Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism

Richard Rorty was a colleague of mine at Stanford. We argued more than we ever agreed. While these arguments could be frustratingly inconclusive, I have read this year with great joy his posthumously published book.

He writes with his usual wit and clarity, but the book is also breathtakingly fearless. I have a number of disagreements with his arguments and conclusions, but that is not the point. He is thinking through his commitments and articulating these commitments within a broad philosophical vision.

It is a book that exemplifies thinking and, in so doing, reminds us of what philosophy can be.

Although the firebrand American philosopher Richard Rorty passed away in 2007, this collection of late lectures only reached publication in 2021.

It provides a consummate presentation of Rorty’s late views on the relevance of the pragmatist tradition for contemporary philosophy. Most intriguingly, Rorty here reconfigures many of the core ideas of the pragmatist philosophers and his own theses about the death of representationalism in explicitly political terms: pragmatism is the best philosophy because it is the least authoritarian.

If a worryingly authoritarian moment is evident today on the global political stage, Rorty’s cheekily unconventional brilliance in articulating a thoroughgoing pragmatist… show more.