How to Be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross

The early 1990s were the height of the culture wars, and the exchange played out the left version of them, along the fault lines of traditional versus cultural or identity politics. I return to it now not to resuscitate those quarrels, but to look at Rorty and Ross and their respective careers. The exchange, like most such exchanges, probably served to entrench each side rather than persuade the other, but it also brought to center stage two of the more prominent humanities intellectuals of the last two decades. What models of the intellectual does each present? Rorty was right to say that he and Ross represented different intellectual generations, a difference that has become clearer in the years since 1992.