A Pragmatist's Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History

Abstract

“There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all,” sang Bob Dylan. His rather arch lyrics capture the fate of the philosopher Richard Rorty, as the contributors to this volume acknowledge Rorty's important failures but also diminish his success. Rorty demanded recognition with publication of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979. There Rorty skewered philosophers' foundational stone of a correspondence theory of truth. Instead, Rorty proposed that our descriptions of the world are nothing more than simply culturally located descriptions. In subsequent works, Rorty increasingly identified himself with the pragmatist tradition while he also embraced the au courant language theory of postmodernism. In a non-foundationalist world, Rorty drew a firm distinction between the private and public realms, celebrating irony and self-creation in the private realm while calling for liberal reformism, predicated on the imperative to lessen cruelty, in the public arena. In his most recent work, Achieving Our Country (1997), Rorty attacked academic theorists as impotent spectators, distanced from the hurly-burly world of political reform. Rorty also sought to rewrite the history of the American Left by lumping together, with a vengeance, various individuals (ranging from Herbert Croly to Sidney Hook to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) as fighters for social justice in America.