Walter A. Eberstadt University Distinguished Professor, Philosophy, The New School for Social Research and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, UK

I was born and raised near Seattle, WA. I did an AB in Philosophy at Harvard, with Hilary Putnam as my thesis advisor, and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where my doctoral dissertation was supervised by John McDowell. I was hired in the Philosophy Department at the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (now the New School for Social Research), a few months after finishing my PhD, in 2000, and I have spent most of my career there, while also briefly holding a chair in philosophy at Oxford, as well as visiting positions in philosophy at Humboldt University, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Paris-1 Pantheon Sorbonne. I was a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton in 2017-2018, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2021-2022, a Visiting Fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility in Spring 2024, and, during 2025-2026, a Researcher-in-Residence at Maison Suger, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, a Visiting Researcher at the Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Critical Democracy Studies, American University of Paris. I will be an Academic Visitor in Philosophy at Oxford during Trinity Term 2027.

The following article appeared in Critical Times, Oct 29, 2026 (see here). It was reposted on Public Seminar on Nov 5, 2026 (see here).

If It Can Happen at The New School …

Alice Crary

Wall Panel at the New School during WWII that reads New School for Social Research Has Saved Noted European Scientists and Scholars...

Wall Panel at The New School Probably During WWII. Photo Credit: The New School

The US’s recent authoritarian turn has brought with it attacks on universities that take aim at their commitments to free inquiry. Such attacks, predictable at a time when democratic norms are being shredded, are tacit acknowledgments of the importance of academic freedom for democratic life. Yet those launching the attacks often try to disguise their domineering ambitions by presenting themselves as academic freedom’s truest champions, say, by insisting they are making needed room for “viewpoint diversity” or “civil discourse.”

Recent events at The New School, the progressive university in New York City’s Greenwich Village, represent a striking case of such obfuscation. At first glance, this university seems an unlikely setting for an assault on academic freedom. The New School originated in, and still traces its identity to, far-reaching attempts to realize such freedom. Yet last year senior administrators at the school abruptly dismantled most of the main material structures of free inquiry. Far from being dissuaded by their institution’s history, these administrators seized on it in a brazen ideological inversion. In public addresses, they wove a narrative about how they were returning the institution to its roots and ushering in the truest realization of its founding ideals. Their slick and largely effective performance contains an important lesson about challenges faced today by those who strive to protect academic freedom. Successful efforts must include not only political mobilization but resources for the critique of damaging ideologies. They must include, that is, the free and critical social thought that successive generations of The New School’s scholars and creative practitioners fought to pursue, now endangered in the institution they built.

* * *

During the academic year 2025-2026, a handful of senior administrators at the New School carried out, with support of most of the university’s board of trustees and under guidance from management consulting firms, a major institutional “restructuring.” The rationale involved financial challenges the administrators pinned on a pandemic-era decline in enrollments, though critics argued that the groundwork for the difficulties was laid over more than a decade, as administrators borrowed to build one extravagant building, entered into an ill-judged lease for a dormitory, hiked executive pay faster than faculty and staff salaries, and spent freely on business consultants, without investing appropriately in admissions personnel and resources that could have aided recruitment and retention. The university’s financial problems tempted successive administrations to exchange its original understanding of higher education as a democratic good for a prevalent vision of education as a commodity to be profitably sold—a vision which, as wholly embraced by the university’s current president and provost, retraces a familiar austerity-themed path.

These two administrators orchestrated the firing of 19 full-time faculty members (ten tenured, two with extended employment, one with a successful tenure review, one tenure-track, and five with renewable term appointments) and 68 staff members as well as the resignation of numerous others who were pressed, at risk of being fired, into so-called “voluntary” departure deals. Unlike the president and provost, both trained in the arts, the work of those terminated or pushed out focused on the delivery of programs in the social sciences and humanities in the university’s graduate faculty, the New School for Social Science (NSSR), and its liberal arts arm, Eugene Lang College (Lang). Shortly before the terminations began, top administrators shuttered more than thirty programs primarily in these non-arts fields, devoting more resources to professional degrees at the university’s top-rated design school, Parsons. They “paused” admission to non-professional Ph.D. programs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, passing on multiple offers to invest in these areas, including at least fourteen million dollars to endow the halted Ph.D. lines. The administrators apparently embraced the legal theory that, since their revamp was university-wide, and since faculty by-laws licensed firings in discontinued programs or divisions, there were no restrictions on who could be laid off.

The retrenchment had a distinct procedural face. The president and provost acted unilaterally, though always with the board’s support, destroying democratic institutional dynamics. They steamrolled tenure protections and sidelined deans, the faculty senate, and the part-time faculty union. Yet they hailed their reshaping of the university as “collaborative” and “collective,” having asked staff and faculty to spend the preceding year addressing restructuring plans in a parade of time-intensive working groups, charettes, and committees. These exercises were performative affairs designed to make it technically true that staff and faculty were “consulted,” while community-washing unpopular policies and undercutting protest. The president and provost formalized their centralization of power by treating their reorganization as nullifying divisional by-laws that contained self-governance policies. They relocated deans to the provost’s office and signaled that the provost would henceforth control domains previously treated as in the first instance the preserve of faculties or their divisional representatives (for example, the appointment of leadership positions such as deanships, for which the involvement of faculty search or selection committees had been standard).

Top-down, market-driven university restructurings that target the humanities and social sciences are now common in the US, in public as well as private institutions. Still, events at the New School were greeted as newsworthy. Partly this is because the actions of its president, provost, and board appear to be an especially blatant attack on tenure protections. For more than a century, academic tenure has been recognized in the US as key for safeguarding the free exchange of scholarly ideas. Since its 1919 founding, the New School has been the site of radical exercises in enacting academic freedom and supporting it abroad. Its reputation as an exemplar of such freedom has endured, with current faculty and students drawing on the university’s critical intellectual traditions (including strains of heterodox economics, decolonial theory, and the anti-totalitarian thought of Hannah Arendt) to expose mechanisms of authoritarian politics in the US and around the globe. Yet at a time when academic freedom is under attack, with the second Trump administration snatching students off the streets for pro-Palestinian speech, tying research funds to political allegiance, and filing lawsuits against universities that refuse to align programs and curricula with its MAGA agenda, this university famed for its unqualified defense of free inquiry turned on many of the members of its own community who were most energetic about exercising this freedom. Those fired or pushed out included outspoken advocates of Palestinian rights, local champions of academic freedom, and vocal critics of the university administration itself. In pressing these individuals to leave or firing them, the university deadened speech on campus. It did all this without any academic rationale beyond free-floating phrases about dismantling “silos” and fostering greater “integration,” consulting firm jargon that has been the cover for numerous austerity-driven university remodelings. The New School’s repudiation of academic freedom thus appeared deliberate and definitive. The resulting outcry has been vocal in the US (see coverage inDissent, Democracy Now, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jacobin, and The New York Times) and in many countries abroad (see coverage in Le Monde, Libertà e Giustizia, and the Frankfurter Randschau).

These protests contradict the narrative of change recited by leadership at The New School. The president and provost insist they are bringing the university into better alignment with its original commitments. The president, who adopted “democracy” as one of four thematic axes of his administration (alongside “cities,” “technology,” and “climate”), regularly highlights the importance of academic freedom and other ideals that foster democratic responsiveness to “the times in which we live,” and he glosses these themes by saying that he is “remaking the New School in the spirit of its founding.”

This inverts the truth. In fact, the New School administration executed a corporatist reworking of the institution that razes its founding ideal of academic freedom. The view that education is a commodity to be bought and sold profitably is a substantive political view, and its use as a standard of institutional organization threatens the free pursuit of research or creative practice. The vertical deployment of this (or any other exogenous) metric to judge institutional success also jeopardizes university democracy, and, absent stable internal democratic structures, no university can justly claim the democratically decisive ideal of academic freedom.

The New School counts among its founding figures some of the thinkers who first articulated this conception of academic freedom. The founders devised structures to stymie the encroachments of administrators and donors within the school, while enabling free traffic in ideas to strengthen democracy without. They worked during years in which anti-democratic forces in the US and overseas endangered universities’ democratic missions, and they took the defense of academic freedom to be a political priority. Today, as the US government pressures universities to conform to its fascist agenda, this project remains urgent. Some universities have embraced the Trump administration. Many others have caved and used undemocratic methods to curb programs and forms of speech that attract censure. But a university organized along authoritarian lines has, as The New School’s founders taught, diminished its claim to uphold the academic freedom that is a university’s principal virtue. An institution called “The New School” that does this—for private, ideological, or financial reasons—represents an even greater scandal. It benefits from its name’s history while dishonoring the values that name represents.

Auditorium of the New School. Grey-scale photo with striking geometrical patterns.

Auditorium of the 66 West 12th Street Building of The New School. Photo credit: The New School

Securing academic freedom was the impetus to the 1919 founding of the institution that, until 1997, was known as “The New School for Social Research,” and that, since 2005, has been called “The New School.” The galvanizing event was Columbia University’s firing of two professors for pacificist speech after the US entered World War I. This prompted two other members of its faculty, historians Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson, to resign in protest. Politically motivated firings and protests of them were not uncommon at the time. A politically driven firing at Stanford in 1900 led philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy to resign, and, in 1915, Beard’s and Robinson’s Columbia colleague, philosopher John Dewey, who later offered classes at their new institution, joined with Lovejoy to co-create the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to defend free academic work. Unhappy with Columbia, Beard and Robinson met with others in offices of The New Republic to design an institution that would protect the freedoms Columbia had failed to respect.¹

One source that illuminates the project’s origins is a 1918 pamphlet, A Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science, that is both manifesto and funding pitch by the institution’s Organizing Committee. The leaflet’s titular emphasis on social science was provocative, since sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and economics (as opposed to political economy) had been recognized as disciplines only in the late nineteenth century. The inspiration came partly from the two historians central to the enterprise. Robinson and Beard, teacher and student, had started the “New History” movement, which exchanged a traditional emphasis on wars, kings, and legal documents for the use of the nascent social sciences in making sense of the past. They believed that this would aid progress by transforming our understanding of the “problems and prospects of mankind.”² A corollary is that we are obliged to be ever open to new standards for assessing whether problems are rightly addressed.

The New School’s inaugural brochure makes this point about the assessment of research that draws on the social sciences. At issue, however, is a point about how all thought has revolutionary potential and about how the identification of appropriate standards is thus a matter for subject- and occasion-sensitive judgment. When the school was founded, Dewey was well known for an educational philosophy that accented this view of the power of thinking irrespective of domain. For him, thinking not only in the social sciences but also in the natural sciences, humanities, and the arts has the capacity to be disruptive. In Democracy and Education (1916), he argues that education opens the mind to new pathways, revealing the need for novel metrics. So, education’s aims cannot be given from outside. Any external aims or metrics will, Dewey urges, “limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence.” Since “the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth,” the aim of education can only be “to enable individuals to continue their education.”³

This generalization of the brochure’s theme sheds light on The New School’s trajectory during its first fifteen years. The school initially focused on social science instruction, with nearly every course on social sciences and the remainder on related themes in philosophy, history, and public policy, with some vocational courses aimed at union members. The early years were heady, with lectures by luminaries in the social sciences, history, and philosophy, and the institution’s offerings aroused great excitement.⁴ Still, the school ran a deficit that outstripped its resources, and in 1922 financial difficulties led to the departure of most of its social science faculty. That year, it expanded its offerings to courses in studio and performance arts. The inclusion of the arts was faithful to a concern with social understanding, since the arts contribute to shaping and articulating social conditions, and, by 1925, The New School had pivoted to popular lectures in drama, dance, literature, visual arts, and music. This was a change in but not a repudiation of its ambitions.

The works of the painters, composers, architects, and dancers who taught at the school were decidedly modernist.⁵ Modernist art departs from established aesthetic forms with an eye not to rejecting but to staying true to tradition. Artistic modernism is, as American philosopher Stanley Cavell put it half a century later, the awareness of a “continuous revolution”⁶ and the joining of a continuous quest for critical terms. The productions in the arts emerging from The New School, like the social research to which it aspired, were radical in raising questions about the standards by which they could be assessed. To protect the arts required an artistic freedom that was an aspect of the academic freedom that was the founders’ primary commitment.

