“Restoring common sense”

In Common Sense: A Political History, Sophia Rosenfeld notes that trust in common sense “has, in the context of contemporary democratic politics, itself become commonsensical.” Politicians appeal to the “common” person, the everyday citizen, the quotidian — those faceless people who somehow exist everywhere and nowhere at once.

To put it another way, they are able construct a common sense around a mythical figure of the ordinary person. Then they can ventriloquize what this ordinary person views as commonsensical, which, shockingly, happens to overlap exactly with their political worldview.

It’s no coincidence that common sense has become a powerful rhetorical tool for the contemporary far right. Donald Trump routinely uses the term. When asked why he thought DEI policies were the primary reason for the midair collision between an American Airlines flight and a US Army Blackhawk helicopter, Trump simply responded: “because I have common sense.”

In his 2025 inaugural address, Trump presented his movement as a “revolution in common sense,” a term he repeated in a speech at the World Economic Forum later that month. When reporters suggested that members of the National Guard were untrained to deal with local crime in Washington DC, he responded that they were “trained in common sense.” He has even signed Executive Orders titled “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Office Space Management” and “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies.”

Is there a relationship between the common sense that circulates around the analytic philosophy seminar and the one that comes out of the mouth of Donald Trump? Analytic philosophers would like to dismiss any connection, yet in both scenarios, common sense is used both as a means to dismiss those who disagree and to explain away complexity. Perhaps more importantly, the rhetorical appeal of the term “common sense” is that it cements a particular political worldview without having to explicitly name it.

The problem with common sense, as Antonio Gramsci reminded us, is that there are multiple common senses. For Trump, it is common sense to inject bleach to cure COVID-19. For Moore, it is common sense that he has a human body. We might think that one is more commonsensical than the other, but we can’t deny that Trump’s common sense was persuasive for those who ended up in a hospital with poisoning.

In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Christoph Schuringa argues that appeals to common sense have been an effective tool used by analytic philosophy to construct an apolitical appearance. But the common sense that it appeals to just happens to reinforce the ideological underpinnings of a bourgeois liberalism that cements the status quo.

Schuringa quotes a remark from the Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson during his time as a student at Oxford in the late 1950s. For Anderson, the claim of analytic philosophy to represent “a symposium of truth and independent of time and place” was bogus: it was, “in the pristine sense of the word, a class ideology.” It is an intellectual practice by the liberal bourgeoisie for the liberal bourgeoisie within the elite institutions of the liberal bourgeoisie, but one that is blind (or perhaps merely claims to be blind) to its own conditions of emergence.

The Making of Analytic Philosophy

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy provides a comprehensive overview of how the analytic tradition came to dominate academic philosophy departments across the anglophone world. At Cambridge in the early decades of the twentieth century, Moore, Bertrand Russell, and (later) Ludwig Wittgenstein led the revolution against the idealist theories of their predecessors, F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart.

Where the idealists thought that the greenness of grass was in the mind, Moore and Russell, Schuringa writes, “finally made it possible to say that, after all, grass was green.” Logic and common sense became the new lingua franca of anglophone philosophy, especially when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929.

In Vienna, logical positivism — which held that a statement can only be deemed true if it can be verified by empirical observation — spearheaded a much more wide-reaching revolt, not only against a prior intellectual tradition, but against “the decadent ornamentation characteristic of the old Habsburg world.” The philosophers of the Vienna Circle such as Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath were restoring the Austrian liberal tradition in a city that had been given the adjective “red.”

Philosophy and radical politics were intertwined in Vienna, especially in the work of Neurath. As Schuringa points out, “The Vienna Circle wore its ideology on its sleeve, unlike anything that subsequently emerged as analytic philosophy solidified.” As a result, the Circle crumbled as Vienna’s political complexion transformed from red to black. Many of its members fled Europe to the United States, where figures such as Frank, Rudolf Carnap, and Herbert Feigl would play a prominent role in shaping postwar academic philosophy.

Oxford was much later to the party than Cambridge or Vienna, with A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin emerging as leading figures in the 1930s. Since fewer men enrolled in philosophy during World War II, Oxford became the reluctant training ground for female philosophers, most notably Mary Midgley, Elisabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch.

After the war, Oxford philosophy came into its own. Austin’s “ordinary language philosophy,” which Schuringa describes as the study of “language as it is used by speakers of really existing natural languages such as English,” seemingly conquered all before it.

