[Dissent mourns the passing of Richard Rorty, one of America's most distinguished philosophers. A long-standing friend and contributor to Dissent, Rorty wrote on a range of subjects from European foreign policy to the novels of Ian McEwan. For more Rorty articles, click here. --The Editors]


THINK BACK TO a time when the Clinton administration’s “triangulation” and free-trade policies looked to many on the left like the primary threat to a humane approach to political economy, when controversy about presidential lying had to do with adultery and not a ghastly war, and when political insurgents looked to a candidate other than Ralph Nader to carry the banner of a progressive politics. That candidate was Bill Bradley, whose only success in the 2000 primaries was to lure voters with postgraduate degrees away from Al Gore. But unlike earlier “new politics” efforts, notably Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 race, the failed Bradley campaign disappeared without leaving a trace on American politics.

One feature of Bradley’s run that is of genuine historical significance is what its failure reveals about the relationship between progressive intellectuals and practical politics at the turn of this century. In the period leading up to his campaign, Bradley gathered around him a kitchen cabinet of academics inspired by the American pragmatist tradition, including Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Benjamin Barber, and historian Robert Westbrook, whose 1991 magisterial John Dewey and American Democracy restored Dewey’s democratic theory to the center of contemporary intellectual life. The presence of such people in the Bradley campaign recalled the role their predecessors had played in American politics a hundred years before. Just as Dewey and his followers occupied the radical wing of the Progressive movement, challenging the elitist inclinations of their allies, so too their successors in the Bradley camp seemed to define a left-leaning fringe of Clintonian neoliberalism.

What distinguished the Bradley think tank from the pragmatist-Progressives of the early twentieth century was its isolation from the very people it sought to rally to an alternative democratic politics. The fault was not with the Bradleyites. Settlement houses, progressive schools, social-gospel churches, and cross-class advocacy groups once provided an extraordinary infrastructure for Progressive politics. Today’s pragmatists have almost nothing comparable to support their political and intellectual activity. No wonder then that the word “hope” figures so prominently in their writing. Even as it recalls the social-gospel roots of Progressivism, the recourse to “hope” reveals the distance traveled since that distant era of confident reform.

Our most thoughtful intellectuals understand the need to start from scratch by rebuilding the connections between theory and democratic practice. In his latest book, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, Westbrook seeks to establish the political consequences of pragmatism as a philosophical method and, more ambitiously, identify what a pragmatist-inspired politics might look like at this moment. That project takes many twists and turns in this rich collection of essays but generally tracks two related agendas, which Westbrook advances through close interrogations of the work of other historians and philosophers. Against Rorty and Richard Posner, who have denied that a pragmatist philosophical stance authorizes a specific political orientation, Westbrook holds that “pragmatism and democratic prophecy are joined at the hip.” He then turns to pragmatism to mount a critique of liberalism in the name of a solidaristic politics of civic obligation that he alternately identifies with the “producer-republicanism” John Dewey shared with Eugene Debs and the “social citizenship” of the postwar British Labour Party. Along the way, he offers penetrating readings of such pragmatist icons as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Dewey, Sidney Hook, Rorty, and West, whom he situates historically and draws on for his own interventions in political theory.

NOT ALL READERS will understand why they need to stick with Westbrook as he works his way through this intellectual genealogy to arrive at the political arguments with which he ends the book. There is a good deal of insider pragmatist talk here, with several of the early essays offering Westbrook’s-response-to-X’s-response-to-Westbrook’s-interpretation-of-Dewey. But those willing to stay the course, as it were, will find a great deal of light at the end of this tunnel. Democratic Hope is the rare work of intellectual history that is simultaneously a powerful contribution to political criticism.

Westbrook believes that the anti-foundationalism that many have come to see as the chief contribution of a pragmatist stance leads not to postmodernist skepticism but to a fallibilist theory of truth with a “powerful elective affinity with democracy.” Pragmatists’ method for arriving at justified truth-claims demands the most open community of inquiry possible, and it is this method that allies pragmatist epistemology with a commitment to a radically inclusive democratic polity. To argue otherwise is to sever Dewey’s legacy in two, suggesting that his “reconstruction” of philosophy had nothing to do with his many admirable political choices. Or to open the door, as Rorty has, to the proposition that pragmatism is “neutral between democrats and fascists.” Westbrook knows that pragmatists have a stake in that fight.

