A Just So Story

 The philosopher's Magazine, 19 sept 2025 

 

Review of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (Verso, 2025)

 

When in the early seventies of the last century in France I started studying philosophers from the tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Quine, my Marxist teachers (among them Louis Althusser) warned me: “Beware! Analytic philosophy is the dominant ideology of capitalism!” I failed to see how logic, the theory of meaning or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus could be part of capitalist ideology, and asked myself what this hidden influence could be, and why it was dominant, in spite of the fact that only a handful of people in France were interested in it. I was told that because analytic philosophy is dominant in England and America, it had to be the expression of bourgeois ideology. Asking for more evidence, it was mentioned to me that because Chomsky – a typical analytic philosopher, as everyone knows – had been funded by the Pentagon, it was evidence that generative linguistics was an accomplice of the American invasion in Vietnam. A few years later I heard Pierre Bourdieu addressing a group of sociologists from Chicago: “You use decision and game theory, therefore you are at the service of the ruling class.” I understood that in order to be subjected to these Marxist “explanations”, there was no need to display relations between the contents of theories and social or economic positions, but only to point out some suspected ties between some individuals and capitalist institutions.

       I have been surprised to discover that, fifty years after, the same kind of sweeping explanations of the “dominance” of analytic philosophy are defended in Christoph Schuringa’s book. Its hegemony rests, in his view, on the fact that analytic philosophy, which claims to seek truth and knowledge through reason and argument and to be free from political commitments, is actually governed by a hidden agenda, the promotion of economic and political liberalism, and by an explicit objective, the colonization of academic philosophy. In order to show this Schuringa aims to give a “social history” of analytic philosophy. Unfortunately the history in question is neither social nor historical.

     The epithet “social” makes us anticipate an examination of the institutions and groups (universities, publishers, journals, professional associations, students, professors) which have accompanied the development of analytic philosophy. But one finds hardly any such information in the book. Schuringa repeatedly complains about the inability of analytic philosophers “to come to grip with social reality”, but he gives us no hints about the ways through which the organisation of academic learning and of universities may have shaped the careers and the views of these philosophers. There are very few descriptions of their social backgrounds, except for suggesting that those from Oxford and Cambridge belong to the upper classes (whereas in fact most philosophers in the UK and the US come from the middle class). No analysis is given of the social and economic forces which are supposed to play a (causal?) role in the production of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century. Schuringa does not even try to use Bourdieu’s views about the “symbolic field” in social theory or various methods in intellectual history. The term “social” here consists largely in recalling various anecdotes about the professional habits of some philosophers. Thus Schuringa mocks the Oxfordian ploy of asking “What do you mean?” about any topic whatsoever, and takes it to manifest the scorn of dons towards those who are not insiders. Many will remember Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett’s satire of Oxbridge conversations.

    Instead of a history we get a series of vignettes: Moore and Russell’s revolt again idealism, the Vienna Circle, Oxford linguistic philosophy, the progress of logical positivism in the US, the “linguistic turn”, the rise of modal metaphysics, the naturalistic wave and experimental philosophy, and the advent of analytic feminism. The narrative consists in glimpses of various cultural episodes, which can hardly pass for a history of analytic philosophy. Not much is said of the Brentano school and of Austrian philosophy, which have been very much studied. Nothing is said of analytic philosophy in Poland, where a genuine logical school has been one of the most active centres. Nothing is said of the progress of analytic philosophy since the 1950s in Continental Europe or in Scandinavia and of prominent figures as Georg Henrik von Wright and Jaakko Hintikka. No effort is made to explain the development of the ideas of analytic philosophers on such central topics as the nature of logic, of language and of mind (Russell’s theory of descriptions, which Ramsey dubbed “a paradigm of philosophy”, is hardly touched upon, and the subsequent development of the theory of reference is absent). Nothing is said about the philosophy of science of logical positivism, and the critique of it by Kuhn and others since the 60s. Equally ignored are the various theories of mind of analytic philosophers, from neutral monism to identity theory, functionalism and cognitive science. In a sense this patchy narrative is to be expected, since for Schuringa’s “analytic philosophy” is a mere umbrella term, covering a succession of disconnected fashions.

