Review: American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration

American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory #

Edited by Sander Verhaegh De Gruyter, 2025 (De Gruyter History of Philosophy and Science, vol. 1)

Verhaegh, Sander, ed. 2025. American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-133498-1. Open access.

The intellectual migration of the 1930s and 1940s is one of those subjects everyone in philosophy knows in outline and almost no one has studied in full. Carnap fled to Chicago, Arendt to the New School, Adorno and Horkheimer to Columbia and then back to Frankfurt: the canonical stories get told and retold. American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration, collecting papers from a 2022 Tilburg conference that launched an ERC/NWO research project on "Exiled Empiricists," sets out to do something more ambitious than retell those stories. It wants to correct the record on how many people were actually involved, and it wants to show that the migration's effects ran through logical empiricism, phenomenology, and critical theory alike, not just through the handful of émigrés who became famous. It partly succeeds at both goals, and the ways it falls short are instructive.

The database is the real contribution #

Sander Verhaegh's introduction does something no chapter that follows quite matches: it builds a table. Working through the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars' records, the 1942 APA inventory of exiled philosophers, Laura Fermi's 1968 study, Bat-Ami Zucker's visa-category analysis, and the University of Jena's Digitale Datenbank Exilphilosophie, Verhaegh assembles a list of 178 displaced philosophers who spent time in the United States between 1931 and 1945, broadly defined to include physicists, classicists, and sociologists who trained in philosophy or worked closely with philosophical movements. Every prior estimate, he shows, undercounts for a specific reason: Fermi only tracked the successful, the 1942 APA inventory only covered people still looking for work, the 1947 immigration report used a definition of "philosopher" narrow enough to exclude Alfred Tarski and Erich Fromm.

The payoff of this work is not just a bigger number. It is a corrective to the shape of the historical narrative. Standard accounts of the migration foreground success stories, which means they foreground people like Carnap, who got a tenured chair at Chicago, over people like Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, a Polish-Jewish logician working on probability whom Nagel, Quine, Hempel, and Tarski all tried and failed to place at an American institution. She was shot by the Gestapo in 1942. Verhaegh's table makes room for that story alongside the more comfortable ones, and it does so with real methodological care about who counts and why. This is exactly the kind of infrastructural scholarship that will outlast the volume built on top of it; future historians of the migration will be citing Table 1 long after they've stopped citing the chapters.

Twelve case studies, four uneven parts #

The book's other half is a set of twelve chapters sorted into four sections: American Philosophy (pragmatism and naturalism), Phenomenology, Logical Empiricism, and Critical Theory and Political Philosophy. Each chapter is a genuine archival contribution. Cheryl Misak traces C.I. Lewis's engagement with the exiled empiricists; George Reisch and Adam Tamas Tuboly reconstruct Philipp Frank's campaign to revive the Unity of Science movement from Harvard; Fons Dewulf explains why voluntarism, a live option in Vienna, found no takers among American logical empiricists.

The strongest chapter I sampled is Thomas Wheatland's "Philosophical Flaschenpost," on Max Horkheimer's attempts to win over Sidney Hook and Ernest Nagel. Wheatland's argument is genuinely dialectical: Horkheimer was right that Critical Theory and Hook's Marxian pragmatism shared real philosophical ground, both trying to rescue Marxism as a social-scientific method rather than a doctrine, both working through the same Hegelian inheritance. But Horkheimer pursued that shared ground by way of immanent critique aimed at demolishing his interlocutors' positions rather than building on the overlap, and the strategy backfired into permanent animosity. Wheatland's twist is that this diagnosis of failure at the center comes paired with a story of success at the margins: Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Fromm, working with less confrontational tactics, did the quiet work that let Critical Theory take root in American thought by the 1960s. It is a chapter that uses close archival reading (unpublished letters to Salka Viertel and Erich Fromm, in one case) to complicate a settled story rather than just confirm it.

The trouble is structural rather than chapter-by-chapter. Twelve case studies drawn from the attendees of a single conference is not the same thing as a systematic account of the migration's philosophical effects, and the volume doesn't quite claim it is one, but it also doesn't fully own the gap. Some sections carry four chapters, others three; genuinely central figures in the standard story of the migration—Arendt above all, but also Cassirer and Strauss beyond the single chapter each gets folded into—appear only as supporting cast in essays organized around someone else. The four-part division itself repeats a problem visible in comparable reference works on adjacent territory: "American Philosophy," "Phenomenology," "Logical Empiricism," and "Critical Theory and Political Philosophy" mix a period label, a method label, and two school labels, so the parts don't sit at a consistent level of description even though they read as parallel. A reader who wants Critical Theory's full American reception, rather than the slice Wheatland, Schliesser, and Dyzenhaus happened to write about, has to look elsewhere.

A first installment, not a synthesis #

None of this is really a complaint about quality; it is a reminder of what kind of book this is. The conference that generated it marked the start of a five-year research project (2022–27), and the volume reads accordingly, as a promissory note backed by unusually strong collateral. The database in the introduction is the collateral. The chapters demonstrate, convincingly, that the migration's American story runs well beyond the logical empiricists who usually get credit for it, into phenomenology's reception through Alfred Schutz's influence on the feminist sociology of Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins, and into a critical-theory story where failure at the top made room for success elsewhere. What the book does not yet offer is a synthesis that would let a reader place Wheatland's Horkheimer alongside Ierna's phenomenologists and Katzav's philosophers of science within one coherent account of how the migration remade American philosophy. That synthesis may be exactly what the remaining years of the Exiled Empiricists project are meant to produce.

Verdict #

This is a useful, honest, and open-access book for anyone working on twentieth-century philosophy's institutional history, and the introduction alone justifies a place in any research library on the subject: 178 names, carefully sourced, is not a small thing to hand the field. Read as a set of case studies rather than a synthetic history, the twelve chapters that follow deliver real archival payoff, Wheatland's chapter especially. Read as the definitive account of how the migration reshaped American philosophy, the book is not there yet, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is the first, well-documented installment of a project still in progress.