British Analytic Philosophy The Politics

“British analytic philosophy: the politics of an apolitical culture” History of Political Thought,
Vol. XXX No. 4 Winter 2009. 1

British Analytic Philosophy: the politics of an apolitical culture1
Dr Thomas L. Akehurst
Abstract
There is a consensus that post-war British analytic philosophy was politically neutral.
This view has been affirmed by the post-war analysts themselves, and by their critics.
This paper argues that this consensus-view is false. Many central analytic philosophers
claimed that their empirical philosophy had liberal outcomes, either through cultivating
liberal habits of mind, or by revealing truths about the world that supported liberal
conclusions. These beliefs were not subject to significant scrutiny, or attempts at
justification. But they do help us to explain the otherwise puzzling disinclination to
engage with questions of political philosophy on the part of these politically active
individuals.
In 1958 the British analytic philosopher G .J. Warnock argued that analytic philosophy
was ideologically neutral, compatible, he argued, with “a quite striking ideological
range”.2 For almost fifty years there has been a consensus on this point. Indeed, in the
period immediately after World War II this claim was pushed even further, with both the
analysts and their critics seeming to agree on the complete abstraction of analytic
philosophy from the concerns of ordinary life. In his famous Words and Things (1959)
Ernest Gellner wrote that:
[t]he emphasis and manifest enthusiasm with which philosophers of this school
stressed the impotence, the formality, the general irrelevance of their own work, is
something which one must perhaps leave the social historian to explain.3
This criticism was later endorsed with a certain defensive belligerence by Geoffrey
Warnock:
I did not believe that it was likely to contribute to the solution of the problems of
the post war world; I did not believe it would contribute, certainly or necessarily,
to the solution of any philosophical problem. But it was enormously enjoyable; it
1
The phrase “politics of apolitical culture” is borrowed from Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical
Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the C.I.A. And Post-War American Hegemony (London:
2002).
2
G.J. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900 (London: 1958) 170.
3
Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: 1959) 245.
Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 1

was not easy, it exercised the wits; and those who think it can never be valuably
instructive have simply never tried, or perhaps are no good at it.4
Another phenomenon seems to buttress this sense of what Gellner called "conspicuous
triviality."5 Even if Warnock’s colleagues weren’t so keen to flaunt the apparent
uselessness of their discipline, many of them agreed that the analysts had no real interest
in the philosophical questions which touched most closely on wider public concerns –
those relating to questions of a political or moral nature. The Oxford analyst Anthony
Quinton, writing in 1967, described “near unanimity with which analytic philosophers
have, until very recently, ignored the subject altogether.”6 Another Oxford analyst, Mary
Warnock, echoes this view, writing that “the casualties in this flowering of [ordinary
language] philosophy were moral and political philosophy… the current interest in
language had placed a dead hand on them…”7 The most striking critical statement of the
same point was made by Peter Laslett who famously, and highly misleadingly, declared
in his introduction to a new book series Philosophy, Politics and Society: “for the
moment anyway political philosophy is dead;” before going on to blame the analysts for
the murder. 8
The temptation is to read these two aspects of analytic philosophy as simply related. The
analysts’ were not interested in solving genuine problems, therefore it is entirely
unsurprising that they undertook no political or moral philosophy in the post war years.
They were the epitome of ivory tower academia, amusing themselves with minutiae
while around them Europe settled into the potentially apocalyptic cold war era, without
philosophical guidance. It is this tempting reading which has predominated, amongst the
analysts’ critics, and a slightly less critical version seems acceptable to the analysts
themselves. The impression conveyed by both sides was that the analysts were not
philosophically engaged in any way with the wider post-war world, with their
4
G.J. Warnock, Essays on J.L. Austin (London: 1973) 59.
5
Gellner, Words and Things 245.
6
Anthony Quinton, ed., Political Philosophy (Oxford: 1967) 3.
7
Mary Warnock, ed., Women Philosophers (London: 1996) xli-xlii.
8
Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy Politics and Society (Oxford: 1956) ix. Laslett’s other explanation, that after
Hiroshima, politics was too serious to be theorized about, doesn’t seem very promising. After all, history is
replete with examples of political crisis prompting political philosophy. One might think of Hobbes and the
Civil War, Locke and the crisis over James II, Hegel and Napoleon…