     Schuringa’s touristic trip among a few philosophical landscapes leads him to a series of surprising pronouncements. He claims that Russell and Moore’s notions of analysis, the positivists’ and Carnap’s ideal of explanation, Quine’s program of logical “regimentation”, Austin and Strawson’s version of linguistic analysis, Davidson’s and Dummett’s project of a systematic “theory of meaning”, and David Lewis and Saul Kripke’s modal semantics have nothing in common. By the same kind of move one could assert that there is nothing in common between the various notions of dialectic in Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Adorno. Schuringa completely misses the role played by the notion of analyticity from Frege to Quine, and why rejecting it led to a naturalist turn, which often took the form of an alliance with cognitive science. Equally baffling are Schuringa’s claims that Dummett “invented” the role of Frege as the father of analytic philosophy of language and that Davidson’s program “came to nothing”. It is hard to know whether these pronouncements are issued for the sake of provoking or whether they are the product of sheer ignorance. Dummett did not say that Frege invented the whole subject fully formed all at once, but that his contributions, even about logic, were decisive and shaped the issues – about sense and reference, the nature of truth and meaning, indexicality and compositionality – even if it took twenty years after his death for analytic philosophers to realize his contribution. Davidson’s programme was fashionable in the 70s and 80s, and the fashion died, but it did not come to nothing, for a lot of Davidsonian views – about truth, meaning, action, logical form, intentionality, saying that, etc. – are still alive.

Schuringa also tells us that analytic philosophers, always occupied in mimicking the scientific style of research, have had no interest in the history of their doctrines and a “remarkable lack of methodological self-scrutiny”. This assertion will itself be found remarkable to those who have even a cursory knowledge of discussions by Russell of the “scientific method in philosophy”, by Moore of the “paradox of analysis” (if analysis is correct, it’s trivial, if it is informative it is false), by Carnap on the nature of explanation, by Strawson on the purposes of “descriptive metaphysics”, and of numerous recent debates about the “philosophy of philosophy”. If Schuringa had paid a bit more attention to the actual history of analytic philosophy, which has been studied by historians of Austrian philosophy and by many other scholars, he could have seen that analytic philosophy and phenomenology have a number of common roots. He is right that the so-called “great divide” between analytics and Continentals is just a slogan, but his book gives no indication that many issues in ontology, the theory of intentionality and the nature of values which are central to contemporary analytic philosophy were also present in Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl, and are still alive in continental philosophy today. But the shallowness of his review makes him blind to the real differences between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, which have to be traced back to the gloomy influence of Heidegger on the latter. Moreover, many philosophers trained in analytic philosophy have practised the history of philosophy, in particular concerning Plato and Aristotle and early modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. There have been disputes about this kind of scholarship, but one cannot pretend that it is non-existent or that analytic philosophers have never thought about the relation of their views to those from earlier periods of the history of philosophy. Schuringa is right that some analytic philosophers have portrayed themselves as having no tradition, but he is wrong to have taken their word for it. Today analytic philosophers fully acknowledge their tradition, studied in journals such as the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy and in a large body of scholarly work.

      Schuringa would probably justify the huge lacunae of his “history” by saying that he did not mean to do historical scholarship as such, but only, as he says, an “ideological critique” in the sense of Marx’s critique in the German Ideology. His project also reminds us of Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth (1994) which shows how modern science emerged from the English institutions science in the seventeenth century, and whose narrative has an eliminativist stance: just as in Shapin’s book truth itself disappears under the history of the institutions which carry it, in Schuringa’s book analytic philosophy disappears under the revelation of the contingent character of its productions. Indeed, the rise of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century owes much to events such as the emigration of many members of the Vienna Circle in the US. But is it true that, as John McCumber once claimed (Time in the Ditch (2001)), analytic philosophy has benefited indirectly from McCarthyism, which according to him is responsible for the de-politicisation of American philosophers since the fifties and the loss of their jobs by some Marxist philosophers? These sorts of accusations are grotesque, not only because a number of positivist emigrants like Carnap had leftist leanings and did not keep quiet about them but also because a number of analytic philosophers, like Putnam, were Marxists or sympathetic to left-wing ideas. Moreover, a number of them had political commitments: Dummett worked in defence of refugees, Bernard Williams chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship in the UK, and Russell had a very active political life. Schuringa recalls these episodes, but is unimpressed because he holds that the apolitical nature of analytic philosophy is rooted in its very ideal of reaching “a view from nowhere”, free from the vagaries of social and economic life. This is certainly true of much of analytic metaphysics as it has been pursued by philosophers like David Lewis and Saul Kripke, and of some Oxford philosophers, who led quasi-conventual lives in such Colleges of Pure Reason as Princeton and All Souls. But it is surprising to learn that philosophers like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel or Martha Nussbaum, who addressed public issues and built complex moral and political arguments, are also representative of this estrangement from real life. Jerry Cohen, the main analytic Marxist, and Rae Langton and Sally Haslanger, the leading analytic feminists, fall into the same trap, according to Schuringa, because their analytic “techniques”, which shed light on limited topics such as pornography or race, fail to come to grip with the social world as a whole. Susan Stebbing, one of the rare women who played a historical role during the pre-war period of analytic philosophy, and whose merits were ignored due to the misogyny of her colleagues, is considered here as getting no “purchase on the real world”. She was not a feminist by today’s standards, and even denied that being a woman had anything to do with her philosophical views, but she was very aware of the fallacy of letting issues about politics invade matters of metaphysics and logic.