The founders’ vision of the social sciences focused on research that was world-oriented. Their inaugural leaflet opens with a declaration about how “[t]he political and social problems forced upon the country by the economic development of the past twenty-five years” created a need for “teachers who have a first-hand knowledge of the world of actual endeavor and are prepared to apply their several specialties to the current issues of the day.”⁷ The founders disagreed about the kind of engaged teaching at issue. At least one—Herbert Croly, founding editor of The New Republic—favored vocational courses for civil servants and labor organizers, but the dominant view, defended by Robinson and others, called for exposing students to research that sheds novel lights on existing social structures, raising new social questions.⁸

Such world-engaged social science research is, paradoxically, sometimes described as “impractical.” That is because it rejects the task of solving pre-given problems and so remains detached from existing instrumentalities. This is a theme of the work of economist Thorstein Veblen, who taught at the New School from the start, stayed for seven years, and arguably contributed more to the conception of the institution than any other individual. A few months before The New School opened, Veblen published a scathing book-length critique of the American university system, The Higher Learning in America, arguing that the original work that distinguishes a university is “not ‘practical’ in the slightest degree.”⁹ Veblen didn’t deny that such work supplies raw material for technical and professional efforts. But he rejected a practicality involving the rote effort to solve established problems. For him, original research had what could be called a practical impracticality. This aspect of Veblen’s work shaped the founding not only of The New School but also of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute’s founder, educator Abraham Flexner, channels Veblen in his own classic 1939 essay The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. The Veblenesque, practically impractical research that Flexner later cultivated in Princeton, initially in mathematics, was what the New School’s founders wished to foster, initially in the social sciences.

The founders’ ideas about protective institutional arrangements were far-reaching. They opposed all university structures that might outsource decisions to those not engaged in the thinking that is the university’s lifeblood. They bemoaned that “[o]ur college and university presidents are pathetically responsible to an uncritical public constituency made up of trustees, parents, alumni, prospective donors and casual newspaper reporters and editors” and that the “one consideration that they can always safely neglect is the scientific conscience of the members of their faculties.”¹⁰They set up a school in which “a small corps of selected specialists” enjoyed complete self-governance regarding appointments and dismissals.¹¹ There was no president, no cadre of administrators, and no endowment. There were also no degrees, an omission necessitated by the lack of endowment that may have been rationalized as a necessary sacrifice. The institution’s charter required a board, and the founders, having put faculty in four of the board’s eleven seats, tried to limit the board’s purview to management issues.¹² The endeavor’s heart was a schedule of magnificent nighttime lectures for adults seeking continuing education.

Several aspects of this bold experiment were soon abandoned. In 1919, the board appointed Robinson as chairman, and, with administrative backup, he served in that role until the troubles of 1922, when he, Beard, and others left. The board then named as director a board member who had previously remained in the background, economist Alvin Johnson. Necessity forced Johnson to assume a more formal role, and he would retroactively be dubbed The New School’s first president. He quickly began working to improve the university’s finances. He was aided in this, and in all he subsequently did as president, by Clara Mayer, a founding board member, gifted administrator, successful fund-raiser, and donor, who stayed on until 1961, working with three further presidents and herself becoming dean and vice-president.

The New School in its post-1922 instantiation did not sacrifice academic freedom. The university, which was the first to focus exclusively on the higher education of adults, then emphasized students’ freedom of ideas. The institution’s stress on learning as opposed to certification was not distinctive in the post-World War I period, which saw an upswing in adult vocational training. But it stood out for emphasizing not individual development but society’s welfare. And, under Mayer’s guidance, students were encouraged to be active in shaping the curriculum. This stress on students’ freedom of thought at what was later referred to as the university’s “Adult Division” was central to the school’s mission well into the second half of the twentieth century, and thereafter it remained an important if not primary concern.

However unrealistic, The New School’s 1919 experiment in academic freedom was a sincere attempt to realize a democratic mode of education. The school’s founders recognized that American industrial society was full of inequities and that only thinking capable of rebelling against entrenched ideas and propelling change toward greater inclusion could serve “the great purposes of a democracy seeking all the light it can obtain upon its own pressing problems.”¹³Dewey sounded these themes regarding “progressive education,” his term for democratically apt education harboring thought’s radical prospects. “It is,” he wrote, “the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them.” Otherwise “there is danger that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo.”¹⁴

If there were any truth to the idea that the New School’s current administration is channeling its founding spirit, the 1919 founding could not be its touchstone. This administration exemplifies the hierarchical institutional arrangements that the founders recognized as threats to free academic activity. Its prioritizing of professional degrees above “practically impractical” basic research and practice across the social sciences, humanities, and arts is likewise a rebuke to the founders’ vision. There was, admittedly, no tenure at the original New School. But this was because the founders’ commitment to faculty self-governance was so absolute that tenure seemed restrictive. It provides no comfort to an administration that throws off the restraints that tenure and related norms place on its authority. Further, in the 1920s, Johnson made pragmatic, market-based decisions to keep the New School afloat. But during the same period, he and Mayer argued that rebuilding the social science faculty was essential to the school’s mission.¹⁵ They knew this would require investment, and they had no truck with the idea that an educational endeavor requiring financial support is less valuable than one with direct revenue streams.

If the current president and provost had been obliged to present their plans to The New School’s original, engaged, and far-thinking board, they would have met with blank hostility. Still, perhaps, in claiming to return to the school’s initial mission, they have in mind a different moment.

A sepia photo of an empty classroom at the New School.

Classroom in 66 West 12th Street Building of The New School. Photo Credit: The New School

Fourteen years after it first opened its doors, The New School established the freely governed faculty dedicated to interdisciplinary social science research its founders envisioned. This faculty was initially, in fall 1933, composed of nine German social scientists, primarily economists, political scientists, and sociologists, who had lost positions on April 7, 1933, when the Nazi regime passed a law excluding “non-Aryans” and political opponents from civil service jobs like university professorships. Alvin Johnson grasped what was happening and acted swiftly. He was then associate editor of the Social Science Research Council’s encyclopedia of social science, and he had become acquainted with German academics while traveling in search of contributors. When the Nazi law resulted in the dismissal of his new friends and colleagues, he quickly hit on the idea of a German university in exile. By mid-May he had money to bring fifteen scholars to New York. Other organizations, such as Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, rescued groups of German scholars, and The New School itself got help from the Rockefeller Foundation. In total, the university gave faculty positions to roughly a fifth of the social scientists forced out of Europe in the years after Hitler’s rise.¹⁶ A research faculty, the “University in Exile,” opened its doors in the fall of 1933.

Events in Germany and other parts of Europe were, for members of The New School community, dreadful confirmation of their views about the importance of academic freedom and its close tie to the intellectual freedom that is democracy’s hallmark. The confirmation was arresting for Johnson because—like the drafters of the AAUP’s 1915 statement on academic freedom—he traced US universities’ recognition of the import of this freedom to awareness of the unfettered conditions for research in German universities in the nineteenth century. It was shocking that these universities were showing the world how the loss of liberty for research constricts the free exchange of ideas in society. In 1933, Johnson addressed these matters, partly to rouse more colleagues in the US to join his rescue efforts and partly to counter complacency about liberty in the academy at home. He rejected the idea that political meddling in US universities was an isolated phenomenon. Recognizing that the profit motive threatened free inquiry, he asked rhetorically: “Do our financial kinglets and their stewards in academic government love liberty?”¹⁷

Johnson ensured nearly unbridled academic liberty for the new social science graduate faculty, which was licensed to offer the university’s first degrees—masters and doctorates. The faculty would be free to manage its own organization, curriculum, hires, and faculty reviews; its members would choose their own dean; and they could, with limited constraints, express themselves politically and participate in politics.¹⁸ Johnson started a “General Seminar,” for faculty members to discuss overlapping research concerns, many having to do with resistance to anti-democratic menaces, and he founded a journal, Social Research, to publish the seminar’s results. The 1933-1934 course catalogue for the graduate faculty, known since 2005 as NSSR, declares: “every professor in the Graduate Faculty will be absolutely untrammeled, teaching freely and fearlessly what he believes to be the truth.”¹⁹

German philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt would not join the faculty at The New School full-time until 1967, 34 years after the University in Exile was established and 16 years after publishing the book, The Origins of Totalitarianism that made her a leading political thinker. But her writings give an important twist to the idea, pivotal for the university’s founders and later associated with the University in Exile, that full-blown thought and action resist determination by existing forms and encode the promise of the revolutionary or “new.” This notion features centrally in Arendt’s account of the difficulty of understanding reality. Understanding requires not the mere application of existing categories but openness to how fidelity to the world can oblige us to rework our categories. Arendt makes this point in reference to the challenge of grasping totalitarianism’s character. “Comprehension,” she writes, “does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt”. Rather, it means the “unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”²⁰ This practically consequential intellectual capacity, which Arendt later calls natality,²¹ and which she traces through revolutions of the late 18^th century,²² is, for her, the final staging ground for resistance to unjust forms of domination. As long as we preserve our natality, a less oppressive future is possible. These Arendtian themes add a dimension to the way “the new” was understood by members of The New School community.

In the years just after 1933, Jonhson started to raise an endowment for the University in Exile. German novelist Thomas Mann agreed to speak, in 1937, at a fund-raising event featuring a two-day conference. Mann concluded his remarks by describing how, in an act that “should put every German to shame,” the Nazis had removed from a new building at the University of Heidelberg an engraved inscription reading “to the living spirit,” replacing it with the words “to the German Spirit.” The deleted motto was from literary scholar Friedrich Gundolf, who, in lauding the “living spirit,” was calling for creative and free thought. Those listening to Mann’s speech knew that, through the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, German universities had furnished conditions for sustaining such thought and that Hitler’s government was eliminating these conditions. What was lost was, as The New School’s sixth president, Jonathan Fanton, later put it, “the tradition of free and unfettered inquiry that had thrived for so long in the German university system.”²³ When Mann proposed that his US hosts adopt the slogan “to indicate that the living spirit, driven from German has found a home in this country,” he was offering a ringing endorsement of The New School for its commitment to academic freedom.²⁴

The University in Exile incorporated the motto into its Charter, and NSSR, the University in Exile’s direct descendant, inherited its concern with academic liberty and interdisciplinary social science research as routes to democracy. For instance, since the 1960s, NSSR has hosted the Theodor Heuss Professorship, a post for distinguished German academics created and funded by the German government to express gratitude to NSSR for giving refuge to scholars fleeing the Nazi regime. In 1970, psychologist Arien Mack took over Social Research and went on to found the “Endangered Scholars Worldwide” initiative, using the journal to document attacks on higher education before later sustaining similarly oriented communities through the New University in Exile Consortium. In the 1980s, a group of faculty engaged with Eastern and Central European intellectuals helped start an underground Democracy Seminar in Warsaw, Budapest, and New York, a project which, under sociologist Elzbieta Matynia, evolved into the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, which supports a democracy-building institute and a Courage in Public Scholarship Award given to dissident intellectuals such as Adam Michnik and M. Gessen. All these initiatives were running through last year.

The University in Exile is not the heritage of one part of The New School alone. It was, from the start, devoted to protecting groundbreaking work that could shift how social issues are seen and aid pro-democratic endeavor. This work qualifies as “new” in the sense of The New School’s founding social scientists, artists, performers, and humanists, as well as in Arendt’s later anti-fatalistic sense. A commitment to newness, thus construed, is university-wide.

This is true of the university’s first unit, the Adult Division, which, after first stressing modernism in the arts, turned in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, to equally “new” work in urban policy and media studies. Lang College, which was founded in 1985, and which started to develop shared social science and humanities departments with the NSSR in 1999, has at times prompted the rest of the university community to advance its thinking about, for instance, gender, race, and coloniality. A commitment to “newness” is also typical of Parsons, born in 1896 as the Chase School of Art. Parsons faced closure when it was saved by The New School in 1970 and is now dedicated to future-facing, revolutionary practice in fashion, constructed environments, and media. And Mannes, one of the university’s two music divisions, joined the university in 1989 when likewise facing closure. Having had a conservative concentration on European masterworks, Mannes shifted to the experimental, “new” New School style. Because all aspire to tradition-transcending research and creative practice, all parts of the university are at risk from an administration intent on top-down management and assessment.

This captures the absurdity of any suggestion that the university’s current administration respects the spirit of the University in Exile. This administration disdains the academic freedom that is that moment’s heart and soul. The university’s chosen mechanism, in 1933, for ensuring such freedom, was tenure, and, although the University in Exile was initially alone in offering tenure, other parts of the university partly adopted it, and The New School has spent the last fifteen years implementing university-wide procedures for tenure and other employment protections. It is these protections, legacies of 1933, that the administration has rendered meaningless. The administration also directly targeted the University in Exile’s successor faculty, the NSSR, firing and pushing out faculty and staff, depriving its remaining faculty of a dean and the right to self-governance, taking steps toward breaking its departments into programs, and moving the remainder into a poorly resourced division with Lang. Faculty were told to keep using the name “NSSR,” but, since the NSSR’s by-laws have been thrown out, this is less a kindness than a smokescreen obscuring its dissolution.

It is hard to imagine a cleaner or more complete break with the project of the University in Exile. Even so, when the president peppers his public remarks with comments about remaking the university “in the spirit of its founding,” this is a key reference point.