philosophical hats on they defended no ideology. 9 Discussion is based on the assumption
that the analysts took no interest in political philosophy, at least – to take Quinton’s
timeframe - until the late 1960s.
This assumption of the essentially apolitical nature of analytic philosophy as a subject has
been nuanced, but by no means dented, by the very obvious political engagement of the
most prominent twentieth century British analyst, Bertrand Russell. Russell himself,
though he wrote on social and political questions, was very keen to distinguish this work
from his philosophy-proper, even going so far as to argue that in order to understand his
work on social and political questions “my technical activities must be forgotten.”10 This
is a line which has been followed, with some justification, by subsequent commentators.
According to Alan Ryan, “Russell’s strictly philosophical views on ethics made no
difference to his moral and political commitments.”11 Even in Russell’s case, then, the
impression has remained of the discipline of analytic philosophy itself as depoliticized.
As Stuart Hampshire, reflecting on the immediate post-war period, summed it up:
“Analytical philosophers might happen to have political interests, but their philosophical
arguments were largely neutral politically.”12
This persistent and clearly rather attractive view of analytic philosophy as a discipline
above the fray and without ideological baggage is nevertheless false. In this paper I will
argue that, in the British case, we cannot simply talk about a depoliticized philosophical
culture within analysis in the years between 1945 and the last years of the 1960s.13 In
their, albeit limited, political-philosophical output, many of the leading analytic
philosophers made clear that they took analytic philosophy to be in alliance with
liberalism. But this of course raises a further question. If a belief in such an alliance
9
This has often morphed into the related accusation that the analysts themselves had no interest in politics
– a claim unsustainable for anyone with knowledge of the biographies of the central analytic philosophers
of the period.
10
Quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970 (London: 2001) 267.
11
Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (London: 1988) x.
12
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: 1989) 9.
13
In the American case, John McCumber has shown the impact of the McCarthy era on analytic philosophy
in a similar period. John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the Mccarthy Era
(Evanston: 2001).

existed, why the relative dearth of analytic political philosophy? I will suggest that the
specific content of the analysts’ ideological stance militated against the need to undertake
political philosophy. What emerges instead is a confidence about the veracity of liberal
values and a clear belief that such values were essentially harmonious with the analysts’
epistemological position.
I will explore these ideas under two headings. First, under the heading “habits of mind,” I
will examine the ways in which the analysts drew links between the structures of thought
appropriate to analysis and those appropriate to liberalism. Second, I will examine the
claim that liberalism needs no theoretical defence because it is, in some sense,
straightforwardly true.14 It is important to stress at the outset that I am not seeking to take
the current understanding of Russell and apply it to other analysts; I am not claiming that
the analytic philosophers had political ideas and ideals which were present, though they
sat separately from their “strictly philosophical” work. Instead, I am claiming that for
these philosophers - including Russell and despite his claims to the contrary – there were
links between their philosophical work and what they took to be political virtue.
Habits of Mind
The Oxford analyst H.H. Price published this striking passage in the dark days of 1940:
I think there is some connection, both historically and psychologically, between
Empiricism and Liberalism: I mean Liberalism in that large and non-party sense
in which we say that the English speaking countries have a liberal tradition.
Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic authoritative
mood, to every sort of ipse dixit. It does not conceive of Philosophy as a heresy-
hunt directed against those who stray from the truths once for all delivered to our
fathers; but as a free co-operative inquiry, where anyone may put forward any
hypothesis he likes, new or old, provided it makes sense. The same live-and-let-
live principles, the same dislike of humbug of the ipse dixit sort of authority, are
characteristic of Liberalism too… If Empiricist philosophy is strong to-day,
perhaps we may hope to see a revival of Liberalism the day after to-morrow.15
14
According to Julie Reuben, American social scientists were making arguments of both types somewhat
earlier in the twentieth century. Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago and London: 1996) 133.
15
H.H. Price, "The Permanent Significance of Hume's Philosophy," Philosophy 15, no. 57 (Jan 1940): 8.

