There are a few people–more than a few, actually– who would like to deny that the domestic tumult of the early Cold War caused permanent changes in American philosophy. There are many ways to do this, but it’s harder than it looks. Here are a few hints.
First, you can go whole hog and claim that the years after World War II saw no significant rise in Anti-Communism in America: the McCarthy Era is a left-wing fiction. No one I know of does this, even on the Right, because it is delusional. The volume of research on the McCarthy Era is vast and growing. Plus, there are people alive today who remember it. I am one of them.
Other strategies of denial seem saner—until you think about them. They all involve admitting that McCarthyism was real but limiting its effects either in duration or in scope. On the temporal side, for example, you can say that McCarthyism didn’t last long enough to be a serious political force (it went quiet on campus around 1960). It was merely an unhappy blip, quickly rectified.
While less loony-sounding than the whole hog approach, this one also ignores salient facts. McCarthyism originated in the Cold War and is often dated from President Truman’s speech of March 12, 1947, which awakened fear of domestic subversion to gear Americans up for our Cold War intervention in Greece. “McCarthyism” is thus not an independent phenomenon, but merely a popular (and reassuring) name for the first phase of the home front in the Cold War. Though anti-Communism did lower its volume around 1960, the Cold War persisted and this did not signify a return to normal. It just meant that no Communists were left to fight. Things have largely stayed that way: for better or worse, American radicalism is mainly concerned with identity, not class.
The denialist might also try various scope-limitations: claiming that while the domestic pressures of the early Cold War were strong and proved enduring, they spared certain institutions. But which? Again, a vast body of established fact that shows that American universities were heavily attacked. Cold War defense funding still drives much of their research, and the philosophical assumptions that support that funding still drive many other fields (again, see Scare).
So how about conceding the strength and staying power of Cold War political pressures on universities, but claiming that they somehow spared philosophy departments? Believing this would require an insouciance worthy of a Brian Leiter (if anyone pursues this type of denialism it will probably be Leiter or one of his acolytes, if any are left). That is because the intersection of the Cold War and philosophy departments is where Leiter’s rubber meets his road. His laudably left wing instincts push him to recognize the damage done on American society by right-wing forces—but if philosophy departments themselves were seriously hit, Leiter’s beloved departmental rankings would be conducted by a post-purge generation, and so may well be skewed.
But why would philosophy department have been spared? Was it because they are (or are perceived to be) simply too stultifyingly trivial to be of interest to players in the political world? That may be true today. ( I heard it often enough from my teachers in the 60’s–now I know why). But facts get in the way again. As Scare establishes, philosophy departments were in fact prime targets of right-wing forces in the early Cold War because of their propensity to teach atheism. (Besides, if philosophy is so stultifyingly trivial, why is anyone doing it?)
If philosophy departments were front and center and so offered no protection, denialists must turn to individual philosophers–to the really important ones who shaped the future of the discipline—and claim that they were somehow spared in spite of being in philosophy departments. But this ignores the fact that, as I show in Scare, several of those Great Men, people like Quine, Davidson and eventually David Lewis, just happened to incorporate elements of what I call Cold War philosophy, the anti-Communist ideology of the time into their philosophy.
Is this an accident? Did they do it to gain protection? Or, having done it for what they considered to be philosophical reasons, did they find it helped their careers? The last is most likely. But it remains a fact that philosophers who in those days turned to other paradigms, such as phenomenology or class analysis, didn’t have skyrocket careers like those guys.
Only one strategy of denial now seems open: accept all the facts showing that the political pressures of the early Cold War affected American philosophy, and permanently, but claim that this was a good thing. Didn’t it chase all sorts of charlatanry out of the discipline?
This strategy allows one to have one’s cake and eat it too: It affords a standpoint from which to condemn difficult thinkers like Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault without bothering to read them—and if one’s ignorance is discovered, one can always claim that one has been attacked by charlatans.
But this, alas, supposes that the discipline of philosophy either could not in time have cleansed itself, or that it would have taken too long to do so. If philosophers cannot eliminate charlatanry from their own ranks, their discipline itself is very close to being fraudulent. And when did philosophers invest in speed? We’re still trying to figure out exactly where Plato went wrong, and it obviously take decades to get the McCarthy Era right.
Maybe there is some way beyond these to deny the main thesis of Scare, but I don’t know what it would be. That won’t stop the denialists, of course. Facts are facts, but you can’t tell that to some people.