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when he took on, in the second phase of the New Deal, Wall Street and
the ruling classes. Seldom in American history have the democratic peo–
ple posed such a threat to ruling elites. The lesson could never sink in for
Dewey, for what he trusted least Roosevelt trusted most-bold, imagina–
tive leadership, the exceptional person who could be, to use Hook's terms,
both "eventful" and "event-making."
Rotty may feel he is free from the demands of truth, but as a pragma–
tist he must still come to terms with experience. How can he rhapsodize
about the thirties without dealing with the depression, the rise of Hitler,
Stalinism, the atroci ties of the Spanish Civil War, and the Ethiopian War,
which had African-Americans and Italian-Americans battling each other
on the streets of New York? Ignoring such chastening episodes, Rotty
invokes Dewey and others as though the Left's pipe dreams can be sus–
tained even after we awake to reality. But Daniel Bell has a better grasp of
the meaning of the thirties. "There are few figures, of the las t twenty years,
and few books, that can match the stature of Dewey, Beard, Holmes,
Veblen, Brandeis," wrote Bell in
The End of Ideology
(1960). "But to read
these men today is to be struck by their essential optimism....Ours, a
'twice-born' generation, finds its wisdom in pessimism, evil, tragedy, and
despair. So we are both old and young 'before our time.'"
Rorty refuses to allow America to be old. His idea of American his–
tory is to leap from hope to hope, from Whitman to Dewey, and to keep
reaffirming the cult of the yea. There is not a touch of the romantic in
Rotty, the need to ransack the past in order to dwell on its disillusion–
ments and melancholy. Still, Rotty deserves better than the treatment he
recently received in the neoconservative
The VVeekly Standard,
where he is
depicted as an academic entrepreneur enjoying fame and fortune, a
manque
philosopher only interested in self-promotion.
On the contrary, Rorty is an anguished moralist, and despite his
mil–
itant atheism, he is closer to America's religious legacies than he would
perhaps care to acknowledge. George Santayana used to say of Dewey that
he "inherits the Puritan conscience" since he practices a "social moralism"
without appealing to theology or philosophical foundations. The same
description may apply to Rotty, who remains convinced that the
Academic Left can only begin to make a difference when it ceases its
yearning to comprehend reality and instead replaces the quest for knowl–
edge with the more promising need to hope. What is such a postmodernist
stance but the old Calvinist injunction that it is better to will the good
than to know the truth?
Yet the history of the school of American pragmatism is hardly
encouraging to those who would appropriate it for political purposes.
