The Ghettoization of Nietzsche

A major sociological divide in recent Anglophone philosophy is the divide between philosophers who see themselves as working in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida -- so-called "Continental" philosophers -- and those working in the tradition of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine -- so-called "analytic philosophers". The labels are problematic and the divisions not always clear, but plainly there's a non-trivial sociological division here. This division is reflected, in part, in journal citation patterns. You might wonder about this history of this. Was Philosophical Review always allergic to Nietzsche? Or is that a relatively recent phenomenon? And how extreme is the phenomenon? Do leading Continental figures get at least some play in the top analytic journals, or are they almost entirely excluded?

Let's look at this quantitatively.

The "Big Three" Anglophone philosophy journals -- all of which have been leading journals since the first decade of the 20th century -- are Philosophical Review, Mind, and Journal of Philosophy (formerly Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods). All currently seem to lean heavily "analytic". Also, all are also indexed in JStor, along with a diverse group of 93 other philosophy journals, many of which are not as sociologically aligned with the analytic tradition. So I have looked, decade by decade, at the rates at which the names of central analytic and Continental philosophers appear in these "Big Three" journals compared to other journals.

Compare, first, Nietzsche and Frege -- foundational figures for both traditions, both born in the 1840s. The crucial measure is the rate at which each is cited in the Big Three vs. the rate at which each is cited in the remainder. For methodological details see this note.* For a clearer view of the charts below, click them.

As you can see, apart from a difference for Nietzsche in 1900-1909, through the 1940s or 1950s the Nietzsche lines stay more or less together and the Frege lines stay more or less together. The dashed and solid lines are clearly separated in the 1970s, after which the separation seems to continue to slowly increase. Particularly remarkable is the fact that in the 1990s-2000s, although the terms "Frege*" and "Nietzsche*" appear approximately as often in journals outside the Big Three, there's a huge difference in how often they appear in the Big Three. Over those two decades, the term "Nietzsche*" appears 20 times total in the Big Three, or about once a year total among the three journals, a citation rate of 1.7% -- compared to 7.2% outside the Big Three.  (For Frege it's 24.1% vs. 10.6%.)

A similar story holds for Heidegger and Wittgenstein -- leading early figures in the Continental and analytic traditions, respectively -- and both born in 1889.  (Again, click chart for clarity.)

Despite being cited in over 5% of articles outside the Big Three, the word "Heidegger*" appears only 16 times in the Big Three from 1990-2009, or in 1.3% of the articles.

Okay, how about the Continentals Sartre (b. 1905), Foucault (b. 1926), and Derrida (b. 1930) vs. the analytics Quine (b. 1908), Chisholm (b. 1916), and Putnam (b. 1926)? The graph is a little crowded but the following should be evident: The muted-color analytics show higher in the Big Three (solid lines) than in the remaining journals (dashed lines), while the bright-color Continentals show the reverse pattern -- and the spread is much more evident in the past few decades than it was mid-century. (There's a bit of false-positive noise for Foucault and Putnam, but not enough to mask the general trend. Russell I have chosen to exclude entirely due to false positives.)

Combining the five analytic and five Continental philosophers in a disjunctive search (Frege or Wittgenstein or Quine or Chisholm or Putnam vs. Nietzsche or Heidegger or Sartre or Foucault or Derrida; no wildcards) yields the following aggregate result.

The trends started rapidly pulling apart in the 1950s through 1970s and have continued to slowly pull farther apart since then.

Here's another way to look at it: For any philosopher or group, divide the percentage representation in the Big Three by the percentage representation in all the remaining journals. This yields an index of proportionally how much the Big Three favor that person or group compared to other journals. Call this the "Big Three favor ratio". Unity would mean equal representation in the Big Three vs. the other journals.

The favor ratio of about 1.5 for the analytics over the past couple decades means that the five sample analytic philosophers are about 50% more likely to be cited in the Big Three journals than in other journals. The favor ratio of about 0.2 for the Continentals means that they are about five times more likely to be cited in journals outside the Big Three than by the Big Three.

In the 1990s and the portion of the 2000s that has so far been indexed in JStor, the words Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida appeared in 45 articles total among 1209 Big Three journal articles (3.7%). Thus, the Big Three journals have included, on average, about one article per journal per year that even passingly mentions any of these five authors.

(On the word "ghetto" in the title of this post: I mean it only to refer to the average Anglophone philosopher's perception of what counts as an elite journal. See, for example, this poll. It is not intended as a personal judgment about journal quality.)

_____________________________________

*Percentages are divided by a representative universe of articles hitting search terms philos* or ethic* or mind*. Only English-language articles are included. Reviews and minor documents are excluded by limiting the results to "articles" in JStor and also by excluding articles with a variety of titles such as "books received", "front matter", "back matter", etc. Without these exclusions the results reported above look very different. For example, not using such exclusions raises the occurrence rate of Nietzsche in the Big Three in the 2000s from 1.3% to 12.0%. Although the search terms run through 2009, JStor only covers through the mid-2000s for many journals, including the Big Three.