Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 14:20:44 +0100 From: Jim heartfield <Jim-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: M-I: Richard Rorty's American nationalism In message <199804232052.PAA140872-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> writes >This work is reviewed also in a recent Nation and I think in a recent WSJ. > >Perhaps it is useful to remind readers that Norman Geras had a searing >critique of Rorty in the NLR in the last year, and I believe has a book >out developing that critique in detail. Rorty has had an immense impact on >a number of establishment (left liberal) literary critics in the U.S. > >Carrol I read and reviewed a few of Rorty's books for LM in the early nineties. There is no doubt that he is that special species of conservative the 'cold war liberal'. Inspired by John Dewey, Sidney Hook (in one of the two volumes of philosophical papers Rorty describes being dandled on Hook's knee as an infant) and his own father James Rorty (who, like most of the cold war liberals, travelled from Stalinism, through trotskyism to become part of the 'Voice of America' broadcasters to 'Red' China. Rorty senior's sterling service for US imperialism did not stop him being -falsely- acused of being a spy by the House UnAmerican Activities Commission.). Cold war liberalism combines a rejection of (generally arising out of a flirtation with) Marxism and a rejection of traditional conservatism (on the grounds that it is likely to provoke class struggle). The key players are described in Alan Wald's New York Intellectuals: Max Eastman, Norman Podhoretz, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell etc. Many of these were students of John Dewey's pragamtic philosophy and prevailed on the ailing Dewey to adjudicate Trotsky's hearings on Stalinism in Mexico. Trotsky used Dewey to give credence to his version of events; Dewey used Trotsky to teach a lesson in the ultimate failure of all revolutionary change. Rorty's philosophy summarises much of that. He draws on the pluralism that Dewey's radical students propounded as an alternative to Marxism. Rorty saw the similarity between pragmatism's rejection of rational systemic thought and the post-modernists attack on grand narratives. His two books Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and the Two Volumes of Philosophical Papers are all about making peace with the long despised continental philosophy, now that it too has seen the light of rejecting 'metaphysics' (which is code for systemic thought, and includes of course, Marxism). By 'solidarity' Rorty means a 'non-foundational' social cohesion, ie one that does not rest on any 'metaphysical' notions of 'economic interest' 'class consciousness' or (because he equates these things as all species of 'metaphysics') race. His earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is interestingly radical (if ultimately absurd) in its rejection of the 'foundationalism' of the subject, attacking the ideas of an inner self, the sub-conscious, etc. Though Rorty's theory is derived from the anglo-American philosophical tradition, its meeting points with contemporary theories of the 'death of the subject' derived from continental philosophy has meant that he has been an influential bourgeois ideologue. -- Jim heartfield --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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