The democratic logic that Westbrook identifies in pragmatism leads him to a political position sharply at odds with Rorty’s stance in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. By identifying anti-foundationalism in philosophy with self-fashioning, Rorty has in Westbrook’s account restricted the political reach of Dewey’s most radical ideas to an ironic sensibility and limited public life to a thin, procedural liberalism. Contingency’s utopia of “a liberal polity embedded in a postphilosophical culture” reveals, moreover, an ambivalence about the public accountability of intellectuals in a democracy. “Rorty cannot seem to make up his mind,” Westbrook charges, “whether the liberal utopia” he proposes “will be one in which all of its citizens will indeed be ironists as well as liberals, or only some of its citizens will be ironists—and they [sic] only when they are not acting as citizens.” In contrast to Dewey’s effort to organize all communities along democratic lines, Rorty must resort to a “jerry-rigged and precarious sort of arrangement to protect liberalism” from the ironic skepticism of the educated few.

Westbrook also has harsh words for Rorty’s ventures into political commentary, particularly in Achieving Our Country. As much as he shares Rorty’s distaste for cultural-studies “theorizing” about “power,” Westbrook believes that a rigorous left would commit an enormous error if it were to follow Rorty in adopting “a wholly banal vocabulary” that condemns the deepening inequalities of the last four decades as instances of plutocratic “greed” and “selfishness.” “A left without social theory is disarmed,” Westbrook warns.

One assumes that such social theory will have a Marxian valence, but Westbrook has no sympathy for scholars such as James Livingston who have aligned pragmatism and Marxism in a program that welcomes corporate capitalism as the necessary first step toward some socialist future. Instead, he defends a producerist politics that he maintains Dewey shared with Eugene Debs, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the left wing of the social-gospel movement. “Dewey was not only a democratic collectivist,” he writes, “but also a persistent populist who carried forward into the twentieth century a good deal of the radical impulses in producer-republicanism” from the 1880s and 1890s. Dewey’s debt to American producerism was an important theme in Westbrook’s first book, as well, and it allowed him to make a case for Dewey as a radical democrat who challenged the welfarist liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society. But there has been an important shift in emphasis in Westbrook’s interpretation since John Dewey and American Democracy. Producer-republicanism figured there more as an original influence than as the defining feature of Dewey’s mature politics, a good deal of which was closer to European social democracy than it was to the agrarian radicalism of the People’s Party. Democratic Hope, by contrast, makes a significantly stronger claim for a petty-bourgeois stance of the kind Christopher Lasch advocated in his later work as the appropriate political position for pragmatists in our time.

That claim may provoke some confusion for those of us who look to the Dewey Westbrook has made so vividly available in sorting through our political options today. On the one hand, he invokes Dewey’s populist sympathies to counter the antidemocratic and corporatist tendencies of historians who have tried to join Dewey and Marx in unholy matrimony. On the other hand, Westbrook applauds the ideal of “social citizenship” that T.H. Marshall and other British Labourites promoted after World War Two. “That is,” he writes, “a conception of citizenship that went beyond the provision to all citizens of civil and political rights to the provision of ‘social rights’ ” by way of a far more “robust welfare state” than the one that emerged in the United States during the Roosevelt-Truman administrations. Like the producerist politics Westbrook admires in Debs and Dewey, “social citizenship might require solidarities that a strictly liberal political culture cannot sustain.” An “ethic of mutual obligation” lay beneath populism and postwar Labourism alike.

If one is looking for solidaristic alternatives to liberalism, then certainly these two traditions have much to offer. Yet Westbrook sidesteps the contradictions between populism and Labour’s expansive welfarism. At the end of the nineteenth century, radical farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers warned that the eclipse of an economy of small producers threatened the democratic experiment. Their twentieth-century heirs—including the Catholic Distributists and Lasch himself—continued this line of argument: however much it has softened the blows of the market, the modern welfare state accelerated the decline of self-government by ceding decisions about public affairs to distant and often unaccountable administrators. Dewey’s “planning” society may have constituted a populist counterweight to modern liberalism, but it’s not clear from Westbrook’s accounts that Dewey ever fully acknowledged the contradictions between these two traditions. The uneasy coexistence of populism and welfarism in the twentieth-century progressive tradition is a story still to be told, and no historian is better prepared to tell it than Westbrook himself.

