No doubt the inheritors of the American revolution have something to learn from the inheritors of the English, French, Russian or Chinese ones but the learning should not be all one way. Maybe he is only saying – quite plausibly, I should have thought – that if you compare the actually existing legal and political systems of different countries and rank them according to their ability to tackle injustices old and new, then those of the United States must come pretty near the top. The patriotic Rorty does not deny that there has been massive unnecessary unhappiness in the history of the United States both at home and abroad. The point about Americanism can perhaps be disposed of quite quickly. And the other dereliction – perhaps gravest of all from the point of view of solemn European leftists – is that Rorty is not ashamed of being a citizen of the United States of America, and indeed that he has called on his fellow citizens to ʻrejoiceʼ in their Americanness and build up their ʻshared sense of national identityʼ by yielding to the ʻemotion of national prideʼ. Another is that, given his pragmatism or antifoundationalism or anti-realism, he can never have any grounds for criticizing existing social relations: after all, if no description is necessitated by reality as such, then intolerable injustices will always be open to face-saving redescriptions that will make them out to be inevitable or even desirable. One is that he has given up on all a priori universal necessities, and so cannot subscribe to any belief in natural human rights – a belief which they may well take to be historically and logically indispensable to any kind of progressive or critical politics, perhaps even for politics as such.
I particularly enjoy all those glum self-descriptions he goes in for, where ʻwe Western leftistsʼ, for instance, are made to coincide with ʻwe bourgeois liberalsʼ, and admonished, after ʻdumping Marxʼ, to become ʻmore willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far.ʼ These reiterated ʻweʼsʼ may be questionable as statements of fact, but they are pretty effective as needles for puncturing pompous conceits: comic devices for winding up those of us who cannot bring ourselves to admit that our political righteousness may not be quite so self-evident when seen in its broad practical context, or when measured in terms of its long-range historical effects.įor those who get wound up by Rorty, he is guilty of three principal betrayals. He may or may not be, as Harold Bloom claimed, ʻthe most interesting philosopher in the world todayʼ, but he is certainly one of the drollest: a continuous tease, and just about the only philosopher who can make me laugh. For one thing they are unaware of Rortyʼs funny side. For those who like taking left offence, Rorty is a most dependable supplier of what turns them on.īut the comrades seem to me to have got the wrong end of the stick. Especially when I see him being set upon by members of the realist old Left: the salt-of-the-earth socialist internationalists who enjoy looking back to the great days of organized labour, wringing their hands over yet another opportunist who has proved unequal to the struggle and sold out to the blandishments of bourgeoisdom. I know he has no need of my help, but I sometimes feel rather protective towards Richard Rorty.
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