One of the commonalities of the analytic philosophers in this period was their near
universal subscription to an empiricist epistemology, and Price here links the empiricists’
intellectual habits with those of liberalism. The careful live-and-let-live scientism of the
empiricist is the natural ally of the anti-authoritarian liberal. In 1940, his perception of
this alliance was clearly powerful enough to provide Price with a measure of hope in the
face of German invasion. The association of empiricism and liberalism, then, appears to
be anything but a trivial one.
The other analysts were also highly persuaded of the analogy in outlook between
liberalism and empiricism. Bertrand Russell took a similar position in the only extended
treatment of this question published by a British analytic philosopher in this period,
“Philosophy and Politics” (1950), and in so doing, shows that Price’s hope of 1940 was
not simply an unrepresentative clutching at straws: “[t]he scientific outlook, accordingly,
is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of
liberalism.”16 For Russell, John Locke exemplifies this unity:
[b]oth in intellectual and in practical matters he stood for order without authority;
this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism. It depends
clearly on consent or assent. In the intellectual world it involves standards of
evidence which, after adequate discussion, will lead to a measure of agreement
among experts. In the practical world it involves submission to the majority after
all parties have had an opportunity to state their case.17
There is evidence that A.J. Ayer, after Russell the most prominent British analyst of the
twentieth century, shared this perspective. Unhelpfully Ayer does not reflect on this point
until 1974, by which time political thought was reviving within analytic philosophy. Yet
the similarity to the views expressed by Russell is such that these passages are worth
quoting. Here Ayer argues that the virtues he took to be characteristic of the empirical
approach to philosophy would also lead to liberalism, or in this case more specifically, to
radicalism and socialism, in politics:
16
Bertrand Russell, "Philosophy and Politics," in Unpopular Essays, ed. Bertrand Russell (London: 1950),
28.
17
Ibid.

in general it has certainly been true in the last century or so that there has been a
close association, so close an association between empiricism and radicalism that
it couldn’t entirely be an accident. But I think it’s a matter of a certain habit of
mind, a certain critical temper in the examination of political and social as well as
philosophical questions, that is responsible for this, rather than some deduction
from first principles.18
Pressed to elaborate his position, Ayer did so as follows:

a certain critical temper that you would develop if you did philosophy in the sort
of way that Naess and I do it, it would on the whole tend… after all, you bring the
same intelligence to bear on any of a wide range of problems, even though they
aren’t necessarily the same range of problems, and this would, I think, tend to
have the effect of making you a liberal radical in social and political questions.
This would be more than just historical accident.19
He concludes: “[a]nd, in a sense, I would expect an empirical philosopher to be a

radical.”20 His biographer finds a similar link in the thought of Isaiah Berlin.21 Michael
Ignatieff writes that Berlin’s philosophy tutor, Frank Hardie “became the single most
important intellectual influence upon Berlin’s undergraduate life: orienting him towards
the British empiricism that became his intellectual morality.”22 This notion of empiricism
as an intellectual morality is an interesting one. Although Ignatieff does not explicitly
elaborate on this observation, a hundred pages further on in his book he offers a
comparison between Berlin and Albert Einstein which seems to have a bearing on the
theme:
[t]hey shared a “sense of reality”. There was only one world, Berlin wrote of
Einstein, and this was ‘the world of human experience; it alone was real’. This
sense of reality – that the world was as it seems, and that it could be known only
by patient and careful research – was the only sure guarantee against ideological
intoxication…23
18
A.J. Ayer, Arne Naess, and Fons Elders, "The Glass Is on the Table: An Empiricist Vs a Total View," in
Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed. Fons Elders (London: 1974), 27-28.
19
Ibid., 28. Dots appear in original text, reflecting unscripted speech.
20
Ibid., 27. Arne Naess, the philosopher to whom Ayer refers here, was also trained in the analytic
tradition.
21
We can detect the same idea in Richard Wollheim, "Democracy," in Political Thought since World War
2, ed. W.J. Stankiewicz (New York: 1964), 118.
22
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: 2000) 49-50.
23
Ibid. 194-5.

The notion of a “sense of reality” invoked by Ignatieff offers us a route to understanding

the claims made by Price, Russell and Ayer as well as the thought imputed to Berlin.
Empiricists hold, in part, that the only world that we can know is the world given to us by
our senses, and that the positing of a world beyond appearance is a nonsense.24 The
analysts’ denial of the mind-createdness of the world, their sense of the unique reality of
the given world, is tied, Ignatieff suggests, to a guarantee against political extremism.
The focus on the concrete saves the empiricist from following grand theories,
metaphysical chimeras and other strictly meaningless exhortations to devalue reality in
favour of dangerous ideological fantasy. This thought was best expressed by the Austrian
empiricist Otto Neurath:
empiricists on average are less prepared to become merciless persecutors, and not
so frequently the enthusiastic followers (for the higher glory of THE transcendent
nation, ideal, etc. or something else) because they are not prepared to sacrifice
their own end and other people’s happiness to something ‘idealist’ and anti-
human.25
The very groundedness of the empirical approach was a guarantee against dangerous
political ideas. There are two dimensions of this that it is worth noting. First, we see that
the alliance between liberalism and empiricism is predicated on an assumption about the
philosophical nature of political evil. Only if you assume that totalitarian politics issues
from some kind of philosophically inspired romantic bid to recreate the known reality
will an empiricist theory of knowledge give you any guarantee against it. And indeed it
was precisely this line that the analysts took, believing as they did that the post-Kantian
tradition, particularly through Hegel and Nietzsche, provided what Russell called “the
ancestry of fascism”.26 They did not appear to contemplate the possibility that totalitarian
ideas may issue out of precisely the small-scale, empirically based activities that they saw
as inherently liberal.
24
Alan Lacey, "Empiricism," in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford and
New York: 1995).
25
Neurath 1943 letter to Carnap, quoted in John O'Neill, "Unified Science and Political Philosophy:
Positivism, Pluralism and Liberalism," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 588.
26
Bertrand Russell, "The Ancestry of Fascism," in In Praise of Idleness (London: 1935). I have discussed
this at greater length elsewhere. Thomas L. Akehurst, "The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of
Continental Philosophy in Mid-Century Britain," History of European Ideas 34 (2008).

