Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism by David E. McClean (review)

David McClean’s book Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism is an excellent contribution to Rorty scholarship and pragmatism in general. The book begins with a masterful reconstruction of the tradition of American philosophy from Emerson and Thoreau to Peirce and James and Dewey, culminating in Rorty. This beginning, from the Preface entitled “Rorty’s ‘Violence of Direction’” (taking a phrase from Emerson’s “Nature” in Essays: Second Series) to Chapter 1 entitled “From Pragmatism to Rortyism” occupies almost the first third, and seems to establish a three-part structure, of the book. The second part of the book, also very well done, critically engages Rorty’s pragmatist cosmopolitanism, finding the outlines mostly correct, but the (arguably) essentialist linguistic ontology, and the detached and pessimistic perspective, too distant from the spirit of pragmatism, and without sufficient engagement with the practical problems of cosmopolitanism. The third part of the book “keeps the conversation going,” in Rorty’s sense, in “Religion As Conversation-stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, by casting the conversation into the not-so-distant future with the final chapter entitled “Epilogue: Looking Forward to the Year 2096 with Cosmopolitan Hope.” Of course, this chapter title inverts Rorty’s own chapter title, “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096,” also in Philosophy and Social Hope, and follows through on what virtually every pragmatist, Rorty included, thinks most important: namely, that our present conversations and activities inevitably extend to future ends and consequences.

This implicit three-part structure not only provides clear philosophical organization, but also establishes aesthetic unity within the book, aesthetic unity in Aristotle’s sense in the Poetics where a literary plot must have a clear beginning, middle, and end. In fact, the movement of the book as a whole seems to tell a story that unfolds historically, from its beginning in Emerson and classical pragmatism, through its middle in contemporary pragmatism, to its forward-looking end in the future of cosmopolitanism, a pragmatist story spanning three centuries. Rorty himself regularly reconstructed the history of philosophy as leading up to pragmatism, as if the tradition itself had a plot, a hopeful plot, and its characters were also the authors, something Rorty learned from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and McClean’s book reveals this same poetic unity, only with a more engaged and hopeful narrative than what appears so often in Rorty’s writings.

While this forward-looking dimension of the story naturally appears most prominently at the end, the subjunctive conditional voice at the heart of pragmatism, which reconceives all philosophical problems as problems about what could and would happen in the future, given our practices in the present, actually pervades the whole book. In fact, the pragmatist focus on uses for the future appears right at the beginning with the proposal of “uses” for Rorty’s own pragmatism. Of course, the very idea of “uses” of a philosopher will be familiar to readers of Emerson’s Representative Men with its opening chapter on “Uses of Great Men,” and subsequent chapters on Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, and Napoleon. But the further idea of “using” a pragmatist whose writings highlight how ideas can be “used” also refers back to Rorty’s own Consequences of Pragmatism, which recasts Peirce’s early essay title “Consequences of Four Incapacities,” where pragmatism more or less begins.

As Rorty puts Emerson, Peirce, James, and Dewey to good use in revitalizing pragmatism, McClean puts Rorty’s own works to good use in revitalizing the pragmatist conversation on cosmopolitanism, as Rorty himself might even applaud. For McClean does not “use” Rorty’s works to make arguments he never actually held, but respectfully and critically examines how a major philosopher’s works may serve the project of cosmopolitanism, primarily through the very dialogue Rorty always espoused. Toward this end of ongoing conversation, Rorty’s own works in McClean’s book also appear in intimate dialogue with major thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen, Francis Fukuyama...