RICHARD RORTY IS uninterested in the intellectual syntheses that Westbrook is after. He has demonstrated little fondness for the populist tradition and appears indifferent to the distinctions Westbrook draws between British Labourism and U.S. liberalism: both, he would presumably argue, are part of the social-democratic legacy the academic left has abandoned. The connections between American pragmatism and democratic politics are entirely the product of contingent historical circumstances, in his view, not of epistemological affinities of any kind. Much of what Westbrook and other scholars regard as central tenets of Dewey’s thought—“democratic self-realization” and “experience,” above all—represent for Rorty Hegelian hangovers he wishes his hero had overcome. No wonder that Westbrook often finds that he and his colleague James Kloppenberg end up shaking their heads when appearing with Rorty at conferences, saying something along the lines of, “Gee, that argument that you say that you and Dewey make is very provocative, but Dewey never made it and I do not believe he ever would make it since it is at odds with arguments he did make.”

Westbrook’s criticisms of Rorty are a good deal more charitable than many others coming from the left, particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Richard Bernstein famously denounced Rorty’s politics as “little more than an ideological apologia for an old-fashioned version of Cold War liberalism dressed up in fashionable ‘post-modern’ discourse.” Kloppenberg’s justly praised essay “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” drew on Bernstein and Jurgen Habermas to mount one of the most persuasive critiques in the vast Rorty literature. Far more discerning than the crude Rorty-bashing in many left-leaning circles, the essay was nonetheless severe in its judgment on Rorty’s neopragmatism. In Kloppenberg’s view, Rorty’s “liberal ironism encourages selfishness, cynicism, and resignation by undercutting efforts to confront the hard facts of poverty and greed.”

In light of Rorty’s political interventions over the last fifteen years, such criticisms—which this reviewer shared—seem to have lost their purchase. Many of us underestimated the depth of the man’s political commitments. Even if one substitutes “allows” for “encourages,” in Kloppenberg’s formulation, the case for Rorty as an apostle of resignation now strikes me as overstated, indeed misguided. In articles on public education, market fundamentalism, and the Iraq War, Rorty has emerged as one of our most eloquent and impassioned public intellectuals. Yes, he writes in a deliberately “banal” vocabulary, lacking the sophistication of more systematic social theorists and policy experts. Westbrook is right: the left cannot live on such language alone. In so doing, however, Rorty has kept faith with a proud amateur tradition of citizen-intellectuals who write in plain English, and with respect for their audience’s capacity for reasoned argument. Rorty is a model of what Michael Walzer has called a “connected critic,” an intellectual who implores his fellow citizens to live up to the moral values they claim to hold dear. “The only way we can criticize current social rules,” he has told one interviewer, “is by reference to utopian notions which proceed by taking elements in the tradition and showing how unfulfilled they are.” We would be better off with more such banality.

Future historians less preoccupied with Rorty’s pragmatist heresies than are Westbrook and Kloppenberg will still have to assess what he has accomplished by introducing his particular version of James and Dewey into late-twentieth-century culture. Here the issue of whether or not Rorty got Dewey right may prove less compelling than will the question of how exactly he has gone about reintroducing the pragmatists for our consideration. Rorty calls himself, in typically self-deprecatory style, a “syncretist hack,” “someone who tried to retrieve some stuff in Dewey that I thought was in danger of being forgotten.” A master maker of mosaics seems a better description. Rorty has picked up the dusty old windowpane called pragmatism he found in the attic above the philosophy building and laid it down hard on his desk, cracking what was once a single piece of glass into a spider’s web of delicate shards. After much rearranging, pragmatism has emerged in a new pattern, with several fragments dyed a rich French blue. For those who like unified theoretical systems and crystal-clear views of objective truth, the result is aesthetically appealing, but useless as a window onto the world. This is certainly not what Dewey would have done, or did do in his time; but Rorty’s contribution is far more substantial than many of his pragmatist critics allow. As that great philosopher Leonard Cohen reminds us, “There is a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in.”

