Richard Rorty in Retrospect

Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal grandfather was Walter Raushenbush, who, during the 1920s and 1930s, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, was one of the pioneers of the Social Gospel movement. In his sermons, Raushenbush would rail volubly against “the servants of Mammon...who drain their fellow men for gain. . .who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements...[and] who have cloaked their extortion with the gospel of Christ.” Despite this background, Rorty’s own political interests crystallized relatively late in life, with the 1998 publication of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century.