Analytic philosophy after Quine is best understood not only as an intellectual project but as a formation shaped by political pressures, institutional incentives, and shifting ideas about what counted as “proper” philosophical work. Students often encounter Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism as an internal critique—a technical assault on the analytic/synthetic distinction—but Schuringa’s history shows that this moment coincided with a dramatic political reorganisation of American intellectual life. As logical positivism fractured under the weight of Quine’s critiques, the discipline rebuilt itself in ways that aligned—consciously or not—with the political atmosphere of the Cold War, the consolidation of liberal capitalism, and the bureaucratisation of the university. To appreciate the major themes of analytic philosophy after Quine, it is necessary to trace how the collapse of positivism intersected with McCarthyism, the rise of RAND-style technocracy, the policing of dissent, and the professionalisation of departments across the United States.
Quine’s challenge arrived just as analytic philosophy was securing a new institutional dominance. In Two Dogmas, he argued that no principled distinction exists between truths grounded in meaning and those grounded in fact, because appeals to “synonymy” presuppose the very analytic notions they aim to define. As Schuringa notes, this critique destabilised the core assumptions of logical positivism at the very moment the movement appeared to have triumphed in the US university system. Sellars’s demolition of the “myth of the given” in 1956 only sharpened the sense of internal crisis. Yet this crisis did not weaken analytic philosophy’s rise. Instead, it fostered a shift toward new forms of rigour—forms that emphasised formalisation, technical precision, and a stance of political neutrality. These were not merely intellectual preferences; they were conditions of survival in a United States where overt political critique—especially anything tinged with Marxism—was treated as suspicion-worthy. Schuringa highlights how McCarthyism exerted a chilling effect on academics, shutting down forms of philosophical work that sought to challenge the “neutralism” newly associated with analytic method. Loyalty oaths, investigations, and the fear of informants encouraged scholars to identify with an image of philosophy as apolitical, scientific, and insulated from ideological commitments.
At the same time, analytic philosophers increasingly entered spaces—such as the RAND Corporation—that were deeply entangled with Cold War political aims. RAND, funded by the military and built on wartime research structures, offered analytic philosophers both prestige and material support. Figures such as Reichenbach, Quine, Davidson, and Rescher worked within this technocratic environment, contributing to projects that assumed the modelling of rational agents, optimisation under constraints, and game-theoretic decision-making as central tools for understanding human behaviour. These frameworks seeped back into the philosophical mainstream, helping shape the emerging conception of analytic philosophy as a discipline grounded in formal models rather than historical, social, or ideological critique. What seemed like an internal disciplinary shift—toward decision theory, rational choice, and “Cold War rationality”—was simultaneously a political one: analytic philosophy increasingly aligned itself with projects meant to stabilise and legitimise liberal capitalism in the face of perceived threats.
The political pressures that shaped the post-positivist landscape also help explain why analytic philosophy so rapidly achieved institutional dominance. In the 1930s, American departments were diverse: pragmatism, idealism, phenomenology, and even Marxism found academic homes. After the war, however, analytic philosophy consolidated its position with remarkable speed. At Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton, conversions to analytic methodology were swift; departments that resisted the shift lost prestige. Schuringa criticises explanations that attribute this merely to “journal capture” or citation networks. Such accounts mirror the analytic tendency to treat social and political forces as external or irrelevant. Instead, he argues, the alignment of analytic philosophy with neutrality, formalism, and scientific rhetoric made it politically congenial to administrators who wanted to avoid the controversies associated with continental philosophy, critical theory, or politically engaged work. The very image of the analytic philosopher—as a technician of concepts rather than a critic of society—fit neatly into the Cold War university’s desire for compliance, order, and depoliticised scholarship.
Yet analytic philosophy after Quine was not simply the story of an increasingly narrow formalist programme. The period also saw the surprising return of metaphysics through the revival of modal logic. Schuringa draws attention to Max Cresswell’s suggestion that the politics of logic mattered: many early modal logicians—Ruth Barcan Marcus, C. I. Lewis, Arthur Prior—stood to Quine’s political left, and the resistance to modal logic may have reflected more than just technical disagreement. Regardless, by the 1970s and 1980s, the works of Kripke and David Lewis normalised modal notions, enabling a resurgence of metaphysics that would have been unthinkable to earlier positivists. This revival occurred within the insulated, professionalised, and politically quietistic environment analytic philosophy had built for itself. The metaphysics that returned was not a speculative cosmology but a highly technical, model-theoretic enterprise—one compatible with the discipline’s commitment to neutrality and formal precision.
The eventual re-emergence of political philosophy within the analytic tradition followed a similar trajectory. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice marked a major renaissance for normative theory, yet Rawls’s training and early intellectual environment were deeply shaped by RAND and Cold War rationality. His model of justice as fairness—constructed through hypothetical, idealised rational agents—arguably reflects the technocratic ethos that analytic philosophy had absorbed. Rather than reintroducing historically situated critique or engaging with radical traditions, Rawls framed political philosophy as a quasi-formal problem of choice behind a veil of ignorance. In this sense, political philosophy returned, but in a way that preserved the image of analytic philosophy as neutral, methodologically individualist, and detached from structural critique.
A fuller awareness of this history alters the way students should understand analytic philosophy after Quine. Rather than seeing the field’s developments as purely internal—shifts in logic, meaning, and metaphysics—Schuringa encourages us to view analytic philosophy as a formation shaped by external political forces. Neutrality, formalism, and technocratic precision were historically situated responses to the Cold War university, not timeless philosophical virtues. Similarly, the marginalisation of phenomenology, critical theory, and politically engaged work reflected not philosophical inferiority but institutional decisions shaped by fear, ideology, and the demands of a liberal-capitalist order. Analytic philosophy’s evolution after Quine is therefore inseparable from the political conditions in which it grew: the collapse of positivism, the enforcement of academic neutrality, the rise of RAND, and the disciplining of intellectual life. Understanding this makes it possible to read post-Quine analytic philosophy both within and against the world that helped form it.