Secondly, the prima facie differences between liberal values and scientific methods seem
as striking as the similarities.27 Yet, as should be apparent from the quotations above, the
analogy between the empirical and the liberal habits of mind was not one the analysts
subjected to any real philosophical scrutiny. Only Russell dwelt on the analogy at any
length, and even he did not provide a full account of its mechanics. Nevertheless, the
analogy was clearly comfortable enough for Ayer to return to it thirty years after Price
suggested the idea. It was a thought that had a persistence and a weight amongst the
analytic philosophers despite the lack of any detailed elaboration.28
It was also a thought that might lead the analysts to devalue the practice of political
philosophy. If, through the study of empirical philosophy, one acquires the habits of mind
that, when applied to political matters, will naturally lead to liberal outcomes, then the
political value of teaching political philosophy will be very limited.
Truth
More concrete than the suggestions of analogy, the analysts also claimed that empiricism
is allied to liberalism because both hold a subscription to truth. Indeed it may be that the
attempts to draw an analogy were, in fact, rooted in an appeal to truth. Ayer’s comments,
above, proposed a link between empiricism and liberal radicalism on the basis that
anyone deploying the schooled intelligence and critical temper characteristic of an
27
Each of the following examples is open to question, depending on our definitions of the constituent ideas.
But they provide a flavour of the apparent divergence between the two bodies of thought: science does not
appear to abide by the principle of equality celebrated by liberalism in its democratic form, there is no
equivalent to one man one vote. Instead the input of the most well thought of scientists is clearly worth
more than that of a post-doctoral researcher. Liberalism is individualist, whereas modern science is almost
always collective in its procedures and investigations. Liberal politics is arguably a negotiation between
interests, science is a search for facts, and so on. The point here is not that any of these examples are
conclusive in dividing science from liberalism, simply that it is not obvious that they are allied in the way
the analysts assumed.
28
Benjamin Barber analysed Russell’s attempt to link empiricism and liberalism in this way and concluded
that the only sustainable analogy to be made was one which conceived liberalism and empiricism as being
analogous in tending to collapse into political or epistemological extremism respectively. Such a
commonality, he concluded, was not one that could successfully be deployed to vindicate either body of
theory. Benjamin R Barber, "Solipsistic Politics: Russell's Empiricist Liberalism," in Bertrand Russell
Memorial Volume, ed. George W Roberts (London: 1979).

analytic philosopher would come to liberal conclusions. Maybe his thought here was not
that there was an analogy as such between two bodies of thought, but rather the more
straightforward idea that someone who is trained to think carefully towards the right
answers in epistemology, will also be better able to find the right answers to questions of
politics. Of course the assumption here is that in some way liberalism is the right answer,
at best a problematic claim. We also saw a suggestion of an appeal to truth in Ignatieff’s
comments on Berlin. Could the claim here be that somehow empiricism, because it gives
us access to the facts, will also secure for us the right kind of political outcomes? Is there
a claim that the actual truth about the world does not favour extremism, and that therefore
if one can get at the facts, one sees that liberal politics is epistemologically superior?
This is a position that the analysts did more than simply hint at. In the last paragraph of
his History of Western Philosophy Russell is explicit about the importance of truth:
In a welter of conflicting fanaticisms one of the few unifying forces is scientific

truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations
and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental
bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of
this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it
can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which
I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this
philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity,
producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing
capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its
dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of
life.29
Here Russell appeals directly to the morally and politically salutary power of
commitment to truth, a commitment, which remarkably, he suggested was absent from
philosophy before his own school introduced it. This powerful passage concludes
Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which was published in 1946. It clearly offers
us Russell’s message to the post-war world, and his message is that analytic philosophy
can cure fanaticism, that its commitment to truth can inspire a new way of life.
29
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: 1946) 864.

