Histories of Pragmatism

Abstract

This is a complicated and fascinating collection in which, for the first time, intellectual historians try to locate Richard Rorty in an American pragmatic tradition. Rorty himself replies to those who have dissected his place in this tradition. It is difficult to give the overall flavor of a book that is multiauthored without doing a disservice to the views of the individual authors. In general, however, the writers esteem the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey and find it essentially allied with progressive, left-liberal politics in the twentieth century. A Pragmatist's Progress salutes Rorty as the latest member of this tradition, but the authors variously criticize him for falling away from the political and social endeavors defining the work of James and Dewey. Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) distinguished between private pleasures and public action and urged the superior value of the former; the commentators in this volume uniformly condemn but also explain this suburban liberalism. This critique by readers of Rorty is now standard, and he responded to it in Achieving Our Country (1997). This history of the American left in the twentieth century contrasted the good left devoted to social-democratic politics with the bad, cultural left, which Rorty said had triumphed since the 1960s. In part, the contributors argue that this later book's denunciation of the identity politics of the cultural left aims at the complacent views that Rorty had expressed himself in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. More pointedly, the authors of A Pragmatist's Progress dispute Rorty's history, especially his benign appraisal of America's role in the Cold War and his interpretation of the new cultural politics. While praising the new activist Rorty, who calls for concrete left-liberal political commitments in Achieving Our Country, the contributors also find these commitments more straitened than they need be. The evaluation of Rorty is thus mixed: He gets elevated to the canon of James and Dewey, but the commentators find him to be the weakest of the three.