* * *

The heart of the graduation speech that The New School’s president gave to his community on May 18, 2026—mere days before termination notices went out to faculty members—was the story of Mann’s ceremonial delivery to the University in Exile of the motto “to the living spirit” in 1937. In telling the story, the president offered a faithful interpretation of Gundolf’s motto as “proclaiming the aspiration for a community committed to free thought and creative individuals who embody and transmit living knowledge.” Just before sharing his version of the tale, the president rightly glossed “the living spirit” as dedication “to free inquiry.” A moment later, he closed his speech by telling graduates that “‘to the living spirit is yours now, too’.”

A university administrator who simultaneously destroys the material structures and practices constitutive of a community of free inquiry and publicly declares that, in his eyes, free inquiry is the institution’s noblest ideal is aptly described as gaslighting. To be sure, the president may be partly convinced that academic liberty has the standing of a mere brand that floats free of material structures. He may believe that a university that disdains its faculty’s employment protections and scorns its shared governance structures can still lay claim to this brand. That fits the financialized view of education that The New School’s administration and board have so thoroughly embraced. If a university takes its core activity to be profitably selling classes, degrees, and programming, and if it assumes that a prime measure of the “innovativeness” of its products is that they sell well, then it will seem that it is not just licensed but obliged to make use of any powerful brand at its disposal, even if it is busy dismantling the practices that once lent that brand truth.

This way of thinking, depressingly common in the US today, jars painfully at The New School. The university’s founders contributed, with blood, sweat, and immense insight, to writing the book about how academic freedom requires weighty institutional protections. The suggestion that they could have arrived at conditions for free inquiry with the right branding alone would have struck members of the Organizing Committee of 1919 as a bad joke, and it would have struck members of the University in Exile as a cruel one. Not only did these scholars recognize that a university built like a corporation couldn’t reliably protect the free pursuit of ideas and modes of artistic expression that a democracy needs. They also knew that, in times of growing authoritarianism, such a university would be inclined to protect its bottom line by restricting democratically important research and practice that challenged the status quo and thus opened it to political censure.

Today chaos still reigns at The New School. It appears that, from the start, the president and provost had a plan that appealed to them as former deans, respectively, of Parsons and Performing Arts. They would drastically reduce full-time social science and humanities faculties, retaining just enough people to administer liberal arts degrees to Parsons and Performing Arts students, and supplement this faculty with a large cadre of more poorly compensated part-time instructors. They would get there by facilitating collapse: Thus, though the biggest drop in enrollments has been at Lang, the dean who presided over it now also oversees the remnants of NSSR and the former Adult Division (known as the Schools of Public Engagement [SPE]); though the university is spending notably on recruitment at Parsons-Performing Arts, there isn’t an analogous effort at Lang-NSSR-SPE; and though the university is fundraising energetically for Parsons-Performing Arts, there isn’t meaningful attention to the negative impact on M.A. recruitment at former NSSR and SPE of department closures, loss of faculty and staff, and the so-called Ph.D. “pause.”

Meanwhile the selling of the university’s free inquiry “brand” continues. In his public welcome for the 2026-2027 academic year, the president claimed to be renewing the “audacious commitment,” characteristic of the university since “its founding in 1919,” to “the ongoing process of remaking higher education for the needs of the time in which we live.” His administration is working on funding for a Hannah Arendt Chair; it renamed its distinguished teaching awards for Clara Mayer; and it is backing the creation of new centers that do high-profile public programming and distract from the hollowing out of the university in which they are located.

Stories of The New School’s founding are about something far more substantial than branding. They are stories about what academic freedom is, what material resources sustaining it requires, and why doing so matters. Brought together with the story of The New School’s present, they illustrate that, at a time when political norms and the norms of civic institutions like universities are being trampled, academic freedom can be snatched away. They also illustrate that the fight to recover this freedom needs to start with a struggle for the recognition of its loss, a struggle that will require use of the kind of critical thought for which the university’s founders strove to create space.

* * *

Epilogue. This essay was written in solidarity with faculty members and staff at The New School who have lost their livelihoods and with all those at the university who have suffered the shattering of their community. It was written with love for The New School and its ideals. There may be a temptation to think that those who mourn the end of this university’s liberating traditions must have an inflated sense of the importance of a small, imperfect, idiosyncratic, private university. It is true that humanities and social science departments at The New School could never be expected to surpass the world’s largest and wealthiest research universities in ways capturable by standard quantitative measures of things like faculty recruitment and student placement. But it reflects a misunderstanding to think that this is the right standard for their success. What a small private institution of higher learning can do is identify significant values that don’t receive adequate attention in society at large and insist on actualizing them. If it realizes them with great thought, intensity, and passion, as The New School has realized the free pursuit of social understanding toward greater democracy, then it can have, as The New School has, an influence massively out of proportion with its size. That is something worth investing in, especially at times, like the present, when democracy is under open attack.

Note of acknowledgement. This essay could not have been written without the extremely knowledgeable commentaries and observations of a few dozen current and former faculty members, administrators, and students at The New School. I am profoundly grateful for my friends’ and colleagues’ assistance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Crary is Walter A. Eberstadt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at The New School, where she teaches at the New School for Social Research and at Eugene Lang College, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford.

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See Judith Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile (Columbia University Press, 2019), prologue and chapter 1.
James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (Macmillan, 1912), chapter 1.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1916), 122, 117.
Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times, 54.
Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (The Free Press, 1986), chapter 3.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 189.
A Proposal, 3.
Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times, chapter 4.
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (B. W. Huebsch, 1918).
A Proposal, 6.
A Proposal, 15.
Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times, 55-58.
A Proposal, 12.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 140, emphasis in original.
Rutkoff and Scott, New School, 40-41.
See Rutkoff and Scott, New School, 96. See also Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times, 89-91.
Alvin Johnson, “Intellectual Liberty Imperilled,” The American Scholar 2, no. 3 (1933): 318.
Rutkoff and Scott, New School, 104.
Quoted in Jonathan F. Fanton, The University and Civil Society (New School for Social Research, 1995), 95.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian Books, 1951), viii.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), chapter 1.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin, 1963).
Fanton, The University and Civil Society, 98.
See Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times, chapter 8.

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The following article appeared in the Boston Review June 8, 2022, linked here.

Metaphysics and Morals: How four women defended ethical thought from the legacy of positivism

Alice Crary

By Michaelmas Term 1939, mere weeks after the United Kingdom had declared war on Nazi Germany, Oxford University had begun a change that would wholly transform it by the academic year’s end. Men ages twenty and twenty-one, save conscientious objectors and those deemed physically unfit, were being called up, and many others just a bit older volunteered to serve. Women had been able to matriculate and take degrees at the university since 1920, but members of the then all-male Congregation had voted to restrict the number of women to fewer than a quarter of the overall student population. Things changed rapidly after the onset of war. The proportion of women shot up, and, in many classes, there were newly as many women as men.

Among the women who experienced these novel conditions were several who did courses in philosophy and went on to strikingly successful intellectual careers. Elizabeth Anscombe, noted philosopher and Catholic moral thinker who would go on occupy the chair in philosophy that Ludwig Wittgenstein had held at Cambridge, started a course in Greats—roughly, classics and philosophy—in 1937, as did Jean Austin (neé Coutts), who would marry philosopher J. L. Austin and later have a long teaching career at Oxford. Iris Murdoch, admired and beloved philosopher and novelist, began to read Greats in 1938 at the same time as Mary Midgley (neé Scrutton), who became a prominent public philosopher and animal ethicist. A year later Philippa Foot (neé Bosanquet), distinguished moral philosopher, started to read the then relatively new course PPE—philosophy, politics and economics—and three years after that Mary Warnock (neé Wilson), subsequently a high-profile educator and public intellectual, went up to read Greats.

Several of these women would go on to make groundbreaking contributions to ethics. This constellation of circumstances is the subject of not one but two new books, Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. Both interweave stories about the lives and relationships of, in particular, Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch with arguments about how these women’s ethical projects are heterodox and, in key respects, convergent. Both also offer engaging accounts of the lives and writings of women, who, while at best glancingly interested in feminist thought and politics, were decidedly feminist in their insistence on their own intellectual projects and life possibilities—and who, although influenced by and attached to many men, were united in their dedication to their friendships with and support of each other. These books tell stories that rival in passion and intrigue anything that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have to offer and contain much to interest specialists as well as general readers.

Oxford philosophy in the early to mid 1930s had been in upheaval. The strains of Hegel-inspired idealism that had remained influential in Britain through the first decade of the twentieth century had been definitively displaced, in the years before World War I, by realist doctrines which claimed that knowledge must be of what is independent of the knower, and which were elaborated within ethics into forms of intuitionism. By the ’30s, these schools of thought were themselves threatened by new waves of enthusiasm for the themes of logical positivism developed by a group of philosophers and scientists, led by Moritz Schlick, familiarly known as the Vienna Circle. Cambridge University’s Susan Stebbing, the first woman to be appointed to a full professorship in philosophy in the UK, had already interacted professionally with Schlick in England and had championed tenets of logical positivism in essays and public lectures when, in 1933, Oxford don Gilbert Ryle recommended that his promising tutee Freddie Ayer make a trip to Vienna. Ayer obliged, and upon his return he wrote a brief manifesto, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), in defense of some of the Vienna Circle’s views. The book became a sensation, attracting attention and debate far beyond the halls of academic philosophy. Its bombshell contention was that only two kinds statements are meaningful: those that are true solely in virtue of the meanings of their constituent terms (such as “all bachelors are unmarried”), and those that can be verified through physical observation. The gesture seemed to consign to nonsense, at one fell swoop, the statements of metaphysics, theology, and ethics.

At one fell swoop, positivism seemed to consign the statements of metaphysics, theology, and ethics to nonsense.

This turn to “verification” struck some as a fitting response to strains of European metaphysics that many people, rightly or wrongly, associated with fascist irrationalism and the gathering threat of war. But not everyone at Oxford was sympathetic. Although Ayer’s ideas weren’t universally admired, they were widely discussed, including by a group of philosophers led by Isaiah Berlin, who met regularly at All Souls College—among them, J. L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire, Donald MacKinnon, Donald MacNabb, Anthony Woozley, and Ayer himself. Oxford philosophy’s encounter with logical positivism would have a lasting impact and would substantially set the terms for subsequent research in many areas of philosophy—including, it would turn out, ethics and political theory.

Though positivistic zeal was muted during the wartime years that took Ayer and some of the enthusiasts for his claims away from the university, it was part of the intellectual culture experienced by the women then doing joint courses in philosophy. Many of them were sent to tutorials with MacKinnon, a young philosopher and theologian whose asthma had kept him from military service. MacKinnon was skeptical about the merits of Ayer’s project, but he asked his tutees to come to grips with Language, Truth, and Logic themselves. MacKinnon’s own thinking was shaped by Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism, and it featured the unequivocally anti-positivist conviction that historical perspective is necessary for understanding the aspects of our lives of concern for ethics and social thought. He was remembered by students for his intensity, his inspired if eccentric teaching, and his dedication, and several of the women who worked with him credited him with launching them in philosophy. Midgley wrote that without MacKinnon she would very likely have left academic philosophy, and Foot, who regarded MacKinnon as holy and remained close to him until his death, once said simply: “he created me.” Murdoch’s esteem of him was so marked and earnest—and so erotically charged—that the married MacKinnon, who continued to support his former students in their pursuit of graduate fellowships and teaching positions, and who provided key support for Murdoch’s own graduate fellowship, eventually broke off contact with her.

These women’s early interactions were the starting points for some extraordinary, if at first blush unlikely, friendships. The acquaintance between outgoing, culturally enterprising, politically daring, communist, middle-class Murdoch and upper-class, upright, socially reserved (partly because deaf in one ear and unable to recognize faces well) Foot began in earnest in the summer of 1942, when the two were revising for their final exams, and Foot lay confined to bed. At MacKinnon’s urging, Murdoch began to visit her ailing peer. Later, after a conscription act applying to unmarried women led both to service positions in London, Foot moved into the charming but primitive flat Murdoch had found, and the two were roommates for over a year of blackout and air raids. Foot provided companionship and, in turn, benefited from Murdoch’s reading habits, which encompassed theology, psychology, French existentialism, and Anglophone philosophy. Foot also benefited from Murdoch’s colorful London social life, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Arthur Koestler.

Not that the friendship was without complications. It was characteristic of Murdoch to have overlapping romantic ties, and, in the winter of 1943–1944, Murdoch began to see Foot’s then boyfriend Tommy Balogh while also continuing a relationship with (future historian) Michael Foot. When Murdoch eventually dropped Michael, he found comfort with Philippa, and, after Michael was critically injured trying to escape from a prisoner of war camp and Philippa cared for him during his recovery, the two married. Although Murdoch regarded her own behavior in these circumstances as deeply reprehensible, and although Michael was bitter, Foot herself was graciously loyal, and the two women remained close. When, later, the Foots were back in Oxford, and Murdoch returned to do graduate work, she lived in their house for over a year. The friendship between Murdoch and Foot would later take other twists and turns, but it never ceased to be important to both. At the end of Murdoch’s life, after she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and was in decline, Foot remained dedicated, lunching with her every Friday.

