Ha! I knew Bob Trivers in his heyday. A madman of the first water. He flirted with my wife and she loved it. A genuinely nice guy.
I suspect all the first- and 2nd-wave feminists have fallen, quite steeply. That's likely because the Left of that stripe so quickly eats its own. And possibly bexause the early writers are producing new material/thought that becomes passe for the avant garde as it becomes merely garde.
Finally, I cited most of the philosophers in my 1990s dissertation. I included Quine because 1) it gave me a cite in the Q's I worked very hard to have a cite for each lwtter), and 2) he wrote so much that if I looked hard I could find a quote for him that supported any argument I was making. If you have to write a dissertation, you might as well have fun. Plus listening to my committee groaning about checking the cites was funny as heck.
First, most of psychotherapy is non-Freudian (psychotherapy isn't psychoanalysis). So the popularity of psychotherapy doesn't count in Freud's favor, except perhaps in the loosest sense that it involves the idea that talking to people about their problems can help them feel and cope better.
Second, contemporary cognitive psychology posits any number of non-conscious mental states, but they're not unconscious in Freud's sense and don't work the way his unconscious desires were meant to work. Again, Freud gets partial credit at best.
PS Wittgenstein is a faller, for sure, within professional philosophy.
Both Freud and Marx are thinkers whose explicit contributions are often disdained, even dismissed as evil, but people who fundamentally think in Freudian and Marxist ways; their implicit contributions have survived the rejection of their explicit ones.
While other economists rose and fell, my idol Joseph Schumpeter never really got out of neutral. This is a profound shame both for his sake and ours. His book "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" is a shockingly prophetic vision of today's world. For anyone interested, this is an annotated outline of CSD. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/schumpeter-in-a-nutshell
Also, it is easy to criticize Freud's ideas, but don't forget that before Freud no one believed that either childhood experiences or subconscious urges could influence behavior. Today we understand these things very differently, but they were profound insights in their day.
"before Freud no one believed that either childhood experiences or subconscious urges could influence behavior."
I do not think that is true at all. There is a long tradition of believing people are not rational calculating machines, being driven by things that are not conscious. St. Paul says, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." "The flesh" to him is all those things we somehow want to do that we don't consciously want. For him, a big one was sex.
As far as I can tell, everyone believed this, and they believed that childhood affected later life. Of course, they didn't have the Freudian theories, but that doesn't mean they denied the real effect of "childhood experiences or subconscious urges".
They didn't blame "the subconscious". Some times they blamed Satan. Some times they blamed their animal nature. Some times they blamed something else. But the idea that there were causes of our behavior that were not willed by our consciousness is very, very, very old.
Others you could consider in political science would be Sam Huntington - maybe a riser for his work on state capacity, but a faller for Clash of Civilizations, though that work still gets mentioned. Charles Tilly is in the same sphere but probably less well-known even back then. Edward Banfield (Moral Basis of a Backward Society) is maybe returning through Joe Henrich & WEIRD. Were there other culturalists, but b/c that's having its moment? How about C. Wright Mills and the power elite? Making a comeback as ideas but not a name?
The name that I see constantly from a vast range of writers in a vast range of disciplines is Hayek. His elaborations on the broader idea that decentralized competitive striving can lead to knowledge is something that I see cropping up in just about everything I read, and I read a lot. Maybe this says more about me than Hayek, but I suspect he is the real intellectual superstar on this list. The closest thing to a Darwin or A Smith of the 20th C.
On Freud, I have always liked Camille Paglia’s assessment “overrated as a scientist, still underrated as an artist” - the ideas of Freud (and -> Jung -> Joseph Campbell) have so penetrated narrative arts I don’t think it’s possible to say they have fallen that much, they are part of the firmament. Certainly we arn’t explaining major swings world history with toilet training practice, yet just this week I heard a teenager describe her mom as “anal about dog hair on the couch”
If we go by Amdahl's law (multiply influence by cultural and economic presence), Ayn Rand needs to be at the top of the risers. While perhaps faded into a general gestalt, Rand's view of the creative genius and hard-driving industrial revolutionizer as Prime Movers is the implicit structure behind (off the top of my head): Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Steve Jobs (don't forget he also founded Pixar), Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page.
As massive industrial gorillas aren't new to the scene-- Edison, Westinghouse, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt &c-- making it hard to point to some distinct change in economics. Rather, the Randian anti-Soviet angle has made the titans reflect her attitudes, as the expanding American bureaucratic state comes up against their grand visions.
So we can't necessarily point to Rand as a cause of her viewpoint's rise, but I think that's true of many of those thinkers. E.g., the rise in therapy culture wasn't from a sudden interest in Freud, any more than the Leftist angle of the Culture Wars came from a sudden and renewed interest in the Marx-Engel reader.
"He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption."
Today, US corporations are Brobdingnagian oligopolist behemoths, who never innovate*, vindicating his point perfectly.
FIXED!
* how many new products from goog, aapl over the last decade?
Stephen Jay Gould crusaded *against* evolutionary biology? I've read most of his books; he seemed very strongly in support of it.
Ha! I knew Bob Trivers in his heyday. A madman of the first water. He flirted with my wife and she loved it. A genuinely nice guy.
I suspect all the first- and 2nd-wave feminists have fallen, quite steeply. That's likely because the Left of that stripe so quickly eats its own. And possibly bexause the early writers are producing new material/thought that becomes passe for the avant garde as it becomes merely garde.
