Excursus 130 – On Eponymous Schools of Thought

Hossein Jorjani

First publication: 2026 – 08 – 06

The names given to schools of thought are not always intellectually innocent. A name may begin as a convenient historical label and gradually influence how a theory is defined, interpreted, and defended. The problem is particularly acute when a theory or intellectual tradition is named after an individual. An eponymous name identifies intellectual ancestry more readily than theoretical content and may consequently encourage the founder’s writings, changing opinions, and even personal convictions to be incorporated into what comes to be regarded as a single coherent doctrine.

There is an important difference between descriptive and eponymous names. Evolution by natural selection tells us something about the content of a theory; Darwinism tells us primarily about the person historically associated with it. A descriptive name invites the question, What propositions constitute this theory? An eponymous name too readily invites another: What did this person believe? The two questions are not equivalent.

Consider a hypothetical example. Alfred Russel Wallace was, independently of Darwin, a founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Suppose that evolutionary theory had subsequently become known as Wallacism. Would every opinion Wallace later expressed thereby become part of Wallacism? Wallace continued to assign natural selection an important role in evolution, but his broader worldview eventually included spiritualism and appeals to directive intelligence and purpose; he also advocated land nationalization and became a prominent opponent of vaccination. These positions belong to Wallace’s intellectual biography, but they are not for that reason components of the theory of evolution by natural selection. A structured theory must be identified by its propositions and the relations among them, not by everything its author happened to believe.

Darwin provides an equally instructive real example. He proposed pangenesis as a hypothesis of heredity, yet pangenesis is not thereby a component of evolutionary theory. Its theoretical status does not depend upon whether Darwin discussed it early or late in his intellectual life, nor would its appearance in the same work as an evolutionary argument make the two theoretically inseparable. Authorship, textual proximity, and theoretical membership are different relationships. Darwin could be mistaken about heredity without evolutionary theory becoming committed to his particular theory of heredity.

The same principle can be applied to Marx. Instead of beginning with Marxism, suppose that a defined portion of Marx’s work were given a descriptive name such as critical political economy or class-structured political economy. The question would then cease to be which ideas Marx held and become which propositions belong to the specified theoretical structure. Some of Marx’s analyses would qualify; other historical judgments, political opinions, predictions, or practical prescriptions might not. Their exclusion would not require denying that Marx expressed them. It would mean only that intellectual biography and theoretical membership had been separated.

Such renaming produces another important consequence. Once a theory is defined by its content rather than its founder, the founder loses any apparent monopoly over its intellectual territory. Other investigators may arrive independently at similar propositions, modify them, supply new evidence, reject some while retaining others, or extend the theory into areas the original author never considered. They need not become followers of the founder merely because they investigate the same problems. A theory can then develop as an intellectual structure rather than as an inheritance guarded by questions of doctrinal fidelity.

Replacing an eponymous name with a descriptive one may therefore perform two acts of liberation at once: the theory is liberated from the complete intellectual biography of its founder, and the subject matter is liberated from the founder’s intellectual ownership. Newton’s theology need not become part of mechanics, Darwin’s pangenesis need not become part of evolutionary theory, and every proposition written by Marx need not become part of a defined theory of political economy.

None of this makes eponymous names useless. Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Keynesianism, and similar terms may serve legitimate historical purposes. They can identify intellectual genealogies, traditions of interpretation, or communities that consciously claim descent from particular thinkers. But intellectual genealogy should not be mistaken for theoretical identity. When theoretical precision matters, the propositions constituting the theory should be identifiable independently of the founder’s name.

A mature theory should ultimately be capable of intellectual independence from its founder. It should be possible to examine its propositions, test their relations, reject some, modify others, and extend the resulting structure without continually returning to the question of what the founder really meant. The name of a thinker may tell us something about where an intellectual tradition began, but it cannot determine what properly belongs within it. Otherwise, the name of the school silently performs the work that conceptual definition and historical argument should perform.