Theoria

This edition of Theoria is being assembled at a time of war. The government of the United States of America is projecting, through force, its power in the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq has been presented as a war of liberation. Its principal declared purpose has become the emancipation of the Iraqi people from tyrannical rule. Whatever the pretexts, declared and imputed, for the decision to go to war – which have ranged from the desire to disarm Saddam’s regime of its weapons of mass destruction to securing control of Iraqi oil supplies – there is little doubt that this is primarily an attempt to politically ‘reengineer’ an entire region. As such it fits neatly with the doctrine, articulated by the neo-conservative authors associated with the Project for the New American Century, which presses for the creation of an enduring, twenty-first century pax Americana of global reach. In their view, it is imperative that the United States does not lose the military supremacy it currently enjoys. No superpower that might challenge it should be allowed to emerge. To this end, the present war entails an attempt to erect a ‘coercive carapace’ across the Middle East, stretching from Israel in the west through to Afghanistan or indeed perhaps even India – a potentially ‘natural’ ally – in the east. Iraq is the centrally located landmass on which this exercise will first be tested, and from which it will be extended. This bold endeavour is concerned, in its own way, to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ and, by extension, American interests.

One of the most long-standing and potent charges against pragmatism from the point of view of political philosophy has been that of acquiescence. 1 Whatever the personal, moral or political commitments of particular pragmatists, this criticism alleges, pragmatism is vulnerable to appropriation by whatever social forces are most powerful. This criticism takes various forms (MacGilvray 2000), but its core can be fairly simply stated. On the one hand, pragmatism (at least in its Deweyan version) subsumes theoretical reasoning within practical reasoning. For the Deweyan account, inquiry is understood as a particular kind of activity. Like other activities, it is pursued in order to achieve particular goals. In its course one’s goals may change, new conceptions of what one is doing emerge and indeed who one is may emerge, etc. But inquiry should be understood as goal-directed activity, and successful inquiry as that which allows us to deal with the environment in better ways. On the other hand, Deweyan pragmatism is notoriously reticent about setting out ‘final ends’ for the sake of which this activity takes place (Richardson 1999: 122). Inquiry is then viewed as instrumental and goal-directed, but the goals to which it is or should be directed are left out of the picture of practical reasoning. Accordingly, social consensus or power rushes to fill the vacuum. The dilemma that this position presents for the pragmatist, then, is that either she abandons the aspiration to say something critical about existing social and political arrangements or she abandons the pragmatist view of inquiry: she cannot have both.

Rorty wrote his Achieving Our Country as a philosopher, intellectual, academic and citizen, and each of these perspectives lead to a different emphasis in reading his book, and to a different story (and ‘storytelling’ is one of the themes of the book). The emergent pictures vary: the philosopher tells a story of the growing isolation and cultural sterility of analytic philosophy in the United States of America after the Second World War; the intellectual tells a story of the political bareness and practical uselessness of (the majority of) American leftist intellectuals in the context of the emerging new global order at the turn of the 21st century; the academic tells the story about humanities’ departments at American universities, especially departments of literature and cultural studies, and their students, and contrasts their possible future fate with the past fate of departments of analytical philosophy and their students; and, finally, the citizen tells a story about the nationhood, politics, patriotism, reformism (as well as the inherent dangers and opportunities of globalization). Rorty plays the four descriptions off against one another perfectly and Achieving Our Country represents him at his very best: Rorty is passionate, inspiring, uncompromising, biting and very relevant to current public debates. Owing to the intelligent combination of the above perspectives, the clarity and elegance of his prose, and (although not revealed directly) the wide philosophical background provided by his new pragmatism, the book differs from a dozen others written in the 1990s about the American academy and American intellectuals. It also sheds new and interesting light on Rorty’s pragmatism, providing an excellent example of the application of his philosophical views. One has to note that, generally, it is almost impossible to think of any piece written by Rorty outside of the context of his philosophy, and Achieving Our Country is no exception to this rule.

