Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein
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Book Reviews Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (eds.) MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), London, 2004, 379pp. ISBN: 0 262 52427 9. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 340–342. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300240
In this Festschrift, colleagues, students, and friends of Richard Bernstein pay tribute to his life and work. As the editors note, Richard Bernstein has been one of those figures who helped transform 20th century philosophy’s conception of itself, which in 1950s Anglo–American circles was positivist, wedded to unyielding oppositions between explanation and evaluation, and in many respects patently factorial. Like John Dewey, his inspiration and the subject of his first major scholarly work, Bernstein sought to explode this narrow self-image by urging a conversation across disciplines and traditions, thereby reinvigorating American pragmatism and arriving at ‘a countermodel of philosophy for a democratic society,’ in which philosophy is underpinned by and augments the ideal of solidarity (p. vii). In doing so, Bernstein not only fostered a post-positivist understanding of social enquiry and reduced the gulf between the analytic and Continental traditions, but also reasserted social critique as a legitimate concern of philosophers, stressing the inevitable, yet constructive, intertwinement of knowledge, ethics, and politics. Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment divides into four parts. The concluding part comprises a short biographical essay by Judith Friedlander and a very useful bibliography of Bernstein’s writings from 1956 to 2002. Friedlander does an excellent job of situating Bernstein, a New Yorker of humble Jewish background, within the context of mid- to late-20th century academia and of recounting his role within that milieu, from his early days as editor of the Review of Metaphysics, to the controversy surrounding his denial of tenure at Yale, down to his involvement with the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik and Praxis International, the successor to the dissident journal Praxis. The impression conveyed is of a passionately committed thinker and of a teacher exerting an empowering influence over generations of students. The three other parts each reflect a key aspect of Bernstein’s work, although none of the essays contained within them is about Bernstein alone or even predominantly. Part I focuses on philosophy, specifically the role of philosophic reflection in late modernity. In their contributions, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor reflect on the future of philosophic discourