues the alarming thesis that McCarthyism and analytic philosophy are somehow circumstantially evidenced, a thesis that left me non-plussed, and muttering, 'must be something to Marx's charges'. One often has the feeling one is crossing a desert in this branch of philosophy, but then the same has been said of reading Kant's critiques. But philosophers need not apologize for being bedouins, and this work actually spiked my interest here, not only because it raises the toughest of questions, echoing since the days of the Left Hegelian charges against Hegel with his 'absolute science'.
Interesting, and somewhat unnerving book.