File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 395


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


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