      Analytic philosophy necessarily fails to impinge on the real world, according to Schuringa, for three reasons, which are, in my view, misguided.

       First, despite its empiricist leanings, it adopts the classical attitude of rationalism: thinking all matters in an abstract, often logical, way, without considering the whole of social reality. But what is really wrong with thinking in abstract terms? Unless one wants to remain only at a descriptive level, one has to formulate theories and to try to confirm them. Analytic philosophy is very conceptual, but so is all of classical philosophy.

      Second, analytic philosophy relies on common sense and on “intuitions”, and multiplies thought experiments and puzzles. To this Schuringa objects, quoting Gramsci, that “There is not just one common sense” and that intuitions are unreliable. He mocks the “Gettier industry” of examples and counterexamples, which has produced thousands of pages of discussions about the difference between justified belief and knowledge. He is right that such an industry has existed but completely ignores the background of important theories of knowledge which this literature has produced. The idea that there are many common senses runs the risk of relativism, which is actually well illustrated in the project of experimental philosophy, which rejects the a priori style of classical analytic philosophy and is hardly philosophical at all. Schuringa seems to think that one must sidestep intuitions and ordinary judgments, and that one can move directly to the “concrete social reality”. But one must start somewhere, either in arguing or in formulating theories. Even Marxists have to acknowledge this.

      Third, Schuringa says that in promoting the ideal of discussion and openness, analytic philosophers are just following the lead of liberalism and of its ideology of a free market of ideas. Arguing and disagreeing to death is indeed a form of scholasticism, from which analytic philosophy does not always escape. But what is wrong with arguing, and with aiming at clarity and at getting things right?

     Russell and Moore reacted, in their early period, to Hegelianism and they promoted atomism and individualism in ontology and in epistemology. This is unacceptable for Hegelians and Marxists, who subscribe to a holistic conception of the world and of society, where totalities are prior to individuals: for them ontological individualism leads inevitably to social and political individualism. This is why Schuringa rejects the views of analytical Marxists such as Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer, who tried to revive Marxism on the basis of methodological individualism. They were guilty of a kind of apostasy. But what’s wrong with revising certain Marxist principles? Since its origins Marxism has had a problem with dogmatism.

     Schuringa’s chief objection to analytic philosophy in all its forms is that it is everywhere ahistorical and apolitical, thus serving the ideology of liberalism. This was probably what Althusser and Bourdieu meant, when they warned us of the reactionary character of analytic philosophy. Some positivist thinkers, like the French Louis Rougier, who organised the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, and some analytic philosophers, like Robert Nozick, who defended hyper-individualist political views, may indeed be counted as right-wing liberals. But it is hard to understand why analytic philosophers have to be such. It is true that some of them have endorsed political liberalism – notably Russell and Rawls – but the connexion between these commitments and their views in ontology or epistemology is moot. Russell himself denied that there was any link between his work in logic and mathematics on the one hand and his progressive political thought and activities on the other. It has been said that there is some link between Plato’s views on the state and his stay in Sicily, and that Aristotle’s philosophy was at the service of the politics of Philip of Macedon, but who could find the trace of the latter in his metaphysics and in its ethics? It is questionable whether a philosopher is bound to get into politics – or to refrain from it – when he works on the philosophy of language or in epistemology. The Oxford philosopher Richard Hare said that reflecting upon his war experiences led him to think about moral philosophy. But he could just as well have adopted a realistic stance in metaethics instead of defending an anti-realist view according to which all moral claims are prescriptive.

