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PARTISAN REVIEW
Every politician reaches for the adjective "pragmatist" to persuade us
that it is not necessary to have a moral stance or even a clear program for
the future--what one president called "the vision thing." In view of the
close relationship between high-sounding pragmatism and low-level
opportunism, it is amazing that in recent years the philosophy of pragma–
tism has caught on in the academy, especially among radical activists. In
Charlene Haddock Siegried's
Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social
Fabric,
we are told that Dewey and James taught us how reality turns on
perception and interpretation and how multiple perspectives can be radi–
cally transformative. Black scholars like Alaine Locke and W E. B. Du Bois
have also been reinterpreted as pragmatists, and so too the reformer Jane
Addams. Dewey's own political philosophy is offered as "radical democra–
cy." Yet in American history it was more often the moralists, and not the
pragmatists, who championed the cause of freedom and justice, and it is
worth remembering that Martin Luther King, Jr. drew upon Dewey's
antagonist, Reinhold Niebuhr, for a more compelling view of power and
struggle.
When Richard Rorty left philosophy behind and went on to write on
social and political issues in
Contingency. Irony. and Solidarity,
he was follow–
ing the footsteps of Dewey and trying to bring the life of the mind to bear
upon public philosophy. Dewey believed that the old philosophy needed to
be replaced by science and scientific methoci as the basis of its reconstruc–
tion, while Rorty advocated "the linguistic turn," assuming that since all
reality turned on rhetoric and description, change would follow the
method of "redescription." But Rorty has been no more successful than
Dewey in transforming America's political culture of property and oppor–
tunity, what Alexis de Tocqueville once described as "enlightened
self-interest," a materialism he hoped would be "virtuous" rather than
"pernicious." It may be that since pragmatism is a philosophy of success,
pragmatists themselves have been unable to deal with failure in the world
of politics. One wonders why contemporary academics ever thought they
could turn to pragmatism as a way out of our current dilemmas.
A refusal to face failure characterizes Rorty's latest effort in
Achieving
Our Country.
For a scholar who has left the field of philosophy convinced
that it can no longer deliver the certainty of cognitive knowledge, Rorty
has no trouble with his own certainty about historical knowledge. His pre–
sent quarrel is with the cultural leftists in the academy who, despairing of
knowing ultimate reality, are content to fly off into high theory where
they can show us that we are all victims of manipulated interpretations and
representations. Rorty would like to see the Academic Left continue in the
spirit of the Old Left of the thirties, the "reformist Left" that galvanized
