[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).]

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

A completely unscientific survey of three randomly chosen universities confirms the exodus. A search through the philosophy-course descriptions at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on 19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual, Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

A single proposition can hardly explain the fate of several thinkers across several fields. However, general trends can inform separate disciplines. For starters, the ruthlessly anti- or nonhistorical orientation that informs contemporary academe encourages shelving past geniuses. This mind-set evidently affects psychology. The American Psychological Association's own task force on "learning goals" for undergraduate majors makes a nod toward teaching the history of psychology, but it relegates the subject to an optional subfield, equivalent to "group dynamics." "We are not advocating that separate courses in the history of psychology or group dynamics must be included in the undergraduate curriculum," the savants counsel, "but leave it to the ingenuity of departments to determine contexts in which students can learn those relevant skills and perspectives." The ingenious departments apparently have dumped Freud as antiquated. A study by the American Psychoanalytic Association of "teaching about psychoanalytic ideas in the undergraduate curricula of 150 highly ranked colleges and universities" concludes that Freudian ideas thrive outside of psychology departments.

The same antihistorical imperatives operate effectively, if with less force, in economics and philosophy. Again, generalizations can be made only with qualifications, but economics departments, like psychology departments, tend to be fiercely present-minded. Their basic fare consists of principles of economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, finance, game theory, and statistics. To be sure, often the departments offer lecture classes on the history of economic thought, which survey economic thinking from the Greeks to the present. But in this sprint through the past, Marx shows up as little more than a blur. At the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, students devote less than a week to Marx in a course on the history of economic theories. One scholar of Marx estimates that in more than 2,000 economics departments in the United States, only four offer even one class on the German revolutionary. In 1936, Wassily Leontief, who later won a Nobel in economic science, gave a seminar on Marx in Harvard's economics department. No such seminar is given now....

Clare Lois Spark - 7/25/2008

I am surprised that Professor Jacoby, whose writing I have always enjoyed, has not gone much further in his critique of the humanities curriculum.
Let me focus primarily on Freud: unless I am severely deluded, the entire thrust of Freudian psychoanalysis was toward the concept of the individual client capable, someday, of surmounting the irrational components of his psyche by retrieving an accurate history of his relations with family and with the world. This was materialism in the Enlightenment tradition, one that supported the strengths of our human nature in separating facts from deception and self-deception. That means the observing ego actually exists.
But the Freud that has been activated in the academy is either Jungian or Lacanian, while the sub-discipline of the history of science has been dominated by ideologues who, in the words of one of their academic starts, Simon Shaffer, believe that "science is essentially a swindle." (This in my presence while I audited his seminar on the scientific revolution at UCLA in the Fall of 1989.)
Nietzschean postmodern irrationalism, and their attendant cultural and moral relativism rule in the hip academy, and I regret that Jacoby limited his protest to the purported "expulsion" (as if a cabal was organized to commit the bloody deed?) of some of his favorite social theorists.
I wish Professor Jacoby would respond to my comment, as I'm sure he could say more.
Meanwhile, I recommend the collected works of the late, great Frank E. Manuel as an antidote to postmodern pessimism and counter-Enlightenment.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/25/2008

It may "sound good" and plus specifically to you (or such as you're), i.e to folks who know next to none on the history of development of scientific and social thinking, in general, and about the works of those great thinkers, in particular.
And who are those "great thinkers" who <disproved them as chartalans>? Perhaps the charlatans themselves...?

Michael Davis - 7/25/2008

Or how 'bout their ideas were never sound to begin with, and they've all been disproved as charlatans?
Sounds good to me.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/23/2008

but surely general ideological and political anti-Left US climate has played major role in essential eradication of Marx' and Hegel's works from economic and philosophical curriculum.