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of the revolt, just have others have capitalized on his more favorable remarks.
Although White may at times have written in a manner that contributed to this
kind of mistake, he did, in fact, pointedly stress that the “revolt” was not a “particular
thing.” What he claimed was that he had discerned among these individuals a “strong
family resemblance” and a “pattern” of “striking ideological affinities” and “philosophical
kinships.” Despite their diverse perspectives and fields of endeavor, which White
represented by concepts such as instrumentalism, institutionalism, economic
determinism, and legal realism, and even though they sprung from quite different
intellectual roots, he argued that it was possible to treat their work as if it were “a school
of thought.” He conceived his task, and that of philosophy in general, as the
“clarification or analysis of fundamental concepts,” and what he sought were the
“philosophical foundations,” such as a general attachment to pragmatism, that
supported the commonalities noted in his account. This mode of thought, White
claimed, began to take shape in the late 1800s and eventually “touched off a large-
scale revolt against formalism in philosophy and the social sciences” that did away with
the vestiges of such things as formal logic, classical economics, and traditional
jurisprudence. By the early 1920s, It was, he argued, “full-grown and ripe for critical
analysis,” and by the end of the decade, when the intellectual “reign of terror” that it had
precipitated had run its course, it was largely “dead.”
White claimed that, in the end, these individuals “were unable to set limits to this
revolt against rigidity and sometimes they allowed it to run wild,” and thus they did not
so much produce “freedom” as a “Thermidor” which persisted through mid-century.
They may, he suggested, have contributed to “paving the way for an adequate social
Convention