Just published today…
"While Rorty consistently insisted that there is no necessary link from his or anyone's philosophical critiques of truth, rationality, and objectivity to liberal democracy, he did believe that "there is a plausible inference from democratic convictions" to such philosophical views. 11 The affinity stems from a moral commitment to "antiauthoritarianism," his name for the pragmatist objection to any form of fundamentalism, whether philosophical or religious, that attempts "to circumvent the process of achieving democratic consensus" by appealing to "the authority of something 'not ourselves.' "12 In Rorty's antiauthoritarian vision, "Both monotheism and the kind of metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world really is like are replaced with democratic politics." 13 These commitments illuminate two registers of politics that exist in Rorty's writings. The first, which he once dubbed "real politics," involves organized efforts to reduce economic inequality, provide basic needs, and improve people's lives in banal ways through things like labor unions, coalitions, policy reforms, and changing laws. The second register is alluded to in the last volume of essays completed in his lifetime, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), which makes the case that intervening in "cultural politics" should be philosophers' "principal assignment." 14 This apparent embrace of "cultural politics" was surprising to readers of Achieving Our Country familiar with Rorty's scathing indictment of the "academic, cultural Left" for its dismissal of "real" politics and "mock[ ing] the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice." 15 However, his later return to "cultural politics" invokes instead the register of politics oriented to the broad, generational cultural change highlighted in Rorty's work of the 1980s of "liberating the culture from obsolete vocabularies" and "reweaving of the community's fabric of belief" so that we get to "the point where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance." 16 For philosophers to intervene in cultural politics, in this sense, is to join poets and novelists and other social critics in offering new vocabularies and imagining new ways of looking at the world: "social hopes, programs of action, and prophecies of a better future." 17"
— What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty
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