      Schuringa tells us that there is no definition of analytic philosophy in the style of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, and that analytic philosophy today no longer exists in the sense in which it used to exist. One can agree on this, but how can a discipline with such vague boundaries be dominant? We are told that it has “colonized” philosophy. In the usual sense, a colony is a place where a population is subjected by external rulers, who exploit its production. Evidence for this is supposed to be the fact that issues of race and gender, which used to be out of the scope of analytic philosophy, are now part of their toolkit and operate in a way which Americanizes and Europeanizes these issues. But we are not told who are the rulers, how they operate and who are the victims. The argument looks like those conspiracy theories which tell us that some occult influence manipulates a whole field and serves the interests of some powerful group. As far as I know continental philosophers who work along more traditional lines have not been put in minority or expelled from the surface of the earth. Indeed in many “continental” departments (in the geographic sense) they are dominant.

       In his wholesale rejection of analytic philosophy Schuringa barks up the wrong tree. He fails to see that a lot of what passes for “analytic philosophy” today is only vaguely or indirectly so: people refer to some authors but actually work along different lines. For instance, a lot of Wittgensteinian scholarship or Wittgenstein-oriented work is hostile to analytic philosophy in its “scientific” style and has only loose connexions with its tradition. What is perhaps dominant is a sort of mixture of continental philosophy and of analytic philosophy, but serious work on both sides or outside this divide is not dominant. Schuringa also fails to see that many of the defects that he attributes to analytic philosophy are not proper to it, but to a wider system of academic learning, in which research and teaching have been reorganised in novel ways since the rise of internet. The fact that academic philosophy as a whole has become a market, with its networks, its stars, its opaque refereeing system, its pressure to publish more and more in order to get grants and funding and to chase jobs has nothing special to do with analytic philosophy. Like everywhere, the necessity to publish more and more, at a high speed, and without much control, has led to the production of much mediocre work. More worrying is the tendency of students in analytic departments to ignore any work which is not written in English, and even more worrying is their ignorance of ancient languages and of the history of philosophy. But the fact that the world of learning and of academic philosophy is not in a healthy state is not due to the dominance of analytic philosophers. It is due, in addition to the contemporary organisation of research, to the fact that many academics have abdicated their traditional independence, that academic freedom is no longer guaranteed and that the present organisation of science has made universities much less free.

 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL LESSON FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP

Postill magazine  February 1, 2025 by Pascal Engel

 

It is customary on both sides of the Atlantic to vilify Donald Trump, and to see in him the main culprit for most of the ills of recent years: the definitive transformation of politics into a reality show, the elevation of lies to the status of a communication system, nepotism and plutocracy, climate denial, isolationist nationalism, populism, Neronian authoritarianism, sexism, proto-fascism, and above all vulgarity. All this is perfectly true, and for once opinion is totally right. That is also a bit of a problem.

 

Because Trump is anything but a simpleton. He is not another G.W. Bush. The system he has put in place is formidable: the more indignant people become, the more they evoke Caligula or Mussolini with their Godwin points, the more they fall into his trap, because that is all he is waiting for—he has understood that not only are people wrong, but they also like to be wrong. He is in fact, perhaps unwittingly, a profound philosopher. Did he not warn us that he was “a very stable genius?” He had the merit of posing a number of perennial philosophical questions. I can think of at least seven.

 

Truth

 

The first concerns the notion of truth. By brazenly lying, uttering obvious untruths and letting his press secretaries resort to concepts like “alternative facts,” Trump has drawn attention to the absurdity of defining truth as what is “true for me” and the incoherence of relativism. He has thus done more service to the defense of truisms such as “truth is conformity to facts” or “facts are facts” than any dissertation by philosophers who have attacked post-modernism by trying to refute it with rational arguments.

 

Trump also made very clear the difference between two conceptions of truth: the classical conception, according to which truth is correspondence with facts, and the pragmatic conception, according to which what is useful or what pays off is true. He explicitly proposed to define truth in the second way. To journalist Jon Karl he said: “I always try to tell the truth, and I always want to tell the truth. But sometimes something happens and there's a change, but I always want to be truthful.” In other words, when things turn out differently than I thought they would—understand: to my disadvantage, or if my advantage is to present them otherwise—I do not tell the truth, but I am still sincere. In other words, my intentions are good, but my intentions are directed by what suits me, or is useful to me, and that is then for me the measure of the true. This aspect of Trumpism has obviously not escaped the notice of subtle Machiavellians and contemporary disciples of Protagoras. But are they well equipped to criticize it?

