DAVID SIDORSKY
129
For Rorty, the falsity of the factual claims advanced within a political
philosophy does not lead to its refutation. Rorty's account has the virtue
of preserving his general philosophical commitment to pluralism with
its tolerance for diverse opinion.
It
renders problematic, however, the
grounds for his own extreme rejection of competing political directions.
Characteristically, John Dewey interpreted competing political claims
as quasi-scientific hypotheses which could be resolved by a rational
community of inquiry. For a Deweyan concerned with deciding the issue
raised by differences on political policy between James Baldwin and Eli–
jah Muhammad, not only the positions of these two figures but the
appropriate "hypotheses" generated from Richard Wright or Ralph Elli–
son (to complete what Henry Gates has called the "trinity" of black
authors), as well as the relevant "hypotheses" of a Thomas Sowell or
Clarence Thomas, would have to be admitted into the process of free
lllqUlry.
A pluralist like Rorty can assert that Dewey erred in his belief that
there was a scientific method capable of resolving disagreement among
deeply held moral and political attitudes. Yet it seems to me that Rorty
both misinterprets John Dewey and commits a philosophical error in
not recognizing the way in which factual truth or falsity relates to the
objective legitimacy of the acceptance or rejection of political views.
Rorty's attractive strategy is to bypass reference to the truth of com–
peting historical representations, Left or Right, or to the validity of con–
flicting economic theories, Marxist or Hayekian, appealing to literary or
fictional expressions in which views of politics or of human nature are
embedded. Thus, Rorty contrasts contemporary novels of "national
self-mockery and self-disgust" with the "socialist novels of the first half
of the century" that were formulations of "national hope":
The Jungle,
An American Tragedy,
and
The Grapes of Wrath.
Rorty argues that
these works by Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck
serve to show that the rhetoric of individualism fostered by industrial
capitalism "should be replaced by one in which America is destined to
become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society."
Yet there is a gap between the appreciation of these novels as testa–
ments of their times and their use as guideposts for future political direc–
tion. There is the specific historical point that Sinclair, Dreiser, and
Steinbeck themselves came to differ sharply on America's political
future . There is the general point that one need not be a literary decon–
structionist to recognize that even didactic novels lend themselves to the
derivation of different moral and political lessons. In the case of
The
Grapes of Wrath,
there is a stunning illustration of this difference as