The Postwar Common Sense

Schuringa convincingly argues that analytic philosophy did not emerge as a “single, unified movement” until after World War II. This development came especially once the analytic creed had effectively taken over US philosophy departments. Analytic philosophy, while hardly mainstream, was a useful ideological tool in cementing postwar liberalism as a “bulwark against totalitarianism.” At the same time, he suggests, postwar ideological conflicts proved helpful in weeding out the “most radical agendas in philosophy,” particularly Marxism, most notably in the McCarthyite intellectual purges of the 1950s in the United States.

The dominant academic philosophy in anglophone universities since World War II has thus increasingly stepped back from any direct involvement in political and social issues. But it has done so in such a way that it implicitly constructs postwar liberal ideology as the common sense. Schuringa’s book is an important contribution in this sense, because it shows how analytic philosophy’s appeal to empiricism and logical analysis, which appear to stand above the political fray, is precisely the kind of philosophical practice that does not get in the way of the status quo. Why bother discussing politics or society when it is self-evident how politics and society should function?

A similar turn in mainstream political philosophy has buttressed this common sense, one that is characterized by the influence of John Rawls, which Katrina Forrester details in her brilliant book In the Shadow of Justice. Like many analytic philosophers, Rawls also constructed liberalism as the political common sense, especially after this common sense had come to be radically questioned in the United States by the civil rights movement and the mobilization against the war in Vietnam.

Rawls theorized a liberalism that could internalize its own critique through the theoretical adoption of an “original position” in which the principles of liberty and equality could be decided behind the “veil of ignorance.” This was a mythical space of pure rationality where there would no biases and people could make decisions in the interest of everyone, rather than naked self-interest. As Forrester shows in great detail, Rawlsian theory came to dominate political philosophy in the last three decades of the twentieth century in a way that meant liberal theory became increasingly detached from concrete politics.

Schuringa identifies the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium as an important moment in the development of this supposedly apolitical analytic philosophy. The colloquium brought together intellectuals from Europe and the United States to think about the possibilities for the revival of liberalism. Historians have often considered it to be the birthplace of “neoliberalism” as an intellectual project.

For Schuringa, the colloquium was a watershed moment for the tacit pact between analytic philosophy and liberalism. However, he makes an unwarranted distinction between the “neoliberalism” developed at the colloquium, and advanced further by figures in the Mont Pelerin Society, and the neoliberalism that subsequently emerged under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the United States and United Kingdom, respectively.

For Schuringa, the first variety of neoliberalism sought to “safeguard a fragile liberal-capitalist order by building around it a shield of strong state institutions,” whereas Reagan and Thatcher practiced a “market fundamentalism” that was about rolling back the state. This line of demarcation is a strange one to draw, since Schuringa quotes from Quinn Slobodian’s seminal text Globalists, which details the unmistakable genealogical relationship between the ideas developed by some of the figures at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, and the Geneva School of neoliberalism more generally, and the political transformations of the 1980s.

The neoliberalism of Reagan, Thatcher, and others is the same neoliberalism that “encases,” in Slobodian’s term, the liberal market from democratic oversight. This was not a revolution of markets per se but a revolution of the state design of markets. Neoliberalism’s “disenchantment of politics by economics,” as Will Davies describes it, in distinctly Weberian language, effectively mirrors analytic philosophy’s depoliticizing tendencies. Politics gets in the way, and on that point, neoliberals and analytic philosophers can certainly agree.

Constructing an Enemy

The establishment of analytic philosophy as a unified tradition in the postwar decades also made it possible to identify and attack intellectual enemies. Schuringa dismisses the concept of “continental philosophy” — primarily French and German — as “an analytic philosopher’s fiction.” This is not only because the movements of continental philosophy are too diverse to lump together into a unified tradition, but also because some of these movements “challenge the very idea of philosophy itself in a way that does not even occur to analytic philosophers as a possibility.”

The UK analytic philosophers in particular constructed Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty as the enemy, dismissing their work with typical disdain. Existentialism was gibberish, phenomenology was unserious — and don’t get them started on deconstruction. Schuringa writes that “the profession ‘I do not understand this,’ if aimed by the right person at the right target, counts as a powerful objection in analytic philosophy” — an objection that any continental philosopher will certainly have experienced if they have dared to step foot in the analytic philosopher’s lair.