In his Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Gary Gutting attempts to rescue Richard Rorty’s seminal work from various accusations of relativism and skepticism that have plagued it. These arise due to Rorty’s recurrent resistance to the inclusion of any hint of metaphysical realism, which has thus resulted in Rorty committing to (what are seen by many analytic philosophers as objectionable1) claims such as ‘everything we know is known only under “optional description”’ (Rorty 1979: 379), ‘the absurdity of thinking that the vocabulary used by present science, morality, or whatever, has some privileged attachment to reality which makes it more than just a further set of descriptions’ (Rorty 1979: 361), and to instances in later work when he states that ‘[t]he hardness of fact in all these cases is simply the hardness of previous agreements within a community about the consequences of a certain event’ (Rorty 1991: 80). In this paper I intend to describe the pragmatic liberal theory that Gutting puts forward, showing how he uses Rorty’s pragmatism to set his foundations, and how he then builds on this by appealing to a ‘humdrum’ commonsense view in order to save Rorty. I will follow Gutting’s strategy of approaching the theories of ‘knowledge without representation’, ‘justification as social practice’, ‘the problem of truth’, and ‘Davidsonian Therapy’ separately, arguing systematically that each of these aspects fails as a convincing appeal to commonsense, humdrum realism, and that the additions to Rorty do not strengthen his theory; instead, they show the importance of the epistemologies that the theory is trying to denounce.

In his Theoria 97 (June 2001: 23-40) assessment of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, Fred Dallmayr agrees that Rorty’s criticism of the contemporary Left in America is necessary, that the Left has indeed lost the momentum that in previous years so impacted American society. He further agrees with Rorty that there is an important distinction to be made between the old-guard ‘reformist’ Left and the new orthodoxy of ‘cultural’ Leftism. Dallmayr argues, however, that Rorty’s critique is unbalanced, and is unfairly biased against the ‘cultural’ Left, despite the occasional conciliatory statement. He argues further that there is something worrying in the style of American pride that Rorty is promoting. In particular, argues Dallmayr, it seems to ignore the fact that in the contemporary world national boundaries can no longer be sharply defined, and the narrow form of national pride that Rorty seems to espouse can be a destructive force in the interwoven international community. Undoubtedly, Dallmayr makes some telling points against Rorty’s position in what is a thoughtful and well-crafted response. There is, however, more to be said, and I wish in this paper to add to Dallmayr’s critique, working from within the philosophical framework provided by Charles Taylor.1 I will also consider the attempt, made by Gary Gutting, to overcome some of the shortcomings of Rorty’s pragmatism by drawing on aspects of Taylor’s philosophy.

While Richard Rorty’s general views on truth, objectivity, and relativism continue to attract much attention from professional philosophers, some of his contributions to ethical theory have thus far been remarkably neglected. In other work, I have begun the task of sketching what a Rortyan approach to traditional questions in meta-ethics might look like.1 Here, however, I shall attempt to summarize and evaluate some of the contributions that Rorty has made to important debates in first-order normative theory. More specifically, my attention will be devoted primarily to the question of what moral obligations of respect and tolerance, if any, we have towards those who act out of moral frameworks which are divergent from our own. The paper proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I suggest that one promising way of approaching ethical issues about tolerance is through the somewhat novel strategy of first clearly differentiating the various forms of moral relativism. With this background in place, we can then proceed in section two to the details of Rorty’s own view. Finally, the paper concludes with some worries about the plausibility, coherence, and stability of Rorty’s positive proposal.

It’s All in the Game: A Nonfoundational Account of Law and Adjudication, by Allan Hutchinson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View, by Karl-Otto Apel (edited by Marianna Papastephanou). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Reviewed by Iain MacKenzie

Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, by William E. Connolly. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Reviewed by Duncan S.A. Bell

Liberalism and Value Pluralism, by George Crowder. London: Continuum Publishers, 2002. Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice, by William Galston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Reviewed by Shaun Young

Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society, by Stephan Fuchs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001 Reviewed by Roger Deacon

The Liberal Model and Africa: Elites against Democracy, by Kenneth Good. Basingstoke. Palgrave, 2002. Reviewed by Raymond Suttner

Life Support: The Environment and Human Health, (edited by Michael McNally). Boston: MIT Press, 2002. Reviewed by Julia de Kadt

Revolt, She Said, by Julia Kristeva (translated by Brian O’Keeffe). Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e), 2002. Reviewed by Clayton Crockett

Frantz Fanon: A life, by David Macey. London: Granta, 2001. Reviewed by Derek Hook

On Belief, by Slavoj Zizek. London: Routledge, 2001. Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, edited and with a commentary by Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, by Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2002. Reviewed by Derek Hook

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