 

Sincerity

 

All this shows that Trump is aware, like any politician worthy of the name, of the difference between truth as utility and truth as correspondence to facts, on the one hand, and between truth and sincerity, on the other, and of the fact that it is far more important to present oneself as respectful of the latter than of the former. Truth is a property of statements, judgments or speeches, whereas sincerity, or veracity, is a property of people and their intentions. One can utter false statements while being sincere, and true statements while lying. In the eyes of many of his voters and supporters, and in his own eyes, Trump may lie, but he is no less sincere. His technique is not that of ordinary lying, but rather that of deception. You can deceive by telling the truth, or by not quite telling the truth, or by keeping the public guessing as to whether you are dealing with truth or falsehood. The difference lies in the fact that the liar intends to say the wrong thing, even though he knows it is not true, whereas the deceiver tries to mislead or confuse, without taking responsibility for his assertions, as in a shell game.

 

It is also the bullshit technique, so well described by Harry Frankfurt (On Bullshit) The liar respects the truth and observes its rules, whereas the bullshitter does not care. He will say anything, regardless of whether it is true or false; and he will say it anyway to suit his own interests. If he senses that his audience has changed its mind or does not approve, he changes his tune according to their expectations. It is the old formula for political opportunism. Trump pushes it to its limits, even saying things that go against his own interests, just because they pop into his head.

 

This technique is also used for fake news in the media, and here Trump's individual strategy meets that of the Internet collective, which enables falsehoods to be propagated exponentially. Fake information can be understood neither as falsehood nor as truth, because it is up to the receiver to decide whether, according to his or her tastes and preferences, it is or is not. Often the receiver sees it as false, but prefers to hold it as true, and most of the time does not care, whether it is or not. It is the formula for bullshit—just talking. That is why Trump calls any truth he does not like fake news. It is the pragmatist criterion of truth combined with relativism: “What I like is true, what I don't like is false, but you're entitled to say the same.” This is why, for example, he can say after the events in Charlottesville: “There are good people on both sides.” That is also why his opponents are given names that can just as easily apply to himself: “Crooked Hillary,” “Lying Ted,” like children in the playground: “Liar yourself.”

 

Assertion

 

Trump is also a profound philosopher of assertion. Philosophers of language debate whether there is a norm of assertion, as a declarative speech act. Many consider that assertion is governed by the norm of truth: to assert something is to represent oneself as saying something that is true. Others say that assertion is governed by a stronger norm, that of knowledge: the speaker must not only believe that what he is saying is true, and intend to communicate that he is saying the truth, but know that what he is saying is true. One wonders whether Trump follows this standard. The bullshitter clearly does not. In principle he should, not only by virtue of a linguistic norm, but also by virtue of a political norm—should not a president of the United States, or even an important politician, state what he knows, not just what he believes? Even if he does not know everything, does he not have access to information to which the public does not have access, and is he not responsible for what he says to a higher degree than the ordinary citizen? But if he denies any such responsibility, is he not undermining his very presidential function? Or does he not redefine it, by crudely admitting that a President of the United States has the right to say anything?

 

According to some philosophers, assertion is not governed by standards as strict as truth and knowledge; it depends on contexts and intentions, and saying is not governed by any central standard. If this is the case, then Trump is, from the point of view of the pragmatics of discourse, perfectly legitimate to say anything, depending on the circumstances. But it is also clear that he is not some drunk sitting at a bar. He says what he says according to certain intentions he has, what he holds as those of his interlocutors, and his general objectives. Even if it is in his interest to sound sincere, the less sincere he is, the less he will be believed.

 

Trust

Whether or not an assertion, of which public speech is a paradigmatic manifestation, is governed by the norm of truth or that of knowledge, the question always arises as to what degree of information or knowledge authorizes it. This is particularly the case when it comes to the system of expertise. Experts, such as scientists on climate change, say one thing. Trump denies it (which shows that he still respects the norm of assertion, because to deny p is to assert the not p). In the case of scientific expertise, there is knowledge, even if it is in principle open to revision or amendment, and even if, in the way it is presented, it may be biased and linked to political interests. But when it comes to political communication, particularly via the highly ephemeral medium of Twitter-X/Truth-Social which the President uses most of the time, how much knowledge underlies the messages? For Trump, and for most of his supporters, this question is irrelevant, because the epistemic standard of Trumpian assertions is not knowledge, but trust.

