Recycling essay: Max Horkheimer on analytic philosophy and fascism (and coding homework appendix)

This paper responds to a remark I found in Tim Crane’s review of a Marxist history of analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa. The remark is by Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer: logical positivism is “only a miserable rearguard action of the formalistic epistemology of liberalism, which also in this area turns into open servility to fascism.” In earlier years, I would have dismissed Horkheimer. But I have made a speculative proposal which converges with Horkheimer’s thinking. Even though it is a speculation, it probably makes more sense to people than Horkheimer. Even if the leading figures of analytic philosophy are liberal, they need people to teach for them and run departments, etc. I speculated that they face a choice between highly tactical liberals and racist xenophobic nationalists and prefer the latter, because these people maintain craft excellence or lapse only slightly from it. An R.K. Narayan short story, “Father’s Help,” although set in South India, presents the development of the tactical type.