The American Mind
American Thought: A Critical Sketch.
by Morris R. Cohen.
The Free Press. 360 pp. $5.00.
Morris Cohen was working intermittently during the later years of his life on a general history of American thought, but did not complete more than a disjointed series of notes. These have now been edited and seen through the press by members of his family. Admirers of his philosophy will be grateful for the piety which has been displayed by his executors in giving his literary remains to the public. General readers should, however, be warned that this book is by no means a comprehensive history, since it omits a number of important figures and does not present any unifying theme or mode of interpretation. Probably the most interesting section is the general introduction, which analyzes in gloomy terms the obstacles to intellectual speculation in the American environment. The remainder of the book contains some discerning insights but is too sketchy and disorganized to be of much value to students of intellectual history and is marred by a few startling factual errors (Douglas Southall Freeman, for example, being confused with his Victorian namesake, is cited as the main author of the racist approach to history).
After surveying these disjecta membra and contemplating the fact that Morris Cohen worked on them for nearly a quarter of a century without being able to complete them, one is, indeed, impelled to wonder whether the whole project may not have been destined from its inception to an unsatisfactory outcome. Cohen was mainly concerned, not with the social interpretation of American thought, but with those American reflective and speculative thinkers in different philosophical and sociological fields whose work had some intrinsic intellectual value. Such an approach inevitably leaves the impression that American academic thought has been fragmentary, chaotic, meager, and (with the solitary exceptions of James and Dewey) lacking in figures of first-rate importance.
It is, in fact, impossible to find any logical lines of development if one considers American thought in isolation from its European matrix; it becomes coherent only if it is viewed as part of the general development of Western civilization as a whole. There is no continuous native American intellectual tradition. The mental history of the United States, like its ethnic composition, has been the product of a long series of migrations from Europe, and has consisted mainly of the reception of a sequence of European ideas and their adaptation to the American environment. The major influences on the American mind have been such European figures as Calvin, Locke, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. American economic theory, for example, must be analyzed in terms of American reactions to Adam Smith, the German historical school, and John Maynard Keynes; American religious thinking began with the Protestant Reformation and is today being reshaped by the influence of Kierkegaard, Barth, and the existentialists; American philosophy has been mainly a series of reinterpretations of British empiricism, German romanticism, and Austrian logical positivism. Even today genetic ideas and comprehensive syntheses are mostly of European origin, what is distinctively American being a certain distrust of generalizations and an emphasis on practical applications.
For the philosopher the paucity of first-rate speculative thinking in America can be regarded as a deplorable indication of an anti-intellectual bias in American society. But the empirical and practical bias of the American mind can be justified in terms of results. The United States has not produced, for example, a single thinker of major importance in the fields of political and economic theory: as Cohen points out, “American political thought has not been related to any broad philosophic vision but has rather tended to concentrate on specific institutions (such as slavery or revolution) or particular subjects of immediate controversy (such as tariffs or foreign affairs).” Nevertheless, the major achievements of American civilization have been its political and its economic institutions. One cannot do justice to the American mind unless one emphasizes chiefly the practical problems which it has faced and solved. As the principal author of the constitution, James Madison is unquestionably of greater intellectual stature than most of the men to whom Cohen gives extended treatment; yet since he was primarily a practical politician rather than a reflective thinker, he is not discussed in this book and is mentioned briefly only five times.
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