 

There is a classic American character, that of the confidence man—the con-man—whose most famous incarnations are Phineas Taylor Barnum, Frank Abagnale (the hero of the film Catch Me If You Can) and the central character of Melville's novel, The Confidence Man. His Masquerade. Trump is a con-man. The philosophy of testimony opposes two conceptions—one, defended by Hume, says that if testimony is to be credible, it must go back to the sources of its justification, and the other, defended by Thomas Reid, says that testimony must be trusted by default. The con-man obviously relies on the latter. But it is one thing for testimony to be credible by default (which explains why we are so gullible); it is another thing for it to be normatively justified, whatever the source. Even Christ's disciples, like Thomas, rejected the second thesis. Trump's merit is to have brought these questions, which are central to social epistemology, back to the forefront.

 

Morality

 

Trump's contribution to moral philosophy is no less important than his contributions to the theory of knowledge. The author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed in September 2018 lamented, “The heart of the problem is the president's amorality. Anyone who works with him knows that he is bound by no discernible principles to guide his decision-making.” This observer reminded us of the distinction between immoralism and amoralism, and the relevance of the Trump case to understanding it. Someone who is immoral is someone who ignores the good, goes against what is just, or rejects any system of morality or moral value, which presupposes that we recognize that there is such a thing as acting morally or justly. Medea says: video meliora, deteriora sequor, “I see the best but I do the worst.” But Trump is neither Thrasymachus, nor Callicles, nor Medea, nor Nietzsche, and he certainly has not read Gide's The Immoralist. He is an amoralist—no moral considerations move him; and it is fair to say that he has not the slightest idea of what it would mean to be moral. Perhaps he maintains, as is often said, a kind of poor man's Machiavellianism—that politics does not need morality.

 

The Alt-Right also hates political correctness. This position would make his attitude to truth perfectly consistent—if truth and veracity have no moral value, and if they do not have to be taken into consideration, it is understandable that he should allow himself to say anything, according to his interests, and that he should mock the father of the American hero Humayun Khan killed in Iraq, or a disabled journalist. You can blame him, but you cannot blame him for being inconsistent. But the Trumpian position can be interpreted differently—perhaps he maintains that ethical action should not be based on principles. According to a school of moral philosophy known as “particularism,” acting morally does not consist in applying a principle, but in acting well according to particular situations. So maybe Trump is a moralist, but of the particularist variety?

 

Specious present

 

Kafka said, in his Diary: “The bachelor lives only by the moment.” But Trump is not a bachelor, even if he may be a bachelor machine à la Duchamp. He lives in the moment, both because he is always, as we have noted, stream of consciousness, not in the manner of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, but in the manner of his preferred mode of communication, Twitter-X/Truth Social. He lives in what William James calls the “specious present,” the brief moment when we are aware of the present, but which has already passed by the time we realize it. Bergson, then Husserl, analyzed this awareness of time, but the 45th President of the United States is more concerned with the psychopathology of attention deficit disorder, which, like Twitter/X, turns this pathology into a business. He does not insult anyone, because his insults (such as when he calls his head of diplomacy “as stupid as his feet” and “as lazy as a snake”) are as quickly forgotten as they are uttered.

 

Ideal

 

The Trump presidency contains a more general philosophical lesson, prophetically drawn long ago by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country (1998): “At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In I 932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

 

Rorty has been widely praised for his lucidity, for thus predicting the Trump phenomenon, and beyond those we are experiencing in Europe. But there is one essential point on which Rorty was not lucid. He believed that we should not revisit postmodernism's rejection of the classical ideals of democracy founded on values of truth, knowledge, reason and justice taken as moral values, because he held these values to be empty. He believed that the American left should not return to these values, but replace them with other, more social ones, such as solidarity and “deep” democracy à la Dewey. But I believe, on the contrary, that what the Trump presidency shows is that democracy will only revive if these classic ideals and values are maintained and reaffirmed.

 

It is not always so clear in books about Trump. Those by Jason Stanley (How Fascism Works, 2018) or Tim Snyders (On Tyranny, 2017) rely on the imputation of fascism. They are not wrong, of course; but they are wrong when they analyze its propaganda as well-oiled rhetoric. Umberto Eco said of Mussolini's fascism that it was all rhetoric, and not an ounce of philosophy. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Trump's policies contain a lot of philosophy and rather little rhetoric—he does not intend to persuade. And if we have to fight him, it is on that score. Then we will have to pit philosophy against philosophy, and, for example, take issue with Schopenhauerians like Houellebecq who say they are delighted with Trump and applaud his nihilism. There is nothing to be delighted about, and religion will not save us from him.

 

 

 

IThis essay was originally published in AOC (January 9, 2019).