Between 1945 and 1948, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch returned to Oxford to do graduate work in philosophy. Anscombe had been spared women’s conscription by her 1941 marriage to philosopher Peter Geach and, in 1942, pregnant with the first of her eventual seven children, won a Cambridge fellowship that allowed her to do the DPhil at Oxford. For several years, Anscombe commuted between the two universities, and during this period she met and became close to Wittgenstein, who would be one of her great philosophical influences and interlocutors and for whom she would serve as translator and literary executor. After being awarded a fellowship at Somerville College in 1946, Anscombe was more consistently in Oxford. Jean Austin, who had two small children by the early 1940s and who stayed home to care for them and run her household, didn’t teach philosophy until after her husband’s death in 1960. Warnock’s course in Greats had been interrupted by the war, and she returned in 1946 and finished her first degree in 1948, after which she completed the new two-year BPhil degree in one year and took up a position teaching philosophy at St. Hugh’s.

Oxford in the late 1940s was again a changed place. Just after the war, there were thousands more undergraduates at Oxford than before. Many were slightly older men who had returned to finish the courses they had postponed or interrupted, and some of the colleges went to great lengths to accommodate the influx. The intellectual atmosphere for those working in philosophy was also changed. Enthusiasm for logical positivism and related projects of conceptual analysis was the dominant mood, and these research programs were popular well beyond the university. Although logical positivism and its offshoots seemed to many to have made moral philosophy obsolete, there was in some quarters interest in recovering ethics as a serious endeavor.

Ayer had claimed that applications of moral terms don’t pick out worldly things and so should be regarded as merely emotive pseudo-concepts. When people differ about whether something is, say, morally bad or good, Ayer thought, they are not disagreeing about any fact but expressing opposed non-cognitive attitudes to that thing. This view is now commonly glossed, dismissively, by saying that people who have different moral judgments about some circumstance simply differ, at bottom, over whether to cry out “boo!” or “hurrah!” A general consensus emerged that such a boo-hurrah or emotivist theory of ethics was oversimplistic and distorting, and after the war many sought to explain how we can have rational ethical arguments. But many of the new projects preserved the emotivist contention that ethical terms aren’t tools for picking out features of the world and that identifying ethical values isn’t in any straightforward way a matter of discernment.

Arguably the most influential ethical endeavor in this mold was the work of a young thinker, Richard Hare, who started studying Greats at Oxford in 1937, broke off his studies to serve with the Royal Artillery, survived in extremely harsh conditions as a prisoner of war, and returned to the university with a new conviction in the importance of ethics as a practical guide. Hare’s signature contribution to ethics, worked out and refined in three books between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, is his doctrine of universal prescriptivism. His idea was that, in applying an ethical term (say, “good”) to something, we simultaneously express an attitude toward that thing and issue a prescription to act in accordance with the attitude. Our prescription has universal force, logically committing us to prescribe the same action in relation to every relevantly similar thing, and this makes room in ethics for reasoned debates about the consequences of universalizing given courses of action.

Hare’s project inspired critical as well as admiring interest. Detractors pointed out, among other things, that universal prescriptivism places no restrictions on what counts as a distinctly moral assessment (as opposed, say, to an aesthetic assessment or a mere expression of preference) and that an individual could responsibly claim to stand behind an even apparently cruel or violent assessment if she was fanatical enough to consistently embrace the universal prescription encoded in it. The goal of much subsequent work in Anglophone ethics became improving on Hare’s account of moral discourse, but these critical undertakings mostly left in place certain assumptions, as fundamental for Hare as for his emotivist forerunners: that ethical concepts don’t determine aspects of the world and that it is not by attending perceptually to how things are that we encounter ethical values. These assumptions are among the marks of what came to be known as the non-cognitivist tradition in ethics.

This was the intellectual climate in which Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch rubbed shoulders and bounced philosophical ideas off each other during the 1940s. Midgley was living in North Oxford very close to the Foots’ place, where Murdoch briefly resided, and Anscombe, who would sometimes join the other three at the Foots’, had with Philippa Foot begun the tradition, which the two would continue into the late 1960s, of regular afternoon philosophizing in the Somerville Senior Common Room. None of these thinkers had yet embarked on their publishing careers, but it was a period of great intellectual ferment in which they explored numerous partly overlapping philosophical themes, and this positioned three of them—Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch—to start, in the 1950s, producing substantial bodies of published work. Midgley would later discuss the importance of this period for her thinking, but she left Oxford in 1949, began a prolific career as a reviewer and broadcaster while raising children, and only truly began her publishing career in the mid-1970s. The early outputs of the other three were in many stylistic and thematic respects different. But they were alike in developing lines of thought threatening to fundamental presuppositions of the emerging family of ethical non-cognitivisms for which Hare was then the main spokesperson.

Anscombe was stunningly productive in the 1950s, translating thousands of pages of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and bringing out his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956), in addition to publishing two major philosophical monographs, Intention (1957) and An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959), as well as a string of significant articles on philosophy of action, philosophy of psychology, and ethics. A strand of Anscombe’s thought, running through these projects, opposes dominant non-cognitivist postures in ethics by bringing together themes from Aristotle’s ethics and Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects of mind. She follows Aristotle in exploring an approach to ethics modeled on natural historical accounts of human life that tell us not, say, how many teeth human beings have on average but how many are normative for the species. The ethical analogue, which starts from an understanding of humans as more-than-biological beings with capacities for choice and thought, is an account of particular propensities of practical reason, or virtues, as normative for us.

Anscombe combines this Aristotelian orientation in ethics with Wittgenstein’s idea that, contrary to their received interpretation as “outer” manifestations of “inner” mental phenomena, our expressive behaviors are drenched with psychological meaning. Wittgenstein also holds that getting these behaviors perceptually in view presents special challenges. Anscombe’s suggestion is that it is only by drawing on our feel for what living and acting well is like—our feel, that is, for the kind of normative image of human practical endeavor that preoccupies Aristotle—that we can meet the challenges Wittgenstein flags and do justice to the psychological significance of particular expressive behaviors. She takes our ability to identify particular intentions, motives, and other mental features to presuppose an appreciation of a virtuous human life. The result is a powerful, explicitly anti-non-cognitivist case for regarding descriptions of actions as ethically saturated.

Like Anscombe, Murdoch was arrestingly prolific in the ’50s. Her publications included Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), the first English-language study of Sartre’s thought, four novels that would establish her as a leading literary figure—Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Sandcastle (1957), and The Bell (1958)—and a series of important articles on ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. A recurring concern of these works, the literary as well as the philosophical, is evoking anti-non-cognitivist notions of things like freedom, moral difference, and moral argument—the cluster of aspects of practical endeavor that philosophers collect under the heading of “moral psychology.”

The heart of Murdoch’s moral psychology is the view that the world to which moral concepts are responsible is brought into focus by distinctively moral thought and activity, including probing forms of moral imagination. She invites us to see that freedom calls for disciplined work on the self rather than exertion normatively unconstrained by the world; that moral differences are not disagreements about which non-cognitive attitude to adopt toward some neutral region of fact but rather differences of understanding; and that, instead of being a merely intellectual exercise of reconciling conflicting non-cognitive attitudes, moral argument requires an openness to new insights gleaned from reshaping one’s sensibility. Together with her repudiation of ethical non-cognitivism, Murdoch provides an alternative map of the moral life.

At the core of Foot’s smaller yet undeniably impactful output during the same period are several tightly argued articles on ethics that, among other things, defend an idea resonant with these aspects of Anscombe’s and Murdoch’s thought. Foot argues that principles for acting are only recognizable as moral principles—in contrast to, for example, merely capricious practical maxims—if they are intelligible as actualizations of moral concepts such as goodness, duty, or virtue. Together with Anscombe and Murdoch, Foot departs from ethical non-cognitivism in representing the moral life as characterized by forms of regularity only available to an engaged eye.

Intersections among the wide-ranging and distinctive intellectual enterprises of these thinkers can be traced not only to their common influences but to their interactions with each other. Prompted by Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley had started to read then-circulating copies of Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books in the 1940s. Murdoch later helped Anscombe with her translation of the Philosophical Investigations. And, in 1954, during one of years in which Foot and Anscombe were devoting afternoons to questions of philosophy in the Somerville SCR, Foot and Murdoch taught a class together at Keble College exploring the anti-non-cognitivist idea that the descriptive and evaluative components of the meanings of moral concepts cannot be disentangled.

The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals coincide in their chosen themes while diverging in scope and narrative strategy. Lipscomb discusses his four subjects’ entire lifetimes and addresses them largely in parallel. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman concentrate on the stretch of time from these women’s arrivals at Oxford in the late 1930s up to 1956, when three of them enter their initial periods of great productivity, telling their stories simultaneously. Many circumstances in both books will be familiar to those who have read Peter Conradi’s intensively researched biography of Murdoch as well as Midgley’s and Warnock’s successful memoirs. But The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals bring together better-known episodes with original archival work, and, although there are a fair number of mostly minor errors, the books also shed light on less-discussed incidents. While Murdoch’s and Foot’s wartime relationship has been well described elsewhere, the books recount the intensity of Anscombe’s and Murdoch’s relationship, which led to a crisis late in 1948—the culmination of months in which Murdoch increasingly came to regard Anscombe as an object of moral, intellectual, and erotic devotion, and Anscombe felt conscience-driven to combat her own partiality to her friend. The books also reveal the great steadiness of the lifelong friendship between atheist Foot and intensely religious Anscombe, recording Foot’s devastating journal entry just days after Anscombe’s death in 2001: “Everything is done for the first time in this different world without her.”

Both books also depend for much of their appeal on their cases for reassessing the importance of the four women’s ethical contributions, and on this point it is worth noting two of the more significant respects in which they need to be corrected.

First, it is a hazard of intellectual biography to conflate personal affinities with affinities of ideas, and at times these books veer toward such confusions. The recognition that there are philosophically significant points of contact among the ethical approaches of their chosen subjects leads these authors to some misleading accounts of philosophical agreement. Partly, this tendency is attributable to an excessive deference to Midgley, who outlived her three friends, and who, late in life, started suggesting that the local history of philosophy should be told to unite the four of them. Midgley was an important interlocutor for Lipscomb as well as for Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, a circumstance that helps to explain the nearly simultaneous emergence of two books advancing versions of the same—by no means self-evident—thesis that Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch are rightly grouped together. In the year before her death, Midgley went yet further, arguing that in virtue of their convergence on heterodox ideas about ethics in the late 1940s, the four of them should be seen as forming a distinct philosophical “school.”

It is a hazard of intellectual biography to conflate personal affinities with affinities of ideas.

Lipscomb runs with Midgley’s school idea. He represents the four women as rejecting a mechanistic view of the world, the “billiard ball picture,” on which all relations among things are merely causal and on which there is accordingly nothing evaluative for our perceptual sensitivities to detect. Lipscomb’s main thesis is that his subjects counter this picture with commitments to “objective truths” in ethics. This description is unhelpful as it stands because moral philosophers speak of objectivity in ethics in numerous ways. In some cases they use this phrase to mean one or another version of the view that moral assessments are universally valid; in other cases they use it to mean one or another version of the view that ethical values are perceptually accessible. Lipscomb seems primarily interested in ethical objectivity in the latter sense, though he doesn’t distinguish among the various things that philosophers mean by perceptually picking out values.

Not that Lipscomb is wrong to suggest that we might give an account of the experiential availability of values broad enough to encompass beliefs that Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch defended in different places. But such an account would be poor pretext for talk of a school. It would be so thin that it would also apply to the work of any number of men who were at Cambridge and Oxford with these women, including not only some, like Wittgenstein, whom they generally admired and embraced as an influence, but also some, like J. L. Austin, whom they generally despised. Both books do note that Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch launched frontal attacks on Hare’s program in ethics in the 1950s—attacks without clear echoes in the work of any of the men around them—and that Hare complained about being specifically targeted by women philosophers. (Warnock, for her part, was also hard on Hare in a 1960 book, Ethics Since 1900, that is conspicuously absent from both books’ bibliographies.) But this doesn’t in any substantial way strengthen the case for a school.

Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman approach Midgley’s school idea somewhat more skeptically. They give it sympathetic play in their preface and in one further passage. But they don’t explicitly endorse it, and they interlace into their biographical narrative a more nuanced description of philosophical commonalities among their four subjects. Their titular phrase “metaphysical animals,” taken from a 1941 article of MacKinnon’s, is deliberately multivalent. Its implied affirmation of metaphysics connotes a departure from positivistic hostility to metaphysical statements. It also resonates with some of Murdoch’s articles in the 1950s, in which she declares her aim of combatting the elimination of metaphysics—understood as normatively rich reflection about what the world is like—from ethics and political theory. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s reference to “animals” in turn picks up partly on Anscombe’s Aristotle- and Wittgenstein-influenced explorations of distinctive demands of bringing human beings and also other life forms into view. The reference to animals is also a nod to Midgley’s calls for registering human animality and for acknowledging that non-human animals are morally important. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman thus give us an appropriately messy account of these philosophers’ concerns with distinct ethical projects, all the while making a suggestive case for thinking it can be philosophically productive to read their work together.

We can appreciate this case while finding it useful to explore disagreements that these books downplay or neglect. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman address Anscombe’s outspoken opposition, as a Catholic moralist, to contraception and abortion—a stance that, as Lipscomb also discusses, put her at odds with her friends, at one point threatening even her stable bond with Foot. And Lipscomb does at least mention Foot’s surprising intellectual journey, passed over by Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, from her early opposition to ethical non-cognitivism to a period in which she felt obliged to accept some of its main tenets—and on to a final period in which she elaborated Anscombe’s distinctive and anti-non-cognitivist Aristotelian project in ethics. But neither set of authors mentions the intriguing fact that Foot took this Anscombian project to imply that our duties to non-human animals are no more than indirect reflections of our duties to cultivate our own virtuous characters, a position that is ripe for critical scrutiny and that placed Foot at odds with Midgley’s efforts to show animals matter in themselves.

Second, intellectual biographers are also at risk of conjuring intellectual differences among subjects who are personally hostile. The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals both betray tendencies in this direction as well, at times leading to serious misrepresentation. In one case—the treatment of the methods that came to be known as “ordinary language philosophy,” or OLP—the books work directly against their own aims, reinforcing trends that have interfered with the reception of the ethical thought of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch.

OLP emerged in the 1940s at Cambridge, where it was associated with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, and it flourished at Oxford during the 1950s in the work of J. L. Austin, Ryle, and P. F. Strawson. A guiding theme of OLP was that to grapple meaningfully with philosophical perplexities we need to get a feel for some of the ordinary contexts in which we use the words we employ in giving voice to such perplexities. This emphasis on the sensibility at play in our modes of speech marks a sharp contrast with the strictly technical conceptual analysis urged by logical positivists. Indeed, the emerging body of work in OLP was radically hostile to positivism. Austin’s now-famous 1955 William James Lectures, “How to Do Things with Words,” arguably his crowning achievement, are framed as an attack on ethical emotivism.

Austin’s opening critical device is a distinction between statements that constate things about the world and those that do or perform things. After introducing this distinction and exploring it at length, he concludes that there is an aspect of doing in even the most constative operations of language and hence that his original distinction cannot be sustained. His lectures impress on us that linguistic understanding requires a feel for the things we can meaningfully do with words—for what he calls the “illocutionary forces” our words can have. By depicting such understanding as drawing on our appreciation of the lives we lead with language, he asks us to conceive it as engaged and perspectival. In his posthumously published work Sense and Sensibilia, Austin complements this view with an account of perceptual experience, at odds with positivistic views of it as a mode of merely causal, wholly unmediated mental contact with the world, on which it is likewise engaged and perspectival. The upshot is an image of thought about the world that makes room for the perceptual discernment of values—an outcome suggestive of notable and productive ties to aspects of the ethical outlooks that Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch were developing in the 1950s.

For Murdoch, metaphysical reflection is subversive precisely because it challenges the hegemonic creep of instrumental rationality.

Yet The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals give the impression of great distance between these women’s outlooks and the enterprise of OLP. The suggestions of a major intellectual divide are made in tandem with descriptions of personal animosities between the women and some of OLP’s main—male—figures. Both books do explain that Wittgenstein was a great mentor and supporter of Anscombe, though neither mentions well-known accounts of his dislike of women academics or the fact that he made an exception for Anscombe because he regarded her as “one of the boys.” At the same time, both books stress that Anscombe was openly contemptuous of Austin, who returned the sentiment. Anscombe attended some of Austin’s classes and expressed outrage at the idea of similarities between his view of the workings of language and Wittgenstein’s; Foot was also ill-disposed to Austin. He famously organized on an invitation-only basis a Saturday morning philosophy workshop; it began as an all-male group but eventually came to include a few women, and Foot later recalled these gatherings as one of the few circumstances in academic philosophy that made her feel being a woman placed her at a disadvantage. (Anscombe’s and Foot’s attitudes contrast sharply with that of Annette Baier, who was supervised for the BPhil by Austin in the 1950s and who, though she used her 1990 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association to call out the harms of sexist bias in philosophy, made a point later to say that she exempted Austin from her criticism.) For her part, Murdoch on occasion expressed disdain for Ryle.

These portraits of personal antagonism are presented together, within The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals, with claims about how Austin, and other ordinary language philosophers such as Ryle, were fierce philosophical opponents of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch. Lipscomb links the narrowing of philosophy at Oxford that all four women decried to the spirit of Austin’s thought, and Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman depict Austin as hostile to metaphysics in a manner that aligns him with Ayer’s positivist stance and places him in conflict with the four. Lipscomb’s passing remark that there are points of philosophical contact between Austin’s work and the oeuvres of his four subjects does little to disrupt the suggestion—made by Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman as well—of fundamental philosophical conflict between these women and some central thinkers linked to OLP.

Both books thus subtly reinforce an influential narrative that OLP is a banal, philosophically shallow, and politically conservative tradition whose final grave was dug in the 1970s. To be sure, despite repeated efforts over the last half century to bury it, OLP is still alive. Both Wittgenstein’s philosophy and that of Stanley Cavell, another central figure in the tradition, continue to attract interest internationally, and, after a hiatus of several decades, Austin’s writings are receiving new scholarly attention. Although OLP remains marginal in academic philosophy, it shows up in numerous areas, from philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics to literary theory, philosophical theology, and debates about the authority of the interpretative methods of the social sciences. Indeed, it plays a conspicuous role in feminist theory, queer theory, and other critical theories dedicated to the kind of liberating thinking it has often wrongly been taken to stymie.

To indulge these two books’ strategy of treating OLP as an opponent is to miss an opportunity to generate new philosophical interest in the ethical work of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch. Their intersecting ethical projects share with central contributions to OLP an openness to the experiential accessibility of values—an idea that places all of these thinkers squarely at odds with the zeitgeist and opens the door to the kind of normatively loaded reflection about the world that Murdoch calls “metaphysics.” Such reflection is subversive precisely because it is capable of uncovering values that challenge the pressure, characteristic of late capitalism, to treat all domains of our lives instrumentally.

Of course, Murdochian metaphysics is not the only mode of philosophical resistance to the hegemonic creep of instrumental rationality, not even if elaborated in a manner aligned with core ideals of Marxist social thought. There is a further challenge in the strains of liberal Kantianism that, starting with John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice, are often credited with awakening Anglophone moral and political philosophy from their positivistic slumbers. But these latter strains are less groundbreaking than they may appear. By treating the divulging of non-instrumental values as a practical as opposed to theoretical achievement, they sustain the ban on metaphysical theorizing that is one of positivism’s most reactionary legacies. A call to lift this ban represents a far more serious threat to the moral and political status quo. That OLP is threatening in this way is part of what Stephen Mulhall had in mind when he quipped that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the need to reject or transcend OLP “far outweighed the capacity to provide good grounds for doing so.” Something similar can be said about certain aspects of the ethical thought of the women in these two books. One cannot easily dismiss OLP without also dismissing the interest of their far-reaching and politically fecund contributions to ethics.

In knitting together four women’s biographies and philosophical achievements, The Women Are Up to Something and Metaphysical Animals take seriously a remark Midgley made about how the relative absence of men from Oxford during the war was a condition of her and her friends’ finding their ways in philosophy. The task of determining whether, or to what extent, Midgley’s claim holds is rightly left for historians and social scientists. But it is possible to take a philosophical interest in the fact not merely that these women did find their ways in male-dominated, mid-twentieth-century Oxford philosophy, but that their distinct and still immensely pertinent ethical projects went fundamentally against the grain.

These projects contain overlapping accounts of how engaged and perspectival thinking can reveal aspects of the world that we otherwise miss. They reinforce the unsurprising idea that philosophical traditions can be enriched by the inclusion of a diverse range of voices, especially those that have long been left out. Recognizing as much sheds new light on the interest of the achievements of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch—each of whom, in her distinct way, enacts a glorious version of the kind of intellectual innovation that greater inclusiveness promotes.

Author’s Note: My gratitude to Cora Diamond, Michael Kremer, Sabina Lovibond, and Mark Rowe for graciously generous and extremely knowledgeable correspondence as I was composing this article.

Interview with Alice Crary from Nordic Wittgenstein Review Special Issue 2022, linked here.

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and literature, and Critical Theory. She has written on philosophers such as John L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This is the first of two parts of the interview with Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The second part on “Wittgenstein and Critical Theory” is published in the regular issue 11 of NWR.

I. Wittgenstein and Feminism

In Beyond Moral Judgment and Inside Ethics, you suggest that Wittgenstein’s contributions to thought about objectivity are helpful for thinking about ethics and politics. You propose a ‘wider’ conception of objectivity, capable of enriching feminist theory. Could you describe this conception of objectivity and comment on its interest?

CRARY: “Wider objectivity” is a term I introduced when I was first defending a morally and politically consequential philosophical worldview, decisive for my thinking, that is jarringly out of synch with the contemporary Zeitgeist. Our age’s standard outlooks feature the idea that getting the world in view means pursuing point-of-viewlessness, and so working toward dispassionateness and value-neutrality. I proposed the term “narrower objectivity” for the metaphysical counterpart of this epistemic idea, and I spoke of a contrasting “wider conception of objectivity” in discussing the metaphysic at play when we treat bringing worldly things into focus as an engaged exercise that requires virtues such as experienced judgment and perspectival flexibility.

Wittgenstein’s later work, as I read it, contains resources for this shift in philosophical worldview. It’s not that Wittgenstein uses “objectivity” as a term of art. But one of his signature achievements is ferreting out with great thoroughness some of the deepest sources of philosophical resistance to the view that our sensitivities contribute internally to undistorted mental contact with the world. Another achievement is attacking with devastating focus considerations that have seemed to many to speak against this view. There are, to be sure, additional modern thinkers who undertake projects along these lines. Alongside other figures in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, such as J.L. Austin, this includes figures in the traditions of, say, post-Kantian German idealism and American pragmatism. Still, a relentless philosophical case for the transition to a widely objective worldview is one of Wittgenstein’s hallmarks.

There are straightforward links between efforts to “widen” received understandings of objectivity and core themes of many twentieth and twenty-first century discourses of liberation, including feminist ones. When I first sounded Wittgensteinian themes in exploring the idea that thought about the world is an engaged business, I was guided by sympathy with the work of feminist and other social justice-oriented theorists, above all, with these theorists’ often Marx-inspired claims about the cognitive power of perspectives of the oppressed. I was searching for tools to make such claims palatable within Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the site of my training and a tradition to a great extent organized by assumptions that impede these claims’ reception.

An image of Wittgenstein as an ally to discourses of liberation will seem to some like a crude misrepresentation. It is at odds with claims, in circulation since the years just after his death, about how he and other ordinary language philosophers held philosophically and politically blinkered views with reactionary ramifications. The story about how the now familiar idea of Wittgenstein’s conservativism was propagated is quite colorful. One major episode is the publication of Ernest Gellner’s 1959 Words and Things, which represented ordinary language philosophers, and, above all, Wittgenstein, as favoring a damagingly restrictive approach to philosophical and political questions. The fact that Gellner’s book was interpretatively weak, and that it included ad hominem attacks, didn’t stop it from having a large and enthusiastic reception. When Gilbert Ryle, the editor of Mind, pointed to the book’s “personal animadversions” as grounds for refusing to have it reviewed in the journal, it became an international cause célèbre.

Congenial readings that represent Wittgenstein as, if not advocating politically conservative ideas, at least urging that established modes of thought and speech are sacrosanct, have become a fixture of discussions of his philosophy in the intervening sixty years. But they have long co-existed with textually better-grounded interpretations that bluntly challenge any suggestion of critique-impeding tendencies. This opposing trend gets its start with Stanley Cavell’s evocations of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in some arrestingly original essays in the 1960s, and it subsequently comes to include contributions of philosophers such as Hanna Pitkin, Cora Diamond and Hilary Putnam. It was in the context of engaging with these thinkers’ non-standard approaches that I initially turned to Wittgenstein in relation to feminist and other critical theories.

