Cultural Politics, Critical Reflexivity, and Post-Truth Politics: A Response to Clayton Chin’s The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-357
Author(s):  
Susan Dieleman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Contemporary Issue ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Continental Thought

Abstract In this response to Chin’s The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought, I complete two tasks. First, I clarify that Chin’s project is a metatheoretical one, aiming to reconstruct Rorty’s account of political theory as practice. Second, I claim that this reconstruction makes it possible to respond, on Rorty’s behalf, to charges that his position is complacent and acquiescent, especially as it relates to the contemporary issue of post-truth politics.

scholarly journals Book Roundtable

Theoria ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (162) ◽  
pp. 88-116
Author(s):  
Lasse Thomassen ◽  
Joe Hoover ◽  
David Owen ◽  
Paul Patton ◽  
Clayton Chin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Continental Thought

Discussion text: Chin, C. 2018. The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought. New York, Columbia University Press.Respondents: Lasse Thomassen (Introduction), Joe Hoover (Reconstructing Rorty? Between Irony and Seriousness), David Owen (Practices of Political Theory), Paul Patton (Rorty’s ‘Continental’ Interlocutors), Clayton Chin (Rorty’s Pragmatic Political Theory: On Continental Thought and Ontology)

scholarly journals Testing the Ethos of Tolerance: Chin’s Interpretation of Rorty’s Political Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-369
Author(s):  
Matthew Festenstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin puts Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in dialogue with a range of contemporary political theorists, particularly focusing on how his notion of cultural politics can speak to the ontological turn in political theory. This article focuses on Chin’s claim that Rorty’s cultural politics provides an ethos of inclusive and tolerant political engagement. After exploring the basis for Chin’s interpretation, it identifies three tensions in this ethos, in relation to character of its demandingness, the fissure between ethnocentric and egalitarian engagement, and the relationship of this ethos to the virtues and procedures of democratic citizenship.

Richard Rorty on Equality and Cultural Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rondel
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Moral Progress

This chapter provides a sympathetic sketch of Rorty’s “ethnocentric” liberalism and defends it against several critics. It also highlights the importance of “redescription” in Rorty’s thought and illustrate how what Rorty calls “cultural politics” together with his (anti-Kantian) “sentimentalist” conception of moral progress provides a useful lens through which to grasp the “cultural-valuational” register of egalitarian theorizing. Rorty’s political theory has been chastised for its apparent conservatism. But this chapter argues that Rorty’s endorsement of the Sellarsian thesis that “all awareness is a linguistic affair” coupled with his controversial claim that “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” opens up a potentially unlimited space for goods to be pursued and bads to be rejected. This makes Rortyan “cultural politics” as radical or conservative as spinners of new descriptions are apt to make it.

Just What Is Ontological Political Theory Meant to do? The Method and Practice of William E. Connolly

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092549
Author(s):  
Clayton Chin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Systematic Evaluation ◽  
Methodological Development ◽  
Ontological Difference ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Ontological Turn

This article provides a critical appraisal of the ontological method of political theorizing through an examination of the methodological development of the work of William E. Connolly. Connolly has often been taken as a paradigmatic figure of the ‘ontological turn’. This is not only because of the significance of his work in the field but because he is one of its major methodological articulators. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of that method and its development. This paper rectifies that lacuna by critically illustrating Connolly’s turn from a post-positivistic interpretivism to his much noted ‘onto-political method’. It argues that the latter, while usually thought to be modelled on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is structured by Heidegger’s understanding of ontological difference. The paper then argues that this leads to several problematic tendencies within Connolly’s model that undermine the critical-explanatory and normative power of his methodology by compromising the critical reflexivity ontology is meant to provide. All of this raises some concerns and criticisms of the use of ontological method of political theorizing, which has escaped sustained methodological analysis and scrutiny.

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