In fact, Malisoff (and others) did not “welcome all points of view.” This was clearly signaled in the editorial he wrote for the first issue of the journal: “We have representatives of practically all the shades of opinion . . . radicals, progressives, a few tried veterans of established philosophic fashion, but no reactionaries” (Malisoff 1934, 3; emphasis added).
Who were these “reactionaries” who were so explicitly excluded from the journal? The term is notorious as a designation bestowed on the left’s opponents. A possible hint about what type of thinker was meant to be covered by that label is to be found in a letter from Rudolf Carnap (one of the members of the original editorial board) to Karl Popper on February 9, 1946:
I was somewhat surprised to see your acknowledgement of [Friedrich] von Hayek. I have not read his book [The Road to Serfdom] myself; it is much read and discussed in this country, but praised mostly by the protagonists of free enterprise and unrestricted capitalism, while all leftists regard him as a reactionary (quoted in Popper 2008, 98; emphasis added).
Were Hayek and other advocates of the free market supposed to be on the blacklist? We cannot tell. It is difficult to infer, or specify in more precise terms, which views exactly were supposed to be excluded from the journal by the use of the vague word reactionary.
Yet we know that many people on the left at the time actually used the term to refer to mainstream, right-of-center views in American politics. For instance, after the Republicans’ victory in the mid-term elections in 1946, none other than Kurt Gödel wrote in a letter to his mother: “You have probably already read about the ‘landslide’ result of the election here fourteen days ago. So the Republicans (i.e., the reactionaries) are now again in power (Wang 1996, 52).”1 In a similar vein, Carnap wrote to Popper in 1946: “The picture of the world is rather distressing, is it not? Especially since this country [the United States] moves more and more in a reactionary direction” (quoted in Popper 2008, 102).
Another path is worth exploring as well. Some people will immediately associate the label “reactionary” with Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which has the subtitle Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. (The word reactionary occurs eighty-two times in the book.) Interestingly, in one of the first issues of Philosophy of Science the term reactionary was indeed used explicitly in Lenin’s sense (Muller 1934, 13). Moreover, around the same time, Philipp Frank, a prominent member of the Vienna Circle, referred to Lenin’s book as the “moving philosophical chef d’oeuvre of contemporary Communism” (Frank 1937, 46).
A “moving philosophical chef d’oeuvre”? In another place Frank mentions Lenin’s book and points to similarities between “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and logical positivism. He says diamat contains “many elements which are closely related to the ideas that we represent” and that something in the Soviet dialectical thinking “is quite in line with our own ideas”: e.g., that the two approaches share the struggle against metaphysics, that diamat’s conception of truth “is related to American pragmatism,” and that one aspect of diamat’s epistemology is “very close to the viewpoint that science is based on an intersubjective language, which Neurath and Carnap have designated more precisely as the physicalistic language” (Frank 1950, 200–202). Frank even claimed that this kind of dialectical thinking (promoted by Lenin) “is demanded also by logical empiricism” (ibid., 203).
It is amazing that Frank was not aware that this non-philosophy called “dialectical materialism” was merely state-imposed ideological drivel which was probably not taken seriously even by most of its public advocates. Besides, there is no sign whatsoever that Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ever had a smidgen of influence on philosophy proper.
It is also baffling that Frank, who belonged to the Ernst Mach Society and who was a great admirer of Mach, could shower Lenin’s polemical piece with such praise when it was obvious from Lenin’s book that he had waged an attack on Mach and “Machists” using political imputations and insults, rather than relying on philosophical arguments. Here are some typical examples of Lenin’s invective: Mach uses “a reactionary philosophical trick” or “verbal trickery”; is “an egregious sophist,” “a graduated lackey of fideism”; idealism “seduces Mach himself into drawing reactionary conclusions”; Machians “are reactionaries in philosophy,” “are afraid to admit the truth,” “are incapable of thinking,” use “a cowardly and unprincipled method”; Mach’s theory is “nothing but pitiful idealist nonsense” and an instrument of “reactionary bourgeois philosophy”; Mach’s claim that religious opinion is a private affair “is in itself servility to fideism”; Mach’s philosophy “is to science what the kiss of the Christian Judas was to Christ”; “Mach’s renunciation of natural-scientific materialism is a reactionary phenomenon in every respect,” and so forth.
It is hard to disagree with the statement that “anyone with any philosophical sensitivity would be appalled by the crudity of Lenin’s thought” (Read 2013, 91). Even Lenin’s own sister was so shocked by his strident tone and gratuitous personal attacks that she asked him to tone down the vituperative outbursts. Informed about Lenin’s book, Mach himself wrote in a letter to Nikolai Valentinov (a Russian socialist and an advocate of empirio-criticism) that “he found it incomprehensible and quite remarkable (unverständlich, ganz sonderbar) that in Russia criticism of his [Mach’s] scientific views had been transferred to the political field, of which he knew nothing” (Valentinov 1968, 238). Valentinov also made the following, striking observation about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “From this book the road goes straight, well smoothed by bulldozers, to a state philosophy, resting on the GPU-NKVD-MGB” (these abbreviations refer to successive incarnations of the apparatus of Soviet repression).
All in all, there is little doubt that, contrary to Hacking’s claim, when Philosophy of Science was founded it did not “welcome all points of view.” Some points of view were excluded by the ominous “No reactionaries” message, which must have been approved by the editorial board, given that it was included in the programmatic editorial in the first issue. Presumably some potential contributors to Philosophy of Science were thereby rebuffed.
On the other hand, the journal opened its doors to discussion of topics that one would not have expected to take up the scarce space supposedly reserved for the best work in philosophy of science. In the first issue of Philosophy of Science one of the two books reviewed was Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, published nine years earlier by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The reviewer called the book “an important contribution” and did not raise a single criticism, not even the obvious one about Engels’s extremely naive and hackneyed attempts to find many examples of three laws of dialectics at work in various areas of science.
Also, the reviewer oddly distorted Einstein’s famously negative opinion about the value of Dialectics of Nature, making it sound like Einstein’s praise of that work. Einstein’s comment about Engels’s book was first reported in a letter the reformist socialist Eduard Bernstein wrote to the Marx-Engels Institute on November 12, 1924. Bernstein had basically asked Einstein for the “second opinion,” because another prominent scholar, Leo Arons, had already given a consistently negative assessment of the value of Engels’s manuscript, advising against its publication. In a move of dubious intellectual honesty the Philosophy of Science reviewer gave a positive spin to Einstein’s comments, omitting to mention that, closely echoing Arons, Einstein said the content of the book “was of no special interest either from the standpoint of physics or history of physics” and that “he could not recommend publishing if the manuscript did not come from a historically intriguing personality” (Hecker 2000, 167; emphasis added). Far from “advising in favor of publication” (as the reviewer put it), Einstein in fact agreed with Arons and said that Engels’s work, being devoid of scientific merit, could be published merely out of biographical interest.
Let