Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change: Some implications of Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalist liberalism

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 537-557

  Volpi, Frédéric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

irony; liberal imagination; political theory; pragmatism; social change; Third World

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997966664     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028005665     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. For an alternative exposition of contemporary pragmatism see Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. J. Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
2. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. J. Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
3. Richard Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists: a Reply to Bernstein’, Political Theory 15(4) (1987): 564–80 (572).
4. See also Richard J. Bernstein, ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy’, Political Theory 15(4): 538–63.
5. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin Books, 1999);
6. Richard Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’, Constellations 6(2) (1999): 216–21.
7. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xv, 63. Shklar's definition of cruelty is: ‘deliberate and persistent infliction of physical and secondarily emotional pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter’.
8. Judith N. Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in N. L. Rosenblum (ed.) Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 29.
9. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 73.
10. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 172.
11. Rorty's advocacy of a commonsensical and ‘deflationary’ conception of ‘truth’ is much indebted to Davidson. See Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
12. See also Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
13. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 120.
14. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 171.
15. For Rorty this is the case because, in his view, the distinction between the powerful and the powerless has become ‘usefully obscured’ in liberal societies. See Richard Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philosophers: a Reply to Lynn Baker’, Virginia Law Review 78(3) (1992): 719–27.
16. Thomas McCarthy, ‘Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism’, Critical Inquiry 16(2) (1990): 355–70 (366).
17. Richard Rorty, ‘Truth and Freedom: a Reply to Thomas McCarthy’, Critical Inquiry 16(3) (1990): 633–43.
18. See Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’.
19. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 95.
20. For critiques of the voluntaristic drive in this scheme see Sheldon Wolin, ‘Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism’, Social Research 57(1) (1990): 5–30;
21. Thomas McCarthy, ‘Ironist Theory as a Vocation: a Response to Rorty's Reply’, Critical Inquiry 16(3) (1990): 644–55.
22. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 197, 85.
23. As Geuss points out, the distinctions made between public and private in different philosophical traditions do not cut ‘reality’ at the same junctures and the implications that can be drawn from each do not obey a single overall logic. See Raymond Geuss, ‘Shamelessness, Spirituality, and the Common Good’, paper presented at the conference on Asian and Western Conceptions of Public and Private, King's College, Cambridge, 13–15 September 1999.
24. Mill clearly recognized that although the proposal to limit governmental intervention in people's private lives ‘is not likely to be contested in general terms, the practical question — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done’. John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’ and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 9. From a realpolitik perspective, it must be noted that even if this division can be conceptualized, its implementation is an altogether more difficult matter.
25. See John Dunn, ‘Public and Private: Normative Map and Political and Social Battleground’, paper presented at the conference on Asian and Western Conceptions of Public and Private, King's College, Cambridge, 13–15 September 1999.
26. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 220.
27. Gander points to a similar problem in Rorty's selective use of the ‘no cruelty’ clause in his comparison between a liberal utopia and St Ignatius Loyola's ideal Christian order (which Rorty presents as the world of a madman). See Eric M. Gander, The Last Conceptual Revolution: A Critique of Richard Rorty's Political Philosophy (Albany: State of New York University Press, 1999), pp. 69–78.
28. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 220.
29. In Brave New World, when one of the few unhappy characters of the novel, the Savage, raises the issue of the fate of the arts, sciences, liberty, love and passion, he is told by the World Controller that ‘actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery’. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 180, 194–5.
30. See Richard Rorty, ‘Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future’, in R. W. Lovin and M. J. Perry (eds) Critique and Construction: A Symposium on Roberto Unger's Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 29–45.
31. See also Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
32. Although Rorty endorses Mill's suggestion that ‘it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces or can produce well-developed human beings’, he makes very little of Mill's other remark that, for general political purposes, ‘it may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades’ — i.e. better to err on the side of self-denial than to be profligate. Mill, ‘On Liberty’, pp. 69–70.
33. Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
34. It must be remarked, however, that Camus's champion was the ‘rebel’, not the conscientious civil servant or the sensitive liberal reformer. See Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. A. Bower (New York: Random House, 1956).
35. Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’. See also the criticism of both Shklar's and Rorty's utilization of the ‘no cruelty’ argument in Gander's The Last Conceptual Revolution.
36. Rorty is aware that the social, economic and political standards of rich Western democracies are precarious in the face of that same plasticity, and this makes him waver on which conclusions to draw from an analysis of plasticity. In the end, Rorty does not provide any guidelines — even provisional ones — that may help to determine which political attitude is appropriate under which circumstances, and what may shift the balance. Compare the rather upbeat assessment in Richard Rorty's ‘Love and Money’, Common Knowledge 1(1) (1992): 12–16, with the more downcast judgement he gives in
37. ‘Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage’, Diogenes 173(44) (1996): 5–15.
38. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 98–9.
39. Rorty argues that ‘to rely on the suggestions of sentiment rather than on the commands of reason is to think of powerful people gradually ceasing to oppress others, or to countenance the oppression of others, out of mere niceness rather than out of obedience to the moral law’. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 181.
40. Richard Rorty, ‘The Overphilosophication of Politics’, Constellations 7(1) (2000).
41. See also Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
42. For him, they are people ‘like the rich New England abolitionists or rich bleeding hearts like Robert Owen and Friedrich Engels’. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 181.
43. ‘In the ideal liberal society’, Rorty says, ‘the intellectuals would still be ironists, although nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be commonsensically nominalists and historicists. So they would see themselves as contingent through and through, without feeling any particular doubts about the contingencies they happened to be’ (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87). In realpolitik terms, this distinction between the ironists and the non-ironists parallels the one that Machiavelli made between i grandi (who know what politics is about) and il popolo (who know enough to perform their duty as instructed by their masters).
44. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996).
45. Rorty may find solace in Unger's assessment that the agents of change in the Third World are ‘petty-bourgeois functionaries’, but Unger himself does not provide a very satisfactory answer to this problem. His social project relies heavily upon the prowess of the ‘good functionary’ (or ‘good legislator’), and he does not fully explain how his champion manages to retain so much probity. See the critical assessment of Unger's project in John Dunn's ‘Unger's Politics and the Appraisal of Political Possibility’, in Lovin and Perry (eds) Critique and Construction.
46. Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philosophers’, p. 726.
47. Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 104.
48. Rorty, ‘Love and Money’, pp. 15–16.
49. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, p. 25.
50. Allan Johnson points out that on this issue, there are quite a few affinities between Rorty's views and those of early American utopian socialists like Edward Bellamy — and that this is not entirely to Rorty's advantage. Allan Johnson, ‘The Affinities of Richard Rorty and Edward Bellamy’, Radical Philosophy 91 (September–October 1998): 33–6.
51. See Rorty, Truth and Progress, particularly Chapter 12; and compare
52. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
53. See particularly Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979);
54. Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
55. This difficulty is well brought out in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
56. Rorty argues that they are not irrational agents but that they are deprived of security and of sympathy, the twin conditions for a proper moral education. They act as they do, he points out, ‘because they live in a world in which it would be just too risky — indeed, would often be insanely dangerous — to let one's sense of moral community stretch beyond one's family, clan, or tribe’. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 178, 180.
57. Forgetfulness, one of Nietzsche's tools to explain the development of morality, is evidently a double-edged sword from a political as well as an ethical perspective. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
58. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 277, xiv.
59. See Frédéric Volpi, ‘Language, Practices and the Formation of a Transnational Liberal-Democratic Ethos’, Global Society 16(1) (2002).
60. Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’, p. 218, 217.
61. Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philosophers’, p. 726.
62. Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists’, p. 569.
63. Lynn Baker pointed out that, on pragmatic grounds, relatively powerless social reformers would do well to back up their arguments with some form of appeal to ‘Truth’ to convince their audience. See Lynn A. Baker, ‘Just Do It: Pragmatism and Progressive Social Change’, Virginia Law Review 78(3) (1992): 697–718.
64. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
65. See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1927);
66. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925).
67. See also Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Is the Revival of Pragmatism Practical, or What Are the Consequences of Pragmatism’, Constellations 6(4) (1999): 561–87.
68. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 99.
69. See also Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988).
70. See Bryan S. Turner, ‘Forgetfulness and Frailty: Otherness and Rights in Contemporary Social Theory’, in C. Rojek and B. S. Turner, The Politics of Jean-François Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 25–42.