In the book’s final chapter, Schuringa charts analytic philosophy’s recent tentative and largely unconvincing engagement with radical political theories and movements such as Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory. He notes that while analytic philosophers now have “greater exposure” to radical intellectual traditions, they find it difficult to do justice to the “critical power” of those traditions, “thanks to their blindness to their own tendency to neutralize and defang them.” No matter how committedly analytic philosophy engages with more radical forms of thought, it seems like the lure of liberalism’s common sense always wins the day.

When it comes to race, Schuringa illustrates, analytic philosophy has spent much of its time debating whether race really exists. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, concludes: “the truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us.” While discussions of race have now finally entered analytic circles, they have mainly done so to abstract race away from its social reality. As Schuringa notes: “It does not require special philosophical tools to discover that race is a social construct and that race is real.”

The analytic tradition is trapped in a feedback loop, one that makes it increasingly less relevant while it smugly belittles other disciplines and approaches as insufficiently rigorous. Schuringa puts this in more caustic terms: “Analytic philosophers often suppose that a training in logic makes people better able to think in other domains — a plausible-sounding idea for which there nevertheless appears to be no evidence.”

Social History?

I am certainly sympathetic to Schuringa’s broad polemical argument about analytic philosophy. Most, if not all, analytic philosophers will hate this book, and that’s not a bad thing. However, throughout the book, I wondered to what extent this study is a social history, as its title promises.

Schuringa makes the point that “social history” is effectively a redundant term, given that all historical study of human life “must in and of itself be social, since human beings are social beings whose activities cannot be understood except as interventions in the social world within which they act.” Of course, this is true. But then it invites the question as to why we need to have “social” as an adjective alongside “history” at all.

It might be more precise to say that while all human history is social, not all historiography could be described as social. There is such a practice as social history, which is a specific approach to the writing of history, one that prioritizes social dynamics, institutions, and divisions. In many ways, social history is often conceived as the history of the overlooked, the unremarkable, the everyday.

For practitioners of social history such as E. P. Thompson, it is a means to examine how social change emerges “from below” rather than from the decisions and actions of a select few leaders of the ruling classes. In the preface to his Making of the English Working Class, Thompson wrote that he was “seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of history . . . if they were the casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.” The point of social history, then, is to give voice and agency to the forgotten masses of history, those deemed to have been subjected to, rather than taking part in, History.

Can we really say that figures like Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Richard Rorty have been casualties of history? Are the halls of Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard the forgotten landscapes of intellectual production? Of all the intellectual traditions about which a social history might be possible, analytic philosophy might well be the most difficult to examine “from below,” since the tradition is so firmly ensconced in the institutions of “above,” not to mention the fact that the tradition is openly hostile to the very domain of the social.

Even if we took a more limited view of social history, as merely a form of history that prioritizes the social sphere, it would still be difficult to see Schuringa’s book as part of this genre. It is a book that focuses on ideas, the people who developed those ideas, and the places where they did so. While at times it effectively brings in wider political and social developments, such as the McCarthyite era in the United States, it would be a stretch to say that these are the driving force of the analysis.

Schuringa’s book is a conventional intellectual history, and a good one at that. I’m not sure why social history was prioritized in the title and in the opening pages, but it sets up expectations for a reading experience that are not subsequently met.

Schuringa’s point, ultimately, is that while analytic philosophy has “long insulated itself from social, cultural and political questions,” it has passively served as the intellectual handmaiden of a very limited form of liberalism. In his capacity as Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer identified this fundamental problem in his engagement with the Vienna logical positivists in the 1920s and ’30s. In a letter to Theodor Adorno that Schuringa quotes, Horkheimer dismissed the tendency as “a miserable rearguard action of the formalistic epistemology of liberalism, which also in this area turns into open servility to fascism.”

Schuringa’s book shows that the slide of analytic philosophy into irrelevance was tied up with its embrace of postwar liberal common sense. So long as that common sense remained intact, analytic philosophy had no need (or desire) to reflect on its own epistemological foundations. Now, at a time when fascistic tendencies have been renewed and updated in various ways, and as declarations of liberalism’s demise multiply, analytic philosophy is doing a miserable job as liberalism’s rearguard.