Running through the analysts’ claims about the importance of truth is a suspicion of
theory. Theory, for the analysts, is always accompanied by the suspicion that it is being
deployed for sinister ends, to confuse the issue, to mask the real purpose, or to cover a
shoddy argument – in other words, to obscure the truth. Geoffrey Warnock suggested that
the analysts’ hostility to Heideggerian “obscurity”, “rhetoric” and “mystery-mongering”30
was related to “a certain distrust of ‘theories’ ”31 which many analysts, especially the
leader of the Oxford analysts, J.L. Austin, considered “distorting.”32 The political
dimensions of this are here implied through the reference to the sometime Nazi
philosopher Martin Heidegger.33 This becomes explicit in a comment made by Stuart
Hampshire, who worked for military intelligence during the war. Afterwards some of his
former colleagues in intelligence turned out to be Soviet spies. Hampshire’s explanation
for this was that their anger about poverty and injustice was manipulated by communist
doctrine; they were “deceived by theory.”34 Iris Murdoch went so far as to write that for
the analysts:
It is moreover felt that theorizing is anti-liberal… and that liberal-minded persons

should surround their choices with a minimum of theory, relying rather on open
and above-board references to facts or to principles which are simple and
comprehensible to all…35
Russell masterfully ties the threads of these ideas together:
30
G.J. Warnock, Morality and Language (Oxford: 1983) 2.
31
Ibid. 3.
32
Ibid.
33
This is part of a pattern of analytic writing linking Nazism to a post-Hegelian German philosophical
tradition – a pattern I will have something more to say about below, and have discussed more fully
elsewhere. Akehurst, "The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of Continental Philosophy in Mid-
Century Britain." See also Thomas L. Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness
and the Spectre of Europe (London: 2010).
34
Hampshire, Innocence and Experience 10.
35
Iris Murdoch, "A House of Theory," in Iris Murdoch: Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter J. Conradi
(London: 1997), 179. First published in 1958. Murdoch had R.M. Hare particularly in mind here – we will
turn to him shortly.

[i]n every important war since 1700 the more democratic side has been victorious.
This is partly because democracy and empiricism (which are intimately
connected) do not demand a distortion of the facts in the interests of theory.36
Because, for Russell as for his colleagues, to theorize is to falsify, their lack of theoretical
requirements allows the empiricist (and the democrat) to concentrate simply on the given
facts, thus giving themselves a practical advantage. It is not clear whether this is because
these ideas are non-theoretical, or whether they are based a theory of such purity that no
distortion of the facts is required. But what does seem evident is that democracy is being
set up here as a system that is simply and conclusively justifiable – appropriate because
of the nature of the world as we find it. We also see here one of Russell’s wilder
historical claims – that the democratic side has won every important war since 1700. This
three-way alliance between military success, a political system, and truth appears to be
Crusader logic of a 20th-century stripe (or indeed, a rather crude neo-Hegelianism).
We find the same suggestion of an alliance between truth and liberalism in the work of
another analyst, R.M. Hare. Hare argued that, in combination, the structure of ethical
language and clearly stated empirical fact was a powerful weapon for liberalism and
against totalitarians and fanatics. In the following passage, Hare demonstrates the liberal
powers inherent in the logic of ethical discourse:
[i]n his war with the fanatic, the best strategy for the liberal to adopt is one of
persistent attrition. For there are, as we have seen, certain weapons available to
him, in the nature of moral thought, which, if he keeps fighting and does not lose
heart, will cause all but a small hard core of fanatics to relent.37
The structures of logic, as revealed by analytic philosophy, provide the liberal with tools
to use against the totalitarian. But the inoculation of the public against the propaganda of
the extremist is a three-stage process, with philosophy providing only the first phase:
[h]e will be successful in this aim, if he can get the ordinary member of the
public, first to be clear about the logical properties of moral words, as we have
36
Russell, "Philosophy and Politics," 32.
37
R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: 1963) 180.

