Rorty reviewed

[Doug Henwood]

Slate has a reivew of Rorty by ex-New Republic smarty-pants Jacob Weisberg.
For those who've paid their subscription fee to Microsoft (damned if I can
figure out why I did), the review is at
<http://www.slate.com/StrangeBedfellow/98-05-29/StrangeBedfellow.asp>.

Doug

----

A couple of choice excerpts:

Out of Left Field
Richard Rorty's call for a new popular front.
By Jacob Weisberg
(posted Friday, May 29, 1998)
       One does not ordinarily expect a slim volume written by an
academic philosopher and published by a university press to cause
widespread consternation on the right. But for some reason, Richard
Rorty's new book, Achieving Our Country, which is based on a series of
lectures delivered last year at Harvard, seems to be having that effect.
Writing in Newsweek, George Will commented last week that the book
"radiates contempt for the country." (Perhaps more to the point, it
radiates contempt for George Will.) And in the most recent issue of the
Weekly Standard, David Brooks contends that the book's criticism of the
left is merely the latest in a succession of moves designed to advance
the author's academic career. Brooks accuses Rorty of being a
"pseudo-deviant" who poses as a critic of academic radicals while really
congratulating them.

[...]

Isn't this the kind of loyal opposition right-wingers are supposed to
want? The harsh response to Rorty may have something to do with his
penchant for gratuitous, con-baiting asides, such as the one in which he
absurdly states that "we caused the death of a million Vietnamese out of
sheer macho arrogance." In the course of the book, Rorty sets even
liberal teeth on edge with such outlandish statements, though they are
usually contradicted in more sober moments. (He thinks the Cold War was
necessary and that Reagan was correct to call the Soviet Union an "evil
empire.") But I think that what really alarms the right about Rorty is
not his moments of rhetorical excess but rather the buried fear that the
left might one day wake up and take his advice. If the alienated
theorists of academe transformed themselves into a Rortyan left--a
unified, engaged, and patriotic left--conservative columnists could run
dry of material in a matter of weeks.

[...]

       Personally, I don't think that what stands in the way of Rorty's
utopia is the failure of Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton to endorse
it. It's that there's not enough caffeine in America--and that the whole
world is in retreat from all forms of socialism and semi-socialism.
Rorty writes about politics as if he'd been holding out in a small cave
without newspapers for the past several decades. He has not gleaned
anything from the experience that the Atlantic democracies have had in
governing themselves over the past 30 years, or from their rather mixed
record in dealing with social ills. Nor does he consider the possibility
that markets might be effective in dealing with some social problems.
Conservatives can quit fretting. Liberals might be out of it, but we're
not about to start taking cues from a peacenik philosophy prof. who's
still chasing after the Swedish model.