Can the epistemic orientation you ascribe to Wittgenstein be articulated within feminist standpoint theories and the anchoring in lived experiences to which these theories aspire?

CRARY: Standpoint theories were among the feminist projects that originally interested me, and early on I closely followed discussions of the work of standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding. Standpoint theories claim that we have to explore standpoints that members of oppressed groups are made to occupy in order to grasp politically salient features of the social world. These theories assume that perspectival resources directly contribute to bringing the world into focus, and, in a couple of places, I set out to show how strands of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy equip us to bring out the philosophical soundness of this key assumption.

My terminology for talking about these topics has changed over time. When I was getting started, in the early aughts, I didn’t speak of “feminist standpoint theory” in my own voice. This label was then sometimes associated with politically noxious racist, ableist, trans-exclusive and generally elitist assumptions that point confusedly toward a single ‘standpoint of women’, obscuring social differences among women that are functions of subjection to multiple, crossing forms of bias. I rejected the label out of respect for politically crucial insights, pivotal for the work of many Black feminists, that are now often picked out with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s moniker “intersections.”

Today the label “feminist standpoint theory” has to some degree been reclaimed, and there is greater acceptance of the idea that it applies to theories that, while representing perspectives women are made to adopt as cognitively necessary, also reflect the complex interplay among the different modes of oppression women confront. Though I didn’t speak this way then, my early concern was finding philosophical resources to affirm the insights of feminist standpoint theories in this intersectional sense.

Is the feminist stance you have developed on the basis of Wittgensteinian themes at odds with the dominant strategies in moral philosophy?

CRARY: Wittgenstein’s philosophy, on my preferred reading of it, goes against the grain of mainstream analytic philosophy in ways that include conflict with dominant strategies in ethics. So, yes, my style of inheriting from Wittgenstein for feminist theory is inseparable from an oppositional stance to dominant trends in moral philosophy.

The key Wittgensteinian theme is that we need non-neutral resources in order to get the world into focus. To accept this is to reject an entrenched metaphysical outlook characterized by, in the words of historian of science Lorraine Daston, “the moral evacuation of nature”. This metaphysic is the source of the idea of a “naturalistic fallacy in ethics”, and, for all their differences, the currently best represented ethical approaches, including various familiar consequentialisms, standard takes on Kant’s ethical theory, and even some virtue-based theories, are organized by commitment to this idea.

Not that there are no contrary voices within analytic ethics. A group of women philosophers who were at Oxford in the immediately post-World War II years, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch, have been among the most outspoken in laying down paths in ethics that cleanly depart from the idea of a sharp is/ought divide. Philosophical attention to the work of these women philosophers, which has increased markedly over the last decade, is at a high point now with the emergence of two monographs that consider them as a group. Benjamin Lipscombe has just come out with The Women are up to Something, and Claire MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals is due out next month. Since Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch count Wittgenstein among their influences, it might seem reasonable to think that inheriting from Wittgenstein in the way I’m discussing is not terribly oppositional. But it isn’t so. Despite the new excitement surrounding the work of Anscombe et al., advocates of their thought are generally in the position of dissenters. There are still very good reasons to think that using Wittgenstein in the manner at play here—in a manner that makes his work helpful to standpoint theorists and other feminists—means contesting fundamental tenets of mainstream moral philosophy.

Can the feminist epistemology you espouse help us to think about a feminist ethics, as it applies to care ethics, that is attentive to the ordinary dimension of the activities carried out by women, to the vulnerability of certain experiences, to the deprivation of voice and the danger of being reduced to silence?

CRARY: In fact, the links between work I’ve done in feminist epistemology and care ethics are straightforward. The heart of care ethics is the idea that a satisfactory ethics needs to acknowledge human dependencies and vulnerabilities, and care ethicists typically see these vulnerabilities as extending to our condition as knowers. One suggestion, which resonates with my own commitments, is that sensitivities cultivated through engagement in activities like caring are necessary for understanding social relationships. A further suggestion, also in synch with my work, is that social understanding is indelibly value-laden. Care ethicists use this non-neutral conception of social understanding to shed light on challenges of getting sexist and overlapping oppressions in view. Bringing them into focus requires attention to the ordinary rhythms of women’s lives, and these modes of attention must be sensitive. We must, as care-oriented anthropologist Veena Das puts it, remain alive to “the strangeness that is happening right before our eyes”.

There is a lesson here not only, as you put it in your question, about the vulnerability of women and other marginalized people to being silenced but also about the kinds of political remedies required to respond adequately to such silencing. Care ethics teaches that having a voice is closely tied to enjoying material circumstances that accommodate modes of appreciation internal to good social understanding.

Mainstream social and political philosophers tend to suggest that liberation from ideologies that obscure the lives of, and so silence, the downtrodden is at bottom a matter of nothing more than eliminating distorting forces and creating what they conceive as a “neutral” space for thought. Care ethicists allow us to see such views as harmfully cramped and wrongheaded. In line with generations of anti-racist and anti-colonialist theorists, they equip us to see these neutrality-claims not only as false but as themselves perniciously ideological. For such claims disavow evaluative commitments they can’t help but have and so disguise their own partisanship.

One of my projects in recent years has been contributing, in concert with care ethicists such as Sandra Laugier and many other radical social thinkers, to the larger public discourse about the insidiousness of allegedly neutral accounts of social relations. I have argued that meaningful resistance to ideological silencing has to involve agitating for new, more caring forms of life. Among other things, together with Matt Congdon, I co-edited a special issue of Philosophical Topics on Social Visibility—it’s technically the spring 2021 issue, but due to pandemic-related delays it’s just about to come out now—that brings together groundbreaking work on ideology and social critique, much of it concerned with the specifically critical power of partisan or non-neutral methods.

Wittgenstein’s thought stresses the embodied dimension of our linguistic practices, and, within feminist theoretical circles, it is sometimes mobilized against certain post-structuralist approaches to discourse, which are supposedly too abstract or detached from lived experiences. Do you share this view of a distinction between two conceptions of language?

CRARY: The political stakes of this theoretical difference are surprisingly high. There is no doubt that most post-structuralist feminists have emancipatory ambitions. But their characteristic claims deprive us of the unqualified use of ideals such as truth and accuracy as instruments of social assessment, making it seem that we cannot without qualification represent sexist, racist, ableist, ageist and anti-trans ideologies as distorting the lives of those they allege to depict. And, as huge as this initial political downside is, there are much larger costs to not fully dismantling an aperspectival image of thought.

This aperspectival image is the source of the idea, engrained in our public culture, that accurate accounts of social relations must be value-neutral. Claims to neutrality in turn contribute to sustaining harmful sexist and racist ideologies. These claims disown the value-orientations they invariably have, and their concealed partisanship makes them fitting instruments for reinforcing unjust relations of domination.

These dynamics come more clearly into view from social-theoretical and historical perspectives. Interrelated strands of social theory, including those represented by theories of social reproduction, theories of racial capitalism and ecofeminist theories, reveal how sexist and racist ideologies are reliably reproduced by fundamental structures of capitalist forms of life. This social-theoretical corpus acquires additional interest alongside strands of historical research that tie the widespread acceptance of aperspectival epistemic ideals to political, economic and technological developments of capitalist modernity. What emerges is a picture of aperspectival ideals on which they are tied to the very capitalist structures that, according to many social theorists, reliably reproduce the modes of oppression that appeals to these ideals serve. The task of freeing ourselves from aperspectival—or

narrower—epistemic ideals in a thoroughgoing manner thus appears to be a crucial exercise of resistance, necessary for discerning values of, and to working toward, more just and sustainable forms of life.

The theoretical difference between taking one’s cue from Wittgenstein and following in the footsteps of post-structuralist feminism is far from politically trivial. It is the difference between directly challenging the image of our cognitive predicament that is part of the unfolding of global extractive capitalism and merely inverting this image in a manner that not only fails to fully disempower it but also deprives us of crucial critical instruments for fighting the most grievous injustices of our time.

Interview with Alice Crary from Nordic Wittgenstein Review 11 (2022), linked here.

In this interview in two parts—I. Wittgenstein and Feminism and II. Wittgenstein and Critical Theory—Crary discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations.

This interview is divided, appearing in two consecutive issues of this journal. It was done as a single exchange during the first weeks of January 2022. Part 2 came out first with part 1 above.

II. Wittgenstein and Critical Theory

You have opposed the image of Wittgenstein as conservative, showing in particular the ties between Wittgenstein and the project of immanent criticism, introduced by the early members of the Frankfurt School. Could you come back to the ties between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory and to the way Wittgenstein helps us to strengthen or revive the critical project?

CRARY: Even to get started talking about illuminating ties between Wittgenstein and Frankfurt School Critical Theory requires a long running start. Since Wittgenstein is often taken to be dealing in a conservative creed of very little interest to critical thinkers, it’s useful to know something about how he, and, to a lesser extent, other ordinary language philosophers, came to be seen as dealing in reactionary ideas. And it helps to know that members of the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse were involved in spreading the message and, further, that this failed reception of ordinary language philosophy contributed in its way to the shaping of the conceptual space in which, even today, much work in Critical Theory is done. Of course, we also need to be aware that there is longstanding resistance to conservative takes on the ideas of Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers. This is why in settings, such as this journal, in which alternative strategies of inheritance are well-known, it is not unduly shocking to claim that Wittgenstein’s writings are the source of critique-inspiring themes that can help to clarify and strengthen core ambitions of the Frankfurt tradition.

These ambitions first got articulated in late Weimar Germany when thinkers tied to Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research organized around the idea of a critical theory of society. The goal was a liberating picture of social life that would make it possible to free ourselves from ideologically distorted types of social compulsion. This picture would take seriously that practical attitudes mold notions we use in getting social relationships into focus. It would reflect those attitudes, and it would also aspire to a universal authority that involves “transcending” its “immanent” grounding. A major ambition of the Frankfurt School is a theory that qualifies as liberating and accurate because it manages to juggle these claims of immanence and transcendence, and the phrase standardly used for this project is “immanent critique.”

The history of attempts to specify how the desiderata of such critique might be satisfied is somewhat dauntingly involved. Some of the earliest efforts are also among the most straightforward. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer opposed suggestions of barriers to social thought that is, in the plainest sense, both immanently shaped by practical attitudes and possessed of context-transcending authority. Partly guided by the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and partly inspired by elements of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, they effectively taught that all critique is immanent critique. Subsequently, the tradition has issued in a striking array of different accounts of such critique, inheriting from, for instance, revisionary, institutionalist, discursive, and more orthodox versions of Kant’s moral theory, post-structuralist theory, and reconstructive takes on the procedures of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Within this welter of views, one consistent theme is that the demands of immanence and transcendence are in tension, and that theoretical maneuvering is required for their joint attainment. We are asked to believe it would be metaphysically exorbitant to treat values as in the world in a manner that would allow immanent modes of thought to be, without further ado, transcendently revelatory. An image of world-directed thought as value-neutral and aperspectival is thus introduced in a manner that seems to complicate the task of immanent critique, and it’s possible to get an overview of many of the accounts of immanent critique in circulation today by classifying different strategies for addressing these supposed complications.

There are contrary contributions to Critical Theory that revive inspirations of the early Frankfurt School. One clear case is the work of Rahel Jaeggi, who rejects the value-neutral conception of social understanding that bedevils the enterprise of immanent critique, arguing that characterizations of our forms of life call for inseparably descriptive and normative categories. Jaeggi encounters pushback from critics who, unsurprisingly, think her non-neutral view of social understanding disqualifies her from talking about context-transcendence. Yet even so she doesn’t directly defend the more relaxed image of world-directed thought with which she operates. Given the role of value-neutral epistemic ideals in resistance to attempts, like hers, to reclaim the critical enterprise, such a defense seems pressing, and it is here again that Wittgenstein has something distinctive to contribute. He is unyielding in tracing and attacking critique-thwarting value-neutral, aperspectival ideals of thought—and also in following up on ways in which these ideals continue to haunt our reflections even when we take ourselves to have exorcised them.

You have recently argued that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a valuable resource for ecofeminism. How does this go together with your appeals to Wittgenstein with respect to Critical Theory, and is there a connection with your work in critical animal studies?

CRARY: At one level, it’s very easy to answer this answer. Ecofeminism, as I understand it, is a critical theory in the spirit of the Frankfurt School, and it provides a theoretical framework of the sort needed for reimagining animal ethics so that it is responsive to forces devastating animal life on the planet. That second point is one I have developed in recent years with philosopher and ecofeminist Lori Gruen.

Ecofeminism is a roughly half century-old political and intellectual movement which identifies historical and structural ties between the catastrophic destruction of nature and the enduring subjection of women, the poor and colonized, racialized and other marginalized people. Its key practical injunction is that effective responses have to confront these wrongs together, and its main theoretical commitments include the following three interrelated strands of thought.

