La politica del metodo nel naturalismo liberale americano

Abstract

This paper examines the political dimension of method within American liberal naturalism between the 1910s and the 1940s. Drawing on the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy, John H. Randall Jr., and the contributors to Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944), it argues that the so-called “continuity of analysis” was not merely an epistemological postulate, but the normative foundation of a democratic conception of reason. The methodological continuity between science and philosophy—initially formulated as a means of professional legitimation—gradually acquired the status of a civic ideal: a procedural grammar embodying the liberal ethos of cooperation, public control, and intersubjective verification. In this sense, the scientific method became the political pivot of a naturalized civilization. The paper reconstructs the transformation of this methodological credo from Lovejoy’s 1917 Presidential Address to the post-war synthesis of liberal naturalism, showing how the politics of method provided American philosophy with a new narrative of cultural identity and historical mission.