Finally, I cited most of the philosophers in my 1990s dissertation. I included Quine because 1) it gave me a cite in the Q's I worked very hard to have a cite for each lwtter), and 2) he wrote so much that if I looked hard I could find a quote for him that supported any argument I was making. If you have to write a dissertation, you might as well have fun. Plus listening to my committee groaning about checking the cites was funny as heck.
Niebuhr must definitely be a Faller if Arnold Kling doesn't even know how to spell his name.
Searle is a sexual harasser.
Two points on Freud.
First, most of psychotherapy is non-Freudian (psychotherapy isn't psychoanalysis). So the popularity of psychotherapy doesn't count in Freud's favor, except perhaps in the loosest sense that it involves the idea that talking to people about their problems can help them feel and cope better.
Second, contemporary cognitive psychology posits any number of non-conscious mental states, but they're not unconscious in Freud's sense and don't work the way his unconscious desires were meant to work. Again, Freud gets partial credit at best.
PS Wittgenstein is a faller, for sure, within professional philosophy.
CS Lewis
This site is a ranking of basically how much Wikipedia interest there is in a given person, or type of person, e.g. philosophers:
https://pantheon.world/explore/rankings?show=people&years=-3501,2023&occupation=PHILOSOPHER
Both Freud and Marx are thinkers whose explicit contributions are often disdained, even dismissed as evil, but people who fundamentally think in Freudian and Marxist ways; their implicit contributions have survived the rejection of their explicit ones.
In time, almost everyone falls to 0 so perhaps it is more useful to judge on some sort of curve?
While other economists rose and fell, my idol Joseph Schumpeter never really got out of neutral. This is a profound shame both for his sake and ours. His book "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" is a shockingly prophetic vision of today's world. For anyone interested, this is an annotated outline of CSD. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/schumpeter-in-a-nutshell
Also, it is easy to criticize Freud's ideas, but don't forget that before Freud no one believed that either childhood experiences or subconscious urges could influence behavior. Today we understand these things very differently, but they were profound insights in their day.
"before Freud no one believed that either childhood experiences or subconscious urges could influence behavior."
I do not think that is true at all. There is a long tradition of believing people are not rational calculating machines, being driven by things that are not conscious. St. Paul says, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." "The flesh" to him is all those things we somehow want to do that we don't consciously want. For him, a big one was sex.
As far as I can tell, everyone believed this, and they believed that childhood affected later life. Of course, they didn't have the Freudian theories, but that doesn't mean they denied the real effect of "childhood experiences or subconscious urges".
But they didn't blame the subconscious. They blamed Satan.
They didn't blame "the subconscious". Some times they blamed Satan. Some times they blamed their animal nature. Some times they blamed something else. But the idea that there were causes of our behavior that were not willed by our consciousness is very, very, very old.
Others you could consider in political science would be Sam Huntington - maybe a riser for his work on state capacity, but a faller for Clash of Civilizations, though that work still gets mentioned. Charles Tilly is in the same sphere but probably less well-known even back then. Edward Banfield (Moral Basis of a Backward Society) is maybe returning through Joe Henrich & WEIRD. Were there other culturalists, but b/c that's having its moment? How about C. Wright Mills and the power elite? Making a comeback as ideas but not a name?
Excellent post. I learned a lot.
One correction, though. You write, "Everyone (except me) thinks that spending creates jobs and jobs create spending." Not true.
The name that I see constantly from a vast range of writers in a vast range of disciplines is Hayek. His elaborations on the broader idea that decentralized competitive striving can lead to knowledge is something that I see cropping up in just about everything I read, and I read a lot. Maybe this says more about me than Hayek, but I suspect he is the real intellectual superstar on this list. The closest thing to a Darwin or A Smith of the 20th C.
On Freud, I have always liked Camille Paglia’s assessment “overrated as a scientist, still underrated as an artist” - the ideas of Freud (and -> Jung -> Joseph Campbell) have so penetrated narrative arts I don’t think it’s possible to say they have fallen that much, they are part of the firmament. Certainly we arn’t explaining major swings world history with toilet training practice, yet just this week I heard a teenager describe her mom as “anal about dog hair on the couch”
If we go by Amdahl's law (multiply influence by cultural and economic presence), Ayn Rand needs to be at the top of the risers. While perhaps faded into a general gestalt, Rand's view of the creative genius and hard-driving industrial revolutionizer as Prime Movers is the implicit structure behind (off the top of my head): Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Steve Jobs (don't forget he also founded Pixar), Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page.
As massive industrial gorillas aren't new to the scene-- Edison, Westinghouse, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt &c-- making it hard to point to some distinct change in economics. Rather, the Randian anti-Soviet angle has made the titans reflect her attitudes, as the expanding American bureaucratic state comes up against their grand visions.
So we can't necessarily point to Rand as a cause of her viewpoint's rise, but I think that's true of many of those thinkers. E.g., the rise in therapy culture wasn't from a sudden interest in Freud, any more than the Leftist angle of the Culture Wars came from a sudden and renewed interest in the Marx-Engel reader.
"He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption."
Today, US corporations are Brobdingnagian oligopolist behemoths, who never innovate*, vindicating his point perfectly.
FIXED!
* how many new products from goog, aapl over the last decade?