Does philosophy concerns truths and methods that are beyond the mundane reach of fashions and politics? No, says John McCumber, in this most provocative book. The methods and values that constitute modern analytic philosophy, he claims, are a child of the cold war and, specifically, the anticommunist atmosphere that blanketed American colleges and universities in the 1950s. As J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and other federal and local investigators scrubbed the red and pink out of higher education, they helped create a politically sterilized mode of philosophical practice, the one we know today as analytic philosophy.

The book is short (167 pages) and does not pretend to offer an exhaustive or demonstrative account. Its thesis is fairly clear, however, and begins with the largely forgotten historical fact that McCarthyite attacks against philosophers were severe, frequent, and took place at nearly all major universities. Most individuals, as well as the APA and the AAUP, effectively failed to resist these pressures. The result was a narrowing of the profession's vision and purpose to an almost exclusive concern with analysis of sentential truth, especially those truths of empirical science. Truths about art, phenomenology, ethics and (most dangerous of all) politics were marginalized into fields such as existentialism, phenomenology, ethics, and “continental” philosophy—aptly named to suggest an extra-American pedigree.

McCumber's story leans on three characters: Quine, Carnap, and University of Washington president Raymond Allen, who oversaw anticommunist investigations at Washington in the late 1940s. These became the paradigm for investigations elsewhere. So did the outcome. Three of Allen's professors were dismissed from their jobs—a philosopher, an English professor, and a psychologist. That was fine with Allen, because the ideals—the specifically scientific ideals—of academic conduct that he championed were far more important than the livelihoods of a few leftist professors. “If a university,” Allen wrote,

Enter W. V. O. Quine, whose textbook Methods of Logic of 1959 established the dogma, McCumber claims, that there is but one kind of truth, scientific truth, that counts as philosophy's reason to be. Enter Carnapian logical positivism, which provided philosophers with “something they needed” (45)—a scientistic, logic-based approach to philosophy that offerred “intellectual respectability for their political prudence.”(45)

Legend has it that Thales fell into a ditch while staring at the timeless, immutable heavens of antiquity. McCumber believes academic philosophy did the same thing while following Allen and Quine's “timeless, selfless quest of truth.” In roughly the last half of his book, McCumber charts a way out of the ditch. He weaves together pieces of Heidegger and Hegel to outline a project he calls “situated reason” which embraces the historicity of thought (thereby undoing the dominant fetish for “timelessness”) and the contexts of the thinkers involved (thereby undoing the fetish for a scientific objectivity).

Historians who have closely examined universities during the cold war (McCumber follows Ellen Schrecker's definitive No Ivory Tower) come away unanimous that academic life and thought was profoundly changed. In our age of political correctness, when principle so handily wins academic disputes, the cold war's attack on academic freedom (led by Raymond Allen, Sidney Hook, Arthur Lovejoy, and others) seems remarkably easy and unfair. According to Schrecker, the principle was handily subordinated to patriotism at a time when many believed that World War III was imminent. If not finding evidence for this in Korea or the arms race, they succumbed to the widespread view that communists were ever ready to infiltrate the American psyche by way of classrooms and seminar rooms.

Because vocal defenders of academic freedom were few and so easily trampled (William F. Buckley delighted in using the innuendo-laden epithet “academic freedomites”), McCumber's general claim that the cold war affected philosophy can hardly be wrong. While some parts of his specific account are correct, however, other parts are not. His treatment of Carnap, for example, rests on a curious reading of his “Truth and Confirmation” (Carnap distinguishes, McCumber conflates) while the larger project of “logical positivism” is depicted as one that cared about nothing but verifiability and eliminating metaphysics. Recent research has demonstrated, however, that the logical positivists were mostly socialists pursing nothing less than a kind of humanitarian enlightenment. Logical positivism was then itself transformed by the cold war into the ideologically neutral project that McCumber takes it essentially, and always, to have been. Logical positivism was a casualty of the cold war, not one of its villians.

Others will object to McCumber's scant treatment of American pragmatism, and justifiably so since its pluralistic conception of truth should be a hero of McCumber's story. Others will dismiss the conspiratorial overtone that Quine and Raymond Allen engineered marching orders that the profession sheepishly followed. The problem here is historiographic. McCumber's evidence is mainly Schrecker's published research and his own analysis of APA and AAUP publications. He examines trends, that is, and has no genuine access to the causes that drove them. Though Quine's well-known influence and prestige in the profession, along with McCumber's critique of the APA as heirarchical and authoritarian, lend support to the view that Quine and Allen could have led such a transformation, the fact that university departments of all kinds were transformed (Daniel Bell famously called it “The End of Ideology”) suggests that the causes in play had as much or more to do with social psychology than professional leadership. Many individual philosophers reacted in different ways to the “climate of fear” that McCarthyism created in the universities and there is probably no single, global story to tell. Still, McCumber's book usefully and bravely frames some difficult and disturbing questions about the era and, more importantly, the ways it structured (or still structures) contemporary philosophical practice.