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