described them; secondly to inform themselves about the facts concerning
whatever question is in dispute and thirdly to exercise their imaginations. 38
Hare, like Russell, is content to assume that there are no facts about the world which will
ally themselves to the totalitarian. Despite his subjectivism, there is an assumption here
of a moral order, reflected both in the formal rules of logic and in empirical data about
the world.39
These arguments, conducted at length in Freedom and Reason, provide a more

meaningful attempt to ally analytic empirical philosophy with liberalism than any of the
other analysts provided in this period. Hare’s essential case, though, is not dissimilar to
the claims made by Russell about the alliance of liberalism to truth, with empiricism as
the method of discovering that truth. Logic, combined with the empirical facts, represents
a powerful ally to the liberal cause. Indeed, Hare echoes the claim made by Russell that
the fanatic will always seek to distort the truth,40 which explains, he argued, “why, on the
whole (though there are set-backs) liberalism advances against fanaticism”.41 The thought
here, as in Russell’s case, is that the facts about the world are not conducive to totalitarian
politics.
The claim, common to Russell and Hare, and possibly to Ayer, Price and Berlin too
appears to be that liberalism is true, or perhaps better, liberalism accords with the facts of
the human situation. Further, through a combination of scientific and commonsensical
facts and logical rules, analytic empiricism is uniquely well placed to provide evidence of
this. What appears to divide those like Hare, who take the time to work on this topic,
from those like Russell who did not is that Hare believes that “persistent attrition” is
38
Ibid. 180-1. The role of imagination is an important one, but it is not centrally relevant to our concerns
here.
39
Hare, unlike his colleagues, gave concrete indications as to how this works in practice, even going to the
extent of travelling to Germany to lecture the Germans on the philosophical errors that underpinned their
subservience to the Nazis. For one example see: R.M. Hare, "Ethics and Politics 1: Can I Be Blamed for
Obeying Orders," in Applications of Moral Philosophy, ed. R.M. Hare (London: 1972). This was delivered
as a lecture in Germany, broadcast on the Third Programme, and appeared in the Listener in October 1955.
40
Hare, Freedom and Reason 181.
41
Ibid. 184.

required to convert fanatics to liberalism, whereas if Russell believed this, he did not
think that attrition on the level of political philosophy was necessary.
This positive belief in the truth of liberalism may have been allied to a more negative
claim. In the following quotation Stuart Hampshire contrasts the virtuous analytic
tradition, and a vicious continental one. Here, the contrast is offered with the tradition of
Hegel and Heidegger, who, Hampshire argued, had abandoned the search for truth:
philosophers in Britain and Australia, and in Scandinavia and America also, cling to
the idea that their first duty is to try to make statements that are true, even if they are
not always exciting, and to respect the bodies of ascertained truths which are labelled
‘science’ and ‘history’. To meet those of their critics who are uninterested in truth, a
pragmatic apology can be found in the fact that none of these analytic philosophers
has been friendly with Nazis or with other totalitarian parties, and that is not an
accident. Anyone who is a member of these parties or is friendly with them, has to
acquire the habit of making statements that are impressive and powerful without any
regard to their testable truth.42
There is very much that is of interest in this quotation. Hampshire, like Russell makes
explicit a claim that has been heavily implied in some of the other analysts’ remarks, that
it is a pure commitment to truth that is the guarantor of the analysts’ political virtue.
However, this is not the kind of positive metaphysical argument for the alliance of truth
and liberalism that we saw above. Here the argument takes a more negative form. If
fascist-favouring philosophy requires distortion of the truth to get off the ground, and the
analysts stick, like good empiricists, simply to the given facts, then at the very least they
achieve immunity from extremism. This, then, does not offer us a positive vindication of
liberalism, but it may leave liberalism as the last man standing, after the errors of
totalitarian theory have been uncovered.
Neither the analysts beliefs about the origins of anti-liberal philosophy nor their
assumption about the alliance between liberalism and the truth were positions that were
terribly well supported. I will return to the foundations of anti-liberal thought below. On
the alliance between liberalism and truth, it is worth commenting that the notion that
42
Stuart Hampshire, "The Philosopher as Superman," Encounter x, no. 3 (March 1958): 73.

liberalism could be straightforwardly and pre-theoretically defensible based on the
empirically derived facts about the world seems like wishful thinking. Indeed, the notion
of any pre-theoretical data issuing in just one manifestly obvious political interpretation
was as open to question in the mid-20th century as it is today. Yet it was apparently one
that the analysts had some faith in.
Conclusion
The analysts’ refusal to undertake political philosophy after World War II seems
puzzling. But here we have one small part of the explanation. It was not, as many of their
critics had argued, that they were simply wilfully indulging in practices of "conspicuous
triviality."43 Indeed, the claim that analytic philosophers were not interested in politics
was always nonsense. One only has to look at a roll call of their activities: Russell of
course was actively politically involved for decades, both Hampshire and Ayer had
strong ties to the Labour Party; Hampshire, Ayer and Berlin at various times took part in
meetings of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; Mary Warnock famously authored the
Warnock Report on Special Educational Needs, and sits in the house of Lords.44
The question is why this political engagement did not yield more political philosophy.
The answer presented here suggests that the analysts simply found it unnecessary. Their
own epistemological positions were assumed to dovetail with the principles of liberalism,
by dint of a common habit of mind; training in epistemology, then, would ensure liberal
human beings. Or, in a stronger version of the claim, liberalism was seen as not requiring
philosophical justification due to being self-evidently true. It is significant in this context
that even Hare, who did write at length on moral and political questions, was committed
to the claim that the liberal values could be vindicated by pointing out logical truths,
empirical facts, and appealing to the imagination. Hare was no more concerned about the
truth of liberal values than his colleagues; he was just more interested in the way in
which that truth could be conveyed to the benighted.
43
Gellner, Words and Things 245.
44
The list could go on.

It was the analysts’ political philosophical assumptions, about the self-evidence of liberal
values, that enabled them to dispense with the discipline itself. On this reading political
philosophy died because it was deemed superfluous to the furthering of the broadly left
wing political agenda shared by almost all the analytic philosophers in this period.45
But perhaps this account of the death of political philosophy leaves us in a less
satisfactory place than we were at the outset. After all, an explanation of the analysts’
lack of interest in political theory has now yielded an apparently equally thorny question
– why did the analysts believe with such confidence in such flimsily constructed
philosophical positions? I would like to finish this paper with some brief observations as
to the roots of the analysts’ confidence.
Where the simple confidence in the truths of liberalism is concerned, one might be
tempted to offer a Nietzschean reading. The relationship between what was true and what
was good, a staple of philosophical thought since Plato, was as Nietzsche realized, a
fundamental assumption of scientism. One might argue that the analytic philosophers’
faith in the power of modern science was unconsciously accompanied by a belief in the
alliance between truth and goodness, upon which modern science was formed.46 This
would have to be so despite many of the analysts holding a subjectivist position about
ethics which would seem to rule out any relationship between what was true and what
was good.47
Nevertheless, this interpretation may not be far-fetched. One of the characteristics of

analytic philosophy in this period was its commitment, and in some senses its
subservience, to science. Russell had famously written that philosophy was the gap left
between the retreat of theology and the advance of scientific knowledge.48 Ayer and
many of the younger generation of analysts had gone further in denying that philosophy
45
Anthony Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers (London: 1982) 49.
46
See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: 1994).
Book 3.
47
Hare is an interesting case in that his subjectivism apparently commits him to the claim that values are
not readable from what has been empirically given. Yet his religious faith suggests his belief that in some
way values exist independently of human subjects.
48
Russell, History 10.

could produce any new knowledge – this was to be left to science.49 Certainly there was a
certain awe of science on the part of the younger analysts, even if the Oxford-based
analysts chose to discover very little about modern scientific departures.50
There are also good contextual reasons why the analysts might have been tempted by the
view that liberalism was essentially the new truth of politics. The democratic mode of
government, which had been extinguished from mainland Europe in the early 1940s,
appeared to have been restored to strength by a victorious peace. As Russell suggested in
the quotation above, there was a sense in which democracy had been vindicated by war,
and now needed no justification. Mark Mazower has pointed to “the deep antipathy to
ideological politics” resulting from the Second World War.51 In Britain, where the stark
choice of the 1930s “communism or fascism” had been met by the mid-1940s with a
process of gradual welfare reform, and a remarkable degree of political consensus, there
must have been a sense that the ideological argument was over, that liberal democracy
having passed through the fire, was no longer in question. Perhaps the philosophical
thinness of the analysts’ message can therefore partly be accounted for by the lack of
apparent urgency of the question. Certainly one can detect a level of Anglo-Saxon
complacency in the analysts’ comments on political matters, which suggests a view that,
in Britain at least, the right answers had been discovered (if not yet perfectly
implemented).52
But to account for the vague but tangible comfort the analysts found in the supposed truth
of liberalism purely in terms of post-war complacency does not tell the whole story. Their
confidence was in part motivated by their understanding of the philosophical grounding
49
See for example, part of the manifesto for the new journal Analysis: “The contributions to be published
will be concerned, as a general rule, with the elucidation or explanation of facts… the general nature of
which is, by common consent, already known; rather than with attempts to establish new kinds of facts
about the world of very wide scope, or on a very large scale.” A Duncan-Jones et al., "Statement of Policy,"
Analysis 1, no. 1 (November 1933).
50
Aaron Preston provides further evidence for this possibility in arguing that analytic philosophy in this
period had adopted a Newtonian paradigm. Aaron Preston, Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion
(London: 2007) 139-52.
51
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (London: 1999) 194.
52
Thomas L. Akehurst, "Britishness, Logic and Liberty: The Cultural Politics of Twentieth Century
Analytic Philosophy" (D.Phil., University of Sussex, 2007) Chapter 4.

