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MCCARTHY

Conclusions 
American philosophy, then, may still not have climbed out of the ditch into which the
McCarthy Era plunged it. This is not to say that the defensive posture it adopted after
World War II had no good results. Once philosophy had been removed from concrete
questions, it gained a certain sort of freedom. It was, for example, only after the
McCarthy Era, with its obvious anti-Semitism, that Jews were really free to pursue
careers in American philosophy departments. One wonders how soon that would have happened
if philosophy had continued to be the sort of value-bound enterprise it tended to be
earlier--bound in part, inevitably, to the higher wisdoms of the small-minded America of
which Bertrand Russell--and not only he--had run afoul. 
The McCarthy Era also brought universities some practical benefits. The dominance of a
single paradigm meant that philosophy departments could be small and cheap, as befitted a
possibly subversive frill in a country whose chosen mission was the preservation of
global free enterprise. Genuine and fecund pluralism, were it ever to arrive in the New
World, would require far larger and more expensive departments, and there is no evidence
that American universities are ready to support them. 20 The result, as Reiner Schurmann
has written, is that the long awaited dialogue between analytical and Continental
philosophy is taking place in Europe, not in
America [321]. 
It seems possible, in other words, that the choices it made in the fifties enabled
American philosophy to survive the McCarthy Era. But they may have allowed it to survive
only as a reduced and reticent discipline, able to see just a few stars in an
intellectual firmament that was once much wider and more interesting. Whether these
advantages from forty years ago justify perpetuating the present situation much longer is
not easy to decide. What is certain is that philosophers cannot even hope to decide it
unless they discuss it. 
That they do not discuss it suggests that American philosophy continues, even today, to
perpetuate at least one structure of Allen's McCarthyite logic: his stricture against the
kind of passionate, yet always tentative, debate that inquiry into one's own historical
roots must bring. Why do philosophers not talk of the battles of those days? Is it
because investigating them would produce no timeless truth? Would the critical reflection
required be somehow unscientific? That philosophy was so much a target of the
McCarthyites should be a badge of honor; why is it not worn? What really happened to
American philosophy during and after the McCarthy Era? 
We do not have even a rough idea. My efforts here, for example, are confined to the
currently available written record. A final historical judgment must await
supplementation (or, if possible, correction) of the unpleasant information assembled
here. And that can only come when philosophers who lived through the McCarthy Era break
their strange silence on the subject. Such discussion, whatever its result, can be argued
to be absolutely [End Page 47] necessary if American philosophers, analytic and other,
are to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own traditions--and if they, and
intellectuals in general, are to enjoy intellectual freedom today. True intellectual
freedom must be fought for, not presumed, and part of the fight must be exactly what
American philosophy so studiously avoids: critical