One strand of ecofeminist thought deals in historical narratives about how early modern Europe’s development of capitalist forms of social organization, and its colonizing zeal, were accompanied by new practices of treating animals and nature as mere objects of use, together with new practices of denigrating women, Indigenous and enslaved people. A second, Marxian strand is devoted to isolating larger political and economic structures capable of explaining this persistent alignment of the ruination of non-human nature and the subjugation of women and other marginalized human groups. And a third primarily philosophical strand of ecofeminist theorizing traces this coincidence to the overreach of the instrumental uses of reasons that capitalism accents, issuing a call to rethink reason so it can recover non-exchange values in the natural world and in human interactions. This last strand of thought converges with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s claims, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that a significant response to the advancing cataclysm must reimagine reason so that sensibility is integral to its exercise in getting the world in view. Ecofeminists likewise call for this kind of reworking of a dominant image of reason, and in this and other respects they inherit Critical Theory for our time.

This is the background for the work in animal ethics that I have undertaken with Gruen over the past several years—a significant portion of which will be published in our co-written book Animal Crisis, out this May. The heart of our project is a re-envisioning of the fifty-year-old academic discipline of animal ethics, which developed in a manner cut off from traditions of critical social thought devoted to exposing social structures with disastrous effects on humans and non-human nature. Many practices devastating to non-human animals are embedded in bigger institutions that are also the source of grievous wrongs to marginalized groups of humans. So, there is no way to grapple meaningfully with ethical questions about how to improve human-animal relationships without thoroughly reorienting animal ethics so that it is a form of critique. An important feature of our alternative method is thinking in response to the predicaments of animals in particular worldly contexts. We are consciously working in solidarity with ecofeminists and other critical theorists, and we draw attention to this aspect of our posture by calling the method “critical animal theory.”

Your work on Stanley Cavell extends your critical reading of Wittgenstein. Austin and Wittgenstein were very important for Cavell, in order to think democracy within our forms of life, to inscribe the ordinary at the heart of social criticism, or to propose a properly American political philosophy in the wake of Emerson or Thoreau. Could you go back to how you inherited Cavell’s important work and its fruitfulness within critical theory?

CRARY: Cavell was one of my teachers, a wonderful friend, and a model for me of how the pursuit of philosophy could be a confrontation with life’s challenges, not a mere professional technique. He is yet more than usually on my mind right now. Nancy Bauer, Sandra Laugier, and I—all of us advisors to his literary estate—have worked for several years on what will be the first volume of his Nachlass, a brilliant and engaging collection called Here and There: Sites of Philosophy, due out this April, which contains philosophical exercises that clearly express his distinctive voice.

In his accounts of his own philosophical development, Cavell treats his early encounter with J.L. Austin as decisive, explaining that Austin’s lectures provided him with a route to his own thinking. Of particular importance for him was Austin’s exhortation to attend to how words do things, together with Austin’s suggestion that doing so depends on our willingness to register and refine our feeling for language. When Cavell started to seriously read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,a few years afterward, he elaborated this image of our ways with words. Later he often discussed what he saw as substantial differences between Austin and Wittgenstein, but he credited both with powerful evocations of how the speaking of a language is inseparable from the engaged settings that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.”

That is the scene of Cavell’s distinctive conception of philosophy. Situated in what Cavell calls “the ordinary,” philosophy involves responsiveness to particular contexts, employing the categories available at a particular time and place, and it also reflects our drive capture how things really are. To philosophize is to negotiate between these two demands—in Here and There and elsewhere he represents the two as shores of a river that must be endlessly navigated—and an Austinian-Wittgensteinian image of language sheds light on how such negotiations can be locally resolved. Regarding the topic of ties between Cavell and the Frankfurt School, a key point is that we can redescribe Cavellian philosophizing as a balancing of the demands of immanence and transcendence. We can also say that Cavell favors an image of language that allows us to satisfy the demands of immanent critique—and that the seed for such critique is, for him, there in all true thinking.

These aren’t of course the terms that Cavell himself uses in reflecting on the social and political interest of ordinary language philosophy’s legacy. He tends to connect this tradition’s themes with lessons about democratic conversation in American philosophy, in particular, in the work of Emerson and Thoreau. Within such conversation in its optimal form, individuals’ contributions express their own judgment, where judgment is understood as presupposing the ability to register and develop their interests and attitudes. Though Cavell himself doesn’t make this point, this political vision converges strikingly with Hannah Arendt’s later work on judgment as a “specifically political capacity.” One of the vision’s central morals is that it is our responsibility as citizens to strive for conditions under which each of our fellows can judge. This is a far from unimportant message in the catastrophic times in which we live, in which political structures that treat so many human beings as fungible, and that devastate non-human animals and threaten all life on the planet, also veer toward depriving us of resources to judge otherwise, and so to resist.

The following is a 2020 interview conducted by Richard Marshall of the website 3:16. The full interview is available here.

‘It was already clear to me that mainstream research programs in …[philosophy of mind]…. depend for their fundamental structures on the narrower, or subjectivity-extruding, conception of objectivity. I was committed to developing an approach to mind that rejects these structures, making room for an account of mental concepts as metaphysically transparent and irreducibly ethical.’

‘The upshot is that there appears to be no room within ethics for humanistic thinking or artistic expression as such, and this represents a massive and practically catastrophic contraction of ethics.’

‘Members of the Frankfurt School were among those who helped disseminate a picture of Wittgenstein as recommending critique-stymying modes of thought. This includes, prominently, Herbert Marcuse, who, in One-Dimensional Man [1964], in an interpretative performance arguably less defensible even than Gellner’s—among other things, because it simply equated ordinary language philosophy with mainstream analytic philosophy—lambasted Wittgenstein for, as Marcuse saw it, limiting us to thinking that would destroy the possibility of critical awareness.’

‘If the topic is productive links between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, it is fair to say that Wittgenstein can serve as a guide to the recovery of critique as conceived by early members of the Frankfurt School. His writings contain resources for a powerful defense of the sort of “wider” account of rationality that accommodates an unqualified image of immanent critique, shedding light on its nature and on difficulties it poses.’

‘Cavell’s idea is that a democracy thrives when its members enjoy the freedom and resources to, identify, explore and express their particular interests and ambitions—while also respecting and responding to the interests and ambitions of their fellow citizens.’

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, getting animalsethically into view, philosophy and literature, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, and Critical Theory as well as on figures such as Austin, Cavell, Diamond, Foot, Murdoch and Wittgenstein. Here she discusses ethics and objectivity, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to ethics, why the arts and humanities are important for ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and the Frankfurt School, Cavell’s link to this as well, and finally Cavell’s approach to democracy.

3:16: What made you become a philosopher?

Alice Crary: When I arrived at Harvard in the mid 1980s to start my undergraduate studies, I wasn’t actively planning to study philosophy, but I was receptive to the idea. One factor was that I had a brilliant older sister, Jen, who had started a degree in philosophy at Dartmouth. The adults I most admired had been in involved in the civil rights movement, or overlapping social justice movements, and I was captivated by questions about what it would take to understand the world so that its injustices showed up in a manner that informed action on behalf of greater justice. Another factor in my starting in philosophy was that the Harvard Philosophy Department was then a welcoming place for someone with interests like mine.

Having begun, I found the idea of continuing with philosophy attractive. But it took some time for me to believe that this was a real possibility. I hadn’t previously known any academics, and it was easy to think, in an inchoate way, that these were people of a different kind, with skills that I was cut off from acquiring. So, my path to further study meandered. I explored some career paths that were more familiar to me—teaching, city politics—both while doing courses and while taking a year off from my studies. But eventually I focused on philosophy.

I had the great fortune of doing an undergraduate thesis with Hilary Putnam. I wrote on Wittgenstein’s later view of language, exploring themes that today are still important for me. I had already encountered the work of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, and I took my cue from them in emphasizing how, for Wittgenstein, our sensibility is implicated in our every discursive move. One of my claims was that this matters because of its implications for what is involved in improving our understanding of aspects of the world and our place in it. It follows from this image of discourse that making improvements here may call on us to make an effort of mind that isn’t merely or narrowly intellectual. It may call on us to shift our sense of importance, and in this sense to work on ourselves.

The experience of having my undergraduate thesis accepted as a serious piece of philosophical work is what launched me. By the time I arrived at graduate school—at the University of Pittsburgh—a year later, there was wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. Being able to investigate pressing questions about the nature of moral and social life seemed like, and still seems like, a tremendous gift. It’s not that I didn’t have any difficulties after that. There were subsequent occasions on which I was painfully pressed to ask whether I could go on in philosophy. But I never lost the desire to do so.

3:16: You tend to represent moral realism as a push-back position against an ethically indifferent metaphysics. Wouldn’t it be easier to just say that no metaphysics has anything important to say about ethics and go from there?

AC: I need to rephrase this question slightly in order to answer it. “Moral realism” is a label that I deliberately don’t use in describing my image of ethics. Not that, abstractly considered, the term is obviously ill-suited to capture things I believe. It is, for instance, a conviction of mine that that there are morally salient aspects of the world that as such lend themselves to empirical discovery. A case could easily be made for speaking of moral realism in this connection. But that would likely generate confusion. When I claim that, say, humans and animals have moral qualities that are as such observable, I work with an understanding of what the world is like, and of what is involved in knowing it, that is foreign to familiar discussions of moral realism. These discussions are often structured by the assumption that objectivity excludes anything that is only adequately conceivable in terms of reference to human subjectivity. Moral realism is frequently envisioned as an improbable position on which moral values are objective in this subjectivity-extruding sense while still somehow having a direct bearing on action and choice. Thus does the specter of Mackie’s “argument from queerness” still haunt the halls of moral philosophy.

A great deal of my work has been devoted to investigating the grip on the contemporary philosophical imagination of conceptions of objectivity—of the sorts operative in these conversations about moral realism—that take the expulsion of everything subjective as their hallmarks. I have repeatedly argued that restrictions these conceptions impose on what kinds of things count as objective are not justified by the ultimately weak considerations adduced in the conceptions’ favor. I have tried to show not only that we should reject the restrictions but also that doing so is urgent because necessary for getting morally and politically salient aspects of our lives into view. That is why the well-worn label “moral realism,” used in reference to my work in ethics, is likely to mislead. It is likely to mislead because I start from a metaphysical posture that is foreign to most accounts of what moral realism is like.

All of this bears on how to characterize the role of metaphysical considerations in my work in ethics. The outlook I defend is partly characterized by the lifting of a priori restrictions that seem to prevent anything only understandable in terms of subjective responses from qualifying as objective. If the absence of such prior constraints is equated with the absence of metaphysics, then, indeed, it seems reasonable to speak in reference to my work of a kind of abstention from metaphysics. I can certainly see the point of this gloss. But I find it more helpful to describe matters differently. To talk about a thinker’s “metaphysics” is, for me, to talk about the kinds of things they do recognize, or are prepared to recognize, as woven into the real fabric of the world. Insofar as I call for raising restrictions that are standardly imposed on the kinds of things that can thus count as real, it makes sense to say, not that I have opted out of the business of metaphysics, but that I have a relatively liberal or relaxed metaphysical posture. That is the point of some of my terms of art. It is what I am signaling when I say I favor a “wider” conception of objectivity. I mean a conception loose or wide enough to encompass, inter alia, ethical values.

3:16: What is Wittgenstein’s irregular conception of mind, and why does it matter to you?

AC: Two related trains of thought led me to the Wittgenstein-influenced intervention in philosophy of mind that is central to Inside Ethics. One has to do with a respect in which my book Beyond Moral Judgment came to seem to me to be incomplete. There I defend the wider conception of objectivity, appealing to it in arguing that there are morally significant features of the world that are as such observable. I describe this metaphysical shift with an eye to challenging received assumptions about what moral thought is like—to showing not only that sensitivities are essential to our ability to follow rational lines of moral thought but, further, that we may need to refine or further develop our sensitivities in order to make the connections constitutive of such lines of thought. Some of the “widely rational” stretches of thought that I discuss feature not moral concepts but concepts for different aspects of mind. That moral thought need not involve specifically moral concepts is a leitmotif of Beyond Moral Judgment. What I came to regard as a lacuna is I didn’t explain how mental concepts are essentially morally inflected.

A second train of thought suggested the need for an analogous incursion into philosophy of mind. As a graduate student I began researching and teaching animal ethics. I sympathized with advocates who were appalled by awful things humans do to animals and who wanted to show that animals merit radically better treatment. But I couldn’t accept many of the most influential arguments. These arguments tend to presuppose, wrongly in my view, that the task of getting animals empirically into view in a manner relevant to ethics is one not for ethics proper but for disciplines presumed to be outside ethics. Once it had struck me that this presupposition structures major contributions to animal ethics, it hit me that I could describe Beyond Moral Judgment as challenging similar presuppositions about what is involved in getting human beings empirically into view for ethics. That is what led me to see my early book as lacking an account of the irredeemably moral character of mental concepts. By the time it seemed important to me to be able to give such an account, I also wanted to show that the concepts we use in talking about animal minds are likewise ineliminably ethical.