THAT LIGHT HAS gotten into American culture in other ways. Rorty has done more than any single thinker in recent years to shake up our intellectual life, to unsettle a post-sixties academy that was ossifying into insular subcultures, and to model with his own writing what a more open, freewheeling approach to ideas might look like. He has vigorously and for the most part respectfully responded to his critics in philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and history. The new collection of interviews with Rorty edited by Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, takes its title from a mantra that reveals the commitments that have led him into the fray. “My slogan,” Rorty tells one of his interlocutors, “is that if you take care of freedom, truth takes care of itself. A true statement is just one that a free community can agree to be true. If we take care of political freedom, we get truth as a bonus.” Expanding the boundaries of free inquiry, debating one’s critics, replacing older questions with new ones, and writing with clarity and grace is what he suggests intellectuals ought to do, inside and outside the university.

Mendieta’s collection provides a useful and accessible overview of Rorty’s intellectual development, from his childhood and youth in a family of anti-Stalinist social democrats to his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, where study with Richard McKeon gave him a grounding in the history of philosophy most of his contemporaries lacked, then on to a professional career that took him in and out of the inner circles of analytical philosophy to his current vocation as a “post-philosophical” critic. The interviews also give readers a good sense of Rorty’s self-effacing manner, his wry humor, and humane sensibility. Such modesty is not unrelated to his philosophy and political ideas. Mendieta characterizes Rorty’s anti-authoritarian pragmatism as “forward-looking and meliorative,” as “secularism to the nth degree.” “There is no supreme power that can offer an alibi, warrant, or proof for our claims and beliefs,” he writes of Rorty’s stance, “nothing except fallible human authority. There is no supreme authority, other than the authority of human justifications and reasons, whose only power is the power of persuasion.” Or to put it another way, Rorty dares us to imagine a world in which we are free women and men—free from God, free from sin, from Truth, free from anything beyond historically-formed human activity—and asks us to go from there. The United States has produced a great many idiosyncratic champions of human freedom, Walt Whitman and William James above all. It is time to recognize Rorty’s place in that lineage.

In his best cultural criticism Rorty writes in the prophetic voice of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman. That neo-Emersonianism has caused him some trouble, however, as a guide to American history, especially when it comes to understanding the persistent appeal of religion for his fellow citizens—an area in which he has himself admitted to be “unmusical.” In a 1994 interview, he denied that religion has played a dominant role in what his questioner calls the “national self-determination” of his country. “Thoreau and Whitman were not religious,” he explains, as if that settled the matter. Rorty’s position becomes even more baffling when he weighs the consequences of religious belief for contemporary American politics. He describes the civil rights movement as “the single best thing that happened in the United States during the twentieth century” and praises “the black masses”—who presumably acted on non-ironic, religiously-grounded moral commitments—for being far in advance of white intellectuals of the time. Yet he also suggests that “the possibility of rearing new Martin Luther Kings is worth the risk of rearing new Jerry Falwells is a matter of risk management. To my mind, the advantage of getting rid of the Falwells is worth the risk of getting rid of the Kings.” Historians are likely to tear their hair out over this arithmetic approach to American civic culture. Those of us who share Rorty’s political hopes are likely to be equally dumbstruck by such a statement. Living within the tradition that Rorty himself seeks to revivify means learning to live with irritants like Falwell—and then slapping them down hard as enemies of American democracy.

Rorty has in recent years stepped back from his early atheist pronouncements, describing his current position as “anti-clerical,” and he has begun to explore, with increasing sympathy and insight, the social Christianity that his grandfather Walter Rauschenbusch championed a century ago. In an exchange with philosopher Gianni Vattimo, Rorty movingly evokes an ideal of holiness that Rauschenbusch might himself have offered, in roughly the same words. “My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.” Rorty admits he has “no idea of how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. This mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things.”

To which I—and everyone else indebted to Rorty for reminding us of this country’s most generous intellectual and political traditions—can only say, amen.


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Casey Nelson Blake is professor of history and American studies at Columbia University and editor of The Arts of Democracy: Art, Civic Culture, and the State (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press).

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