What Are the Modern Classics? the Baruch Poll of Great Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM Volume XXX, No. 4, December 1999 WHAT ARE THE MODERN CLASSICS? THE BARUCH POLL OF GREAT PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DOUGLAS P. LACKEY The millennial frenzy that generated several highly publicized “Best of the Century” lists early in 1999 planted in my mind the idea of conducting a poll asking my fellow philosophers to name the best works of philosophy in the twentieth century. I approached the project with some trepidation. The polls that had bounced around in the media in early 1999 had something crazed about them. “Hiroshima Voted Top News Event Of The Twentieth Century,” for example: what could one possibly do with such information? Furthermore, even polls that might have some use—the book and movie and musical recording lists that might guide one’s choice of casual entertainment—had in some cases gotten silly results with silly methods. Thus, we have a “top 100 American movies” list without a single film by Buster Keaton, a “top 100 novels” list produced by Random House in which Random House books were listed first when the experts tied, and so forth. All “best of” polls are afflicted with nearly insuperable problems of method and commensurability. The possibility of producing something silly in designing a philosophy poll loomed large. Perhaps asking philosophers to name their favorite books would be like asking mathematicians to name their favorite inte- gers. Nevertheless, there is nothing prima facie absurd in asking philosophers to discriminate between important books and unimportant books. Every teacher does this in designing a syllabus for a course. And even if there is no sense in claiming that a poll of great books tells us what the great books are, at least it will tell us what they are believed to be. This is something I thought it would be fun to know. The goal decided, the question was how to do it. The polls so far had appealed to panels of experts; I was determined not to go that route. There is of course the regress problem: you need an expert to pick the experts. But there is the more 329 DOUGLAS P. LACKEY significant fact that if you poll a few philosophy experts you learn only about the experts. If you poll a larger and more representative group you learn something about the state of the philosophy profession, which is sociologically more interesting. Using the Philosophers’ Email Directory, we mailed our questionnaire to 5,000 teachers of philosophy. About 1,000 emails bounced back for mis-typed or obsolete addresses, 4,000 reached their targets. We received 414 survey replies, a healthy response rate of better than 10%. Since there are about 10,000 teachers of philosophy in North America, we had replies from 4% of the entire profession. At a confidence level of 80%, the survey has an error rate of plus or minus 3%, assuming that we reached a demographically representative group. We have no reason to believe that we did not. The email addresses in the Directory are haphazardly assigned, usually by schools to professors’ offices, and we can detect no significant demographic differences between randomly selected groups of philosophy professors on the list and off the list. The email directory contains a nice mix of large and small, secular and religious, United States and Canadian schools. Assignment of emails across the continent does not break along gender lines or according to specialties. The 4,000 emails were scattered; the 414 replies were scattered. We asked respondents to name the five most important books in philosophy in the twentieth century, and also the five most important articles. Giving five choices permits discretion, but five is a small enough number to force voters to choose their selections carefully. Since we were interested in judgments of qual- ity, we instructed respondents to make their choices on the basic of intrinsic merit, not on the basis of causal influence. (By the causal influence standard, Mein Kampf might be the most important book of the twentieth century.) We received a small number of return letters that found the distinction between “important” and “influential” confusing. In our follow-up letter we explained, “if you think that a book that has influenced many is trash, don’t list it.” There were some replies indicative of strategic voting. Some respondents, for example, listed only books in continental philosophy, perhaps because they felt that only continental philosophy books were important, but more likely because they wanted to see continental philosophy well represented in the results. The rate of strategic voting, however, was too low to affect the basic results. The commonest strategic ballots were those listing books in ethics, in feminist philosophy, in environmental ethics, and in Asian philosophy. Apparently these fields a contain an unusual number of persons who feel that the profession at large has underrated the importance of their specialty. We asked respondents to list their choices in order of preference. On this score we had little compliance: some persons listed only one book; some wrote “in no particular order” or “in alphabetical order.” We decided not to use any 330 CLASSICS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY point system for weighting the results according to preference. We did keep track, however, of which book was listed first on each ballot, and use that indi- cation to break ties. Only 25 books were cited on 11 or more ballots. The number to the left of the title indicates total citations. The number to the right indicates the number of ballots listing the book first. Here are the top 25, by frequency of citation: 1) 179 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [68] 2) 134 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [51] 3) 131 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [21] 4) 77 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [24] 5) 64 Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica [27] 6) 63 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object [7] 7) 56 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity [5] 8) 51 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [3] 9) 38 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness [4] 10) 34 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality [16] 11) 30 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic [4] 12) 25 John Dewey, Experience and Nature [5] 13) 23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [0] 14) 19 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica [0] 15) 18 William James, Pragmatism [1] 18 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue [1] 17) 17 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations [9] 18) 17 Edmund Husserl, Ideas [5] 19) 17 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [2] 20) 14 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law [2] 21) 14 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [0] 22) 13 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast [1] 23) 12 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [3] 24) 12 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons [2] 25) 11 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy [5] 11 W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View [2] 11 Karl Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery [2] The immediate, indisputable, and unexpected result is that there is a runaway winner in first place. Wittgenstein’s Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book and was listed first on more ballots than any other book. The Investigations was cited by persons whose other selections were all logic 331 DOUGLAS P. LACKEY books, by persons whose other selections were all phenomenology books, by persons whose other selections were all Asian books. It is the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse special- izations and philosophical orientations. At the same time, it was only cited on 43% of all ballots. There is, apparently, no book that a majority of American and Canadian philosophers will put on a short list of five. Heidegger’s Being and Time edged out Rawls’s A Theory of Justice for second place. But 51 persons cited Being and Time as the outstanding philosophy book of the twentieth century, while only 21 cited A Theory of Justice first. Rawls is admired; Heidegger is adored. Almost every ballot that listed any work of continental philosophy listed Heidegger. At the same time, a certain number of analytically oriented ballots also cited Heidegger in the top 5. One had the impression, reviewing the ballots, that some people were voting for Heidegger, not because they shared his interests, theses, or methods, but because they recog- nized in Being and Time the workings of an original and subtle philosophical mind. The appearance of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice as a close third is perhaps the single most surprising result of the survey. It is the only work of political philosophy in the top 25 and the only work of ethics in the top 10. According to our respondents, Rawls’s book is the preeminent work in ethics from the last half of the twentieth century; Moore’s Principia Ethica (#14) is the preeminent book from the first half. The strength of support for A Theory of Justice is remarkable. The gap between Rawls and the next book down is large; there is no close fourth. We are now nearly 30 years past the publication of A Theory of Justice, and its popularity can no longer be attributed to some 1960s (or 1950s) zeitgeist. If American and Canadian teachers of philosophy could send only three books from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, Rawls’s Theory of Justice would be one of them. One wonders whether there would be a corresponding result from a poll of philosophy teachers in Europe. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a solid fourth; indeed, 24 voters considered the Tractatus the outstanding philosophical work of the twentieth century.

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