These two trains of thought are what directed my attention to philosophy of mind in Inside Ethics. It was already clear to me that mainstream research programs in this subdiscipline depend for their fundamental structures on the narrower, or subjectivity-extruding, conception of objectivity. I was committed to developing an approach to mind that rejects these structures, making room for an account of mental concepts as metaphysically transparent and irreducibly ethical. A number of considerations speak for here turning to Wittgenstein. Some of the most widely discussed passages from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy—his famous remarks on rule-following and his treatment of privacy—aim to discredit narrower conceptions of objectivity and accommodate wider alternatives; Wittgenstein adopts a widely objective stance in adducing considerations for an account of mental concepts as essentially world-guided and irredeemably ethical; and the account of mental concepts that thus emerges from his thought can be shown to have a straightforward bearing on animal minds as well as on human ones. Taken together, these points provide the basic contours of Wittgenstein’s irregular image of mind. Here, in a phrase, is why the image matters to me. To accept it is to allow that humans and animals have moral qualities that are as such open to view—and that they are, in this sense, inside ethics.

3:16: Do you think that denying ethically rich insights from the arts and humanities into ethics hampers our ability to see harms done to both people and animals?

AC: That would be a way to capture part of the practical motivation for my work in ethics. I attack the view—which I describe as narrowly rational—that it is in theory possible to grasp any real connection of thought from an abstract, ethically neutral vantage point. I do so to show that there are ethically decisive considerations that this view leaves us unequipped to recognize, and I take an interest in work in the different humanities, as well as in literature and the other arts, because such work affords resources for uncovering things inaccessible to an abstract gaze.

Humanistic and artistic productions characteristically lead us to consider aspects of the world from particular, ethically charged perspectives. Anyone operating in a narrowly rational logical space effectively imposes severe constraints on how such productions can contribute to understanding. To be sure, moral philosophers routinely make use of material from, say, poems, novels, historical narratives and films. But, insofar as they respect narrowly rational constraints, they are obliged to regard whatever they cull from these works as available to thought independently of any evaluative perspectives the works invite us to adopt. They cannot help but take any insights with which they credit the works to be extractable in the sense of being there independently of aesthetic qualities in virtue of which the works inculcate these perspectives. The upshot is that there appears to be no room within ethics for humanistic thinking or artistic expression as such, and this represents a massive and practically catastrophic contraction of ethics. Within my ethical writings, alongside showing that this contraction is philosophically unjustifiable, I bring out how it is morally disastrous—among other things, by identifying harms to human beings and animals that it leaves us incapable of registering.

3:16: Is there an interesting link between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the Frankfurt school? And could Cavell also be so linked?

AC: There are in fact many links—links that, properly seen, can contribute productively to how we conceive of liberating social thought. To be sure, it would be possible to tell a story—it is one has yet to be adequately told—about how some of these links have been either overlooked or distorted beyond recognition. A plausible telling would have to reach back to 1959, when Ernest Gellner published Words and Things, arguing that Wittgenstein was advocating a cramped and uncritical take on philosophical and political questions. Gellner’s book was widely recognized by philosophers as the shoddy piece of interpretative work that it was, but that didn’t keep it from starting a high-profile, transatlantic discussion about the allegedly reactionary bent of Wittgensteinian “ordinary language philosophy,” setting the tone for subsequent Wittgenstein exegesis, which has witnessed the publication of at least one major book on Wittgenstein’s supposed conservativism every decade since, with an even higher count if we include the writings of the many commentators who represent Wittgenstein as reactionary simply in virtue of purportedly depicting everyday linguistic usage as inviolable. Members of the Frankfurt School were among those who helped disseminate a picture of Wittgenstein as recommending critique-stymying modes of thought. This includes, prominently, Herbert Marcuse, who, in One-Dimensional Man [1964], in an interpretative performance arguably less defensible even than Gellner’s—among other things, because it simply equated ordinary language philosophy with mainstream analytic philosophy—lambasted Wittgenstein for, as Marcuse saw it, limiting us to thinking that would destroy the possibility of critical awareness.

There has been pushback against this internally varied image of Wittgenstein’s supposed conservatism since as early as the mid 1970s. Incidentally, one of my very first articles, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought” [2000] was a contribution to this opposition. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the image of Wittgenstein-as-conservative continues to resonate. While many of those who advocate it do so as champions of the left, those who resist, striving to bring out the interest of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for critical social thought, are hampered by ideologically contorted institutional settings in which “Wittgensteinian” has become a term of political and philosophical abuse.

That is a very condensed explanation of why it has been difficult to see that there are important lines of filiation between Wittgenstein and members of the Frankfurt School. What gets missed is that Wittgenstein equips us to advance what is arguably the signature project of the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research. In the late 1930s, affiliates of the Institute began to describe themselves as in agreement in their quest for a “critical theory of society.” What they sought under this heading was an undistorted account of our social circumstances that would equip us to liberate ourselves from ideologically-disguised forms of social coercion. Such a theory was envisioned as one that would affirm the idea that attitudes we have as participants in social practices shape the concepts available to us to understand our lives. It would do this by beginning from practical attitudes in a way that established the resulting theorizing as “immanent.” This immanent aspect was conceived as existing side-by-side with a universal or context-independent authority, and, bearing in mind this pair of aims, thinkers who identified with aspirations of the Frankfurt school started to talk about themselves as united in their commitment to the enterprise of “immanent critique.”

Some of the thinkers who belong to the Frankfurt School’s first generation had distinctive views of how this project was best carried out. Partly drawing on a conception of our cognitive predicament inherited from Hegel’s Phenomenology, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno represented themselves as entitled to an understanding of rationality that is “wider” in my sense, with the result that it appeared to them that there are no genuine obstacles to saying that social criticism that is indelibly inflected by practical attitudes, and thus immanent, can be rationally sound, thereby qualifying as full-blooded critique.

But, in intervening years, the idea that we can thus straightforwardly arrive at a notion of immanent critique fell out of favor. One of the formative episodes in the development of Critical Theory was an intense quarrel with positivism in philosophy and sociology in the 1960s and 1970s. Although in this context members of the Frankfurt School were in conversation with Anglo-analytic philosophy, they remained seemingly unaware—and the bit of political-intellectual history I just recited helps to explain why—that two of the most devastating attacks on positivistic modes of thought from within British philosophical circles had been launched precisely by Wittgenstein and Austin. This led to some keen historical ironies, such as Jürgen Habermas’s use of aspects of Austin’s work on speech acts for allegedly anti-positivistic project—his discourse ethics—that Austin himself would have regarded as retaining key positivistic presuppositions. More fundamentally it helps to make sense of the fact that contemporary members of the Frankfurt School largely count as parts of their intellectual inheritance both an avowed antipathy to positivism and a residually positivistic hostility to objective ethical values—as well as to the wider conception of rationality that would be needed to accommodate a worldly terrain partly made up of such values. This stance appears to problematize the task of arriving at a satisfactory account of immanent critique. A reasonable approach to organizing the different accounts of immanent critique currently available today is to depict them as efforts to attain core aims of critical theory while respecting the constraints of what I call a narrower conception of rationality. This, in my view, is like trying to jump with one’s feet pinned to the floor.

If the topic is productive links between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, it is fair to say that Wittgenstein can serve as a guide to the recovery of critique as conceived by early members of the Frankfurt School. His writings contain resources for a powerful defense of the sort of “wider” account of rationality that accommodates an unqualified image of immanent critique, shedding light on its nature and on difficulties it poses. While it is true that Wittgenstein, for all his allusions to the “darkness of [his] time,” does not proceed with the minutely sensitive sociological attention to horrors of modernity that is characteristic of Adorno, it is also true that he is an unparalleled critic of ways in which narrower or positivistic modes of thought, of sorts detrimental to critique, creep back into our thought even at moments at which we are endeavoring to free ourselves from them.

Stanley Cavell has an important place in this stretch of the history of philosophy. Cavell’s marvelously sensitive and faithful reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, presented in its fundamentals already in the early 1960s, represented the decisive challenge to the more dominant narrative about Wittgenstein’s supposed reactionary strain. A key focus of Cavell’s own reflections on the political and social significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was on connections between its themes and ideals of democratic conversation in American philosophy, above all, in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell also influenced a number of thinkers who directly contested the suggestion that Wittgenstein’s thought was somehow irredeemably conservative. This includes the political theorist Hannah Pitkin, who in 1972 produced the first book-length rebuttal to the sorts of views of Wittgenstein advanced by Gellner, Marcuse et al., and it also includes Cavell’s colleague Putnam—whose great sympathy with Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein led to his co-teaching a course on the Philosophical Investigations with him—and who used Wittgensteinian ideas in treatments over many decades of issues in social and political philosophy, including in an extended critical engagement with the work of Habermas.

3:16: How does Cavell help us to be a citizen in Trump’s America, or any other profoundly messed up nation?

AC: Throughout his work, Cavell develops an image of democracy as, in its optimal form, a conversation in which each individual’s participation reflects the exercise of their own judgment. Cavell sometimes spells out the demands of judging in a manner that presupposes a Wittgensteinian thought to the effect that our operations with words necessarily reflect our sense of the importance of the similarities among contexts of their use. The idea is that to judge, to think for oneself, essentially involves drawing on and developing our own sensibility. A view on these lines is what underlies Cavell’s characteristic exhortations to us to pay attention to what we ourselves find striking and take seriously and question our own reactions. That, as he sees it, is a key responsibility we shoulder as citizens of the imperfect societies in which we find ourselves.

Cavell’s idea is that a democracy thrives when its members enjoy the freedom and resources to, identify, explore and express their particular interests and ambitions—while also respecting and responding to the interests and ambitions of their fellow citizens. He invites us to see that our most solemn obligation as human beings and citizens in—to use Charles Mills’ term of art—the “ill-ordered” societies in which we live is to do all we can to ensure that these conditions obtain. That is how, to use the language of your question, Cavell helps us to be citizens in Trump’s America. He rallies us by urging us to recognize that to deliberately erode the conditions for individual judgment—for instance, by exploiting existing social resentments and fanning them into unthinking enthusiasms, indifferent to the difference between truth and lie—is to do nothing less than issue an existential threat to democratic politics.

3:16: For the curious readers here at 3:16, are there five books other than your own that you can recommend to take us further into your philosophical world?

AC: Here are five books that, of late, I have been reading, or returning to and re-reading, finding them helpful to think with.

(1) Over the last year, I undertook to read Hannah Arendt’s work chronologically, at least as far as possible, and one collection I found myself pausing over is The Promise of Politics and, more specifically, the essay “Socrates,” which develops a vision of politics that I find appealing and arresting partly for its similarity to Cavell’s.

(2) Having long worked in the area of philosophy and animals, I have alsobeen reading my way into environmental philosophy. One work that left its mark on my thinking—unsurprisingly, given its massive influence—is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

3) My investigations in environmental philosophy sparked my interest in ongoing conversations, in the humanities and social sciences, that presuppose that, in order to make sense of anthropogenic climate change, we need to find a way to bring together, on the one hand, critical histories about inequalities and grave injustices and, on the other, a natural history of the human species. These topics brought to my mind debates in moral philosophy that I have participated in about the possibility of a satisfactory ethical naturalism, and they also brought to my mind a literary author, W.G. Sebald, whom I admire and have written about partly because he consistently describes human beings in a manner that is simultaneously critical and natural-historical, perhaps with greatest virtuosity in his book Austerlitz.

(4) For the last several years, I have been extending my work in the area of philosophy and animals, writing about how invidious comparisons to animals are used to degrade and marginalize groups of humans, and, among the many works I have read about historical and actual forms of such animalization, one that stands out, for the light it sheds on the violent, capital-driven creation of categories of race and sex that still structure U.S. society today, is Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, about the horrific treatment of African women in the early English colonies.

(5) One of my preoccupations in thinking about animalizing ideologies is to show that a politically farsighted response has to involve, alongside a commitment to resisting the wrongs to human beings that they represent, a willingness to revalue the lives of other animals so that they are no longer conceived as “lower” beings. One book that has made at least as much of a mark on my thinking about these matters as any other, and that I have taught and returned to, is Claire Jean Kim’s Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age.

Get in Touch

alicemcrary@gmail.com

alice.crary@regents.ox.ac.uk

crarya@newschool.edu

Alice Crary

Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor, NSSR

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If It Can Happen at The New School …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Metaphysics and Morals: How four women defended ethical thought from the legacy of positivism

I. Wittgenstein and Feminism

II. Wittgenstein and Critical Theory