If John Emerson is correct, The Man may have started this shift with the introduction of the oversized Prince racquet.

What I see happening was a move away from all ideology in the direction of a sort of technocracy. In various areas formalization and statistics became dominant.

Many of the logical positivists et al were leftists (although Wittgenstein’s socialism, for example, was moderate by European standards). They seem to have been warmly accepted as long as they bracketed out their politics, which most of them did. (Irving Copi, an actual Communist at one point, wrote almost entirely about formal logic.)

In the aftermath of the disaster of WWII it was quite reasonable that a lot of continental thinkers might want to ditch their previous political committments, of course. I’m not really alleging either opportunism or oppression.

Reading Mirowski it’s pretty clear that the post-WWII context was technocratic American liberal imperialism, not any of the forms of American rightism (Christian, nativist, or free-marketer—the American right was pretty lame in 1950).

My beef is that the philosophy produced does not do well on big-idea, world-view type questions, and effectively limits itself to making fine-tuning adjustments within a very narrow ideological framework. I’m aware that there’s a lot of stuff out there, but I find it weak (partly because of aggressively non-populist methodologism). I followed Left2Right’s stuff for awhile, and it seems to me that analytic philosophy just doesn’t work that way; only analytic philosophers could be interested in that.

Evidence of the rather quick and dramatic death of Idealism in Britian is easier to come by when we look at old issues of Mind and IJE. These journals were most clearly dominated by Idealists (in particular, figures like Mackenzie and Muirhead) until the start of WWI. We then see a dramatic shift. I certainly grant that their opponents were gaining strength since the turn of the century, but the onset of WWI seems to have really helped the cause. Indeed, British Idealists, not least Muirhead, found themselves going to fairly considerable lengths to justify their interest in a way of doing/thinking about philosophy that had strong roots in Germany during WWI (most dramatically true with Muirhead’s aforementioned pamphlet on Germans vs German philosophy that is quite a curious read).

Whilst it is most true that the rise of Moore coincided with the fall of the Idealists, as it were, I would want to state differently the way the movement died. The “death” seemed to be more in the form of its failure to gain new, significant members (with important exceptions, such as Collingwood, Oakeshott, etc) rather than its knights lay on their swords. Figures such as Sir Hector Hetherington, Sir Henry Jones, Mackenzie, etc continued to do great work both in writing (esp Jones and Mackenzie) and in society: Jones and Hetherington, for example, helped create universities in Wales. Muirhead helped pioneer Birmingham University. Indeed, Brum boasts both the Muirhead Tower and Muirhead Library. I once commented to a dear friend, Simon Caney, how wonderful it was to see buildings commemorate Muirhead—-yet he’d never heard of him. Of course, Muirhead was a major figure even post-war. His edited series “The Muirhead Library” published any number of important works, such as Bradley’s Knowledge & Appearance, the first translation of Hegel’s PhG, Radhakrishnan’s and Russell’s early work, etc. Post-WWII their numbers depleted as they died off, as it were. Now, thankfully, interest in British Idealism is taking off yet again both with an eye towards understanding its past and developing its future—-I’m particularly interested in this second part.

There was time (pre-WWI) when one couldn’t pick up an academic journal that wasn’t dominated by the Idealists. When I went to write papers on both the decline of British Idealism and also on Hetherington, Muirhead, and Mackenzie, I was struck by the fact that about nothing had been written on these persons for at least fifty years. Perhaps we don’t know much about what happened with the split from Idealism because we simply haven’t thought about it much. I certainly share some this blame as well.

Apparently there was also a brief movement in the UK in this direction, but no idea if it survived.

On another point, the left-or-right credentials of founding analytic figures, of course several of the members of the Vienna Circle had socialist views.