...Philosophers were now arguing that the proper subjects of moral and political philosophy were analyses of the cognitive status of moral and political language. While philosophers might as private citizens have political commitments, it was argued that these had nothing to do with their work as philosophers. Scientific philosophy was seen as a value-free subject.
The fact that this shift in outlook among analytical philosophers coincided with the rise of McCarthyism seems to have been more than a coincidence IMO. Philosophers were among the academics who were hardest hit by the anti-red purges of the universities. Jim Farmelant
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Absolutely. It wasn't coincidence, it was policy.
```I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability.'
[Enforced as of June, 1942, then amended in June, 1949 as follows]
`I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or any illegal or unconstitutional methods.
I am not a member of the Communist Party, or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.'
``...At an Academic Senate meeting on June 7, 1949, professor of psychology Edward Tolman objected vigorously to the amendment to the 1942 oath, but most UC professors and staff thought nothing of it and signed immediately. Heavy pressure from within the faculty encouraged the lagging minority to conform, and by the end of August only 157 of the 9,450 UC employees had failed to do so. When the Group for Academic Freedom formed on the UC campus in July of 1950, that number had dwindled to 36. The Korean police action was going badly for the United States, and the general atmosphere was not friendly to a tiny band of principled nonsigners of what seemed to the public a perfectly reasonable anti-Communist oath---we were at war with them, after all. In August the Regents wearied of the power struggle and by a vote of 12-10 told the nonsigners that they had ten days to sign, resign or be fired. Three resigned, ten signed and of the remaining number, eighteen took the Regents to court. The case of Tolman v Underhill (Robert M. Underhill was the Regents' secretary and treasurer) went to court immediately and on April 6, 1951, a unanimous district court of appeals ruled in favor of the nonsigners. In May the California Supreme Court took the case along with several others then pending and, on October 17, 1952, ruled against the oath on the grounds that the original state of California oath took precedence and the UC employees could not be `subject to any narrower test of loyalty than the constitutional oath prescribed.' The Regents met thirteen days later and voted unanimously to drop the matter. In November the nonsigners were offered their jobs back, but not their back pay. In March of 1956, by order of the court, the nonsigners were granted back pay for the period July 1, 1950 to December 31, 1952. '' (From, David Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 60s, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, 1993, 45-6p)
The entire range of US intellectual life and not just the academy was deformed by these and other more threatening events (Rosenbergs) during the period.
In a more contemplative vein, there is Hakkan Chevalier's Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship, 1965. Hakkan Chevalier was the US translator of Man's Fate, La Condition Humaine, by Andre Malraux. Chevalier was a professor at UC in the Thirties and Forties and had become friends with Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley and later at Cal Tech (Pasadena) until Oppenheimer left academia to head the Los Alamos project in 1943.
Oppenheimer was interviewed by US Army officers as part of his war time security clearance and in the course of those interviews he attempted to minimize his own progressive background. As part of this effort he fabricated a story about his faculty friends who were pacifist, socialists, and communists at UC in the Thirties, and named Chevalier among others. After the war, during the build up to the 1949 UCB loyalty oath controversy, Chevalier left Berkeley for Paris, understanding full well the big chill was on. There is a lot more to this story and its worth reading his book.
Thomas Mann moved from Los Angeles (Pacific Palisades) to Zurich at about the same time---which corresponded to the first of the Hollywood, House on Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Mann never mentioned the political climate as a reason for the move in his journals, but I surmise the nasty and proto-fascist air in LA must have been part of his reasoning. His son Micheal Mann was teaching German Literature in Berkeley. After having lived through the Weimar and pre-Nazis political purges of the Twenties and escaping in 1933, Mann couldn't have been too happy to face even the hint of some latter day American variant.
For the less than luminary American academics and intellectuals a fair amount of support for these purges might have been motivated by the vague presumption that European ideas, particularly moral and political philosophy were the cause of Hitler and Stalin. They were evil and godless ideas in any case. And then too, there might have been a form of modernist idealism at work, or perhaps just denial and naivety in the belief that American society had superseded the need for moral and political philosophy; that these were old and bad relatives of the past, the darkness of Europe.
The post-war purges, threats and intimidations were also an echo from a whole sequence of historical purges that had gone on in the US periodically, and that date back to at least the turn of the century. I suspect if some scholar were to examine US academic and intellectual life through its ideas in moral and political philosophy in conjunction with what was available in Europe, they could trace out a fairly convincing case for a systemic censorship of European left, progressive themes and views in just about every field. The US had a tradition of Euro-phobia, as if Dracula would leap out of the pages of European ideas. And then too, US society and culture was so thoroughly embedded in Protestantism, that even the phrase, `moral and political philosophy' smacked of atheism if not pedophilia.
The lingering residue of those eras and events effectively limited the philosophy I was exposed as a student in the beginning 60s: analytical, empirical, positivist, shored up with inductive logic, a whole British flotilla. In art history, my first textbook was written by EH Gombrich who made a career in the UK of rooting out the evil Hegelians. You couldn't find anyone influenced by Hegel or Nietzsche. All things German were still suspect, except for maybe Kant and Einstein. All that other stuff was dismissed with a pornographic slur about `continental' philosophy. Marx of course was beyond the pale, although some of his work circulated through student groups in tattered, used copies, mostly supplied by suspicious looking older adults who smoked, drank, and talked too much, and had too many books and paintings on their seedy apartment walls.
On the other hand, I must admit that the philosophy courses I took which had an intense focus on the British analytical school did perform a sort of intellectual cleansing task. Through their profound anti-metaphysical attacks they effectively abolished God and variously inspired Christian moral nonsense and substituted the secular humanism of Ayer and Russell.
But as a student, I was looking for anything in philosophy that grappled with the sensual realm of experience, in other words art and libido and there was nothing. It was as if I were in the Vatican museum and all the sculpture had fig leaves.
Naturally, since continental writers and philosophers had the tain of something rotten, akin to the smell of soft cheeses, I was attracted to them by instinct---instinct that lead me straight to the French and Germans. So I discovered Gide, Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Hauser and Cassirer on my own. Now days it is probably impossible to imagine just what a stunning impact they had and how rich, nuanced, complex, ambivalent, and difficult those works were to read in isolation. The closest I got to anything about Marxism was something by Eric Fromm which I also read on my own and forgot. Although I do remember thinking, shit, this is what all the big deal is about?
As the 60s progressed, the anal clinch on what was offered and taught relaxed. By `65 the state college (LA) I was attending offered a course called Existentialism and Phenomenology, and I finally got to read Nietzsche and Sartre for credit and was introduced to Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. When I got to UCB six months later, it was my impression that course changes at UC were forced by younger academics and graduate students. By a class schedule accident I landed Paul Feyerabend for philosophy.
At the time there was the indirect influence of student radicalism which, translated through the infinitely dense filters of the academy, equated social and political action with a question of morals. In other words, rebelling against the establishment called into question the moral fiber of the combatants---as if fighting against political censorship, segregation, and war was tantamount to an intellectual character flaw.
Chuck Grimes