Foundations Shaken but Not Stirred 85of both concepts and speech. This close, finely honed attention to concepts made
it less overtly ambitious. In fact some would say it made it distinctly conservative.
Treatises could be and were written on single concepts. There was no room for broad-
ranging metaphysical speculation, philosophical systems, or creative linkages between
diverse areas of human experience. The whole enterprise of philosophical analysis had
become infinitely more concentrated or focused.
However, the negative reaction to idealism was part of a more general reaction
toanyforeign philosophical import. Philosophical refugees or asylum seekers were
treated harshly. This became particularly persistent during and immediately after both
the First and Second World Wars. One irony here is that the major impetus to both
logical positivism and linguistic philosophy also came from Germany and Austria
particularly, although many would add, of course, that these movements nonetheless
allowed a rediscovery of a latent British empiricist tradition going back to Hobbes,
Locke, Hume, and Mill. This negative reaction to foreign imports marked out the
general attitude of British, and much American philosophy, largely up to the late
1980s. Initially, in the 1930s period, the negativity was to idealism and Hegelianism
in particular. The ghosts of this negative reaction to Hegel carried over for several
decades. The negativity then moved, almost imperceptibly, in the 1950s and 1960s,
to a disquiet with the claims of Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, and Freu-
dianism. The major figure to be standardly vilified by analytic philosophy from the
1950s up to the 1980s was Martin Heidegger; the intellectual fastidiousness concern-
ing his relation with Nazism being a major undercurrent. However, by the 1980s and
1990s, analytical philosophy had a newbête-noirto surpass the rest—postmodernism
and poststructuralism, the names Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault becoming, in
some cases, virtually demonized. Thus analytic philosophy has largely flourished not
so much by what it has produced as by what it has opposed.
The heyday of this movement in analytic political philosophy was largely between
the 1940s and early 1980s. In many ways analytical theorywasan inheritor of an
empiricist tendency. Some of the basic distinctions between, for example, logical or
analytic and empirical propositions can be found, in a slightly cruder format, in David
Hume’s writings, amongst others. In general, for those educated in political theory in
the English-speaking world during this period, analytical political theory was the most
significant aspect of political theory—usually subsisting in an uneasy collegiality with
the history of political thought. Analytic theorists took a similar attitude to the history
of political theory as behaviouralists, namely, that the canon was a potential source
of not so much testable hypotheses as certain interesting arguments and concepts,
which could be critically engaged with. The growth of this analytical perspective
initially coincided directly with the triumphant rise of empirical political theory,
behavioural political science, and the end of ideology debates of the 1950s and 1960s.
The relation between these was not fortuitous. There was some mutual massaging
taking place. Empirical political science could pose as the ‘first order’ provider of
genuine empirical political knowledge, for which analytical political philosophy could
function as a ‘second order’ handmaid, clarifying speech and logic, and acting as a
philosophical gatekeeper for genuine social science.