Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era

by John McCumber

In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political pressures of the McCarthy era skewed the development of the discipline. Why was silence maintained for so long? And what happens, McCumber asks, when political events and pressures go beyond interfering with individual careers to influence the nature of a discipline itself? 

Genres: Philosophy, American History, History

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2001

About the author

John McCumber is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the UCLA Department of Germanic Languages. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Greek from the University of Toronto. Prior to his tenure at UCLA, Prof. McCumber taught at Northwestern University, The Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and the University of Michigan–Dearborn.

Reviews

[Chris Nagel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wholly dissatisfying on every level. For starters, McCumber takes the addresses by the Presidents to the American Philosophical Association's annual divisional meetings as indications of the content, direction, and tendencies of the "profession." Further, he takes the "profession" to include, it appears, those who publish in the big-time journals, attend and are elected to presidencies of big-time societies, but mainly of the APA. All this could confirm is the direction taken by a particular segment of the population of philosophers.

In any case, what he diagnoses as the real difference between what philosophy could have been in the US, versus what it became following McCarthyism, is a refusal to reflect on what philosophy itself is and the marginalization of historical perspective and understanding of philosophy. The latter may be true in some circles, even dominant circles. But the former he never clarifies sufficiently.

On the ground, in person, in conferences I attend, what makes philosophy philosophy is a recurrent theme. It is constant in conversation, even if it may not be a topic in published articles or in remarks by APA presidents (who tend instead to, as McCumber puts it, "do philosophy" in their addresses--i.e., follow the pattern of academic conference presentations).

But from the perspective he takes overall, I doubt that I count as a member of the profession or as a "philosopher," for although I am a full-time college faculty member teaching philosophy for a living, and reading, writing, presenting, and publishing philosophy on a regular basis, I am not tenured and don't attend APA meetings any more. Hell, I don't even go to SPEP unless I'm asked to chair a session.

[Matthew Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting fusion of intellectual history and philosophy. McCumber seeks to explain analytic philosophy's near hegemony in the American university by looking back to its brush with McCarthyism in the 1950s. Unfortunately, McCumber largely fails to demonstrate McCarthyism's impact on philosophy instead going off on a series of (fascinating) tangents and anecdotes about his experience as a philosophy professor in the 1980s and 1990s. Not the best argued book I've ever read, but an informative read nonetheless.