of liberalism’s enemies, Nazism and Communism. We saw in the quotation from Stuart
Hampshire, above, that the analysts accused philosophers who kept company with
totalitarians of giving up on truth in favour of rhetoric. This opens up a very rich seam of
analytic thought; there was a widespread belief that Nazism in particular could be traced
back to a tradition begun by Hegel, and encompassing many subsequent continental
philosophers, including Nietzsche and Heidegger. There was an equally widespread
belief that this totalitarian political theory was riddled with philosophical failings.53 This
is a comment on Hegel from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy:
[a] man may be pardoned if logic compels him regretfully to reach conclusions
which he deplores, but not for departing from logic in order to be free to advocate
crimes.54
In this context, a commitment to carefully establishing the truth through sound argument
could be seen as powerful anti-totalitarian strategy. The analysts had, in their own minds,
good reason to dismiss the proto-totalitarian philosophical tradition as reasoners of a very
low grade. Russell cut a swathe through them in his History of Western Philosophy,
Isaiah Berlin’s 1950s assessment of them was equally damning.55 Other analysts too
betrayed in their published output a thoroughgoing contempt for the quality of philosophy
they felt had allied itself to Hitler and Stalin. The true task of analytic political
philosophy in this context was not so much to do any actual political theorizing, but to
shoot down attempts to so that would lead to dangerous outcomes.
In her acid response to Stuart Hampshire’s condemnation of Heidegger, Majorie Grene

delivered the following diagnosis:
[t]he reason why British and American philosophers are not much inclined to
totalitarian company [as Hampshire had claimed, TA] lies not at all in their
philosophy, but in the point at which they stop philosophising. They stop short
before traditional values of mercy and humanity, which are neither logical
concepts nor testable truths, but standards to which, quite unanalytically, they feel
53
For a discussion of the link to fascism see Ibid. Chapter 1. For a discussion of this tradition’s supposed
philosophical ineptitude see Chapter 3.
54
Russell, History 769. My italics.
55
Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (London: 2002).

they owe respect. Their feelings in this case are stronger than their philosophy,
and I am glad they are; but this is no credit to the philosophy.56
Had the analysts been prone to respond to such attacks, and had they the access that
history has provided us, to the nature of their political assumptions, they would have had
difficulty accepting such a diagnosis. They would have argued that you have to look at
the source of totalitarianism in philosophy and the way in which analytic philosophy
uproots such ideas. They would have pointed to the importance of the coming together in
Britain of empiricism and liberalism, mutually re-enforcing, and complementary to the
native habits of the British people. Yet, Grene was also correct, there was no direct and
satisfactory philosophical case for the alliance of analysis and liberalism. The striking
fact is that for the analysts this did not appear to damage their belief in that alliance,
founded as it was more on a series of ingrained cultural assumptions, than on the rigours
of the analytic method.
56
Majorie Grene, "Discussion: "on Heidegger"," Encounter x, no. 4 (April 1958): 67.

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“British analytic philosophy: the politics of an apolitical culture” History of Political Thought,

Vol. XXX No. 4 Winter 2009. 1

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 1

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 2

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 3

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 4

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 5

Pressed to elaborate his position, Ayer did so as follows:

He concludes: “[a]nd, in a sense, I would expect an empirical philosopher to be a

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 6

The notion of a “sense of reality” invoked by Ignatieff offers us a route to understanding

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 7

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 8

In a welter of conflicting fanaticisms one of the few unifying forces is scientific

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 9

It is moreover felt that theorizing is anti-liberal… and that liberal-minded persons

Russell masterfully ties the threads of these ideas together:

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 10

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 11

These arguments, conducted at length in Freedom and Reason, provide a more

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 12

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 13

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 14

Nevertheless, this interpretation may not be far-fetched. One of the characteristics of

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 15

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 16

In her acid response to Stuart Hampshire’s condemnation of Heidegger, Majorie Grene

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 17

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 18

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 19

Dr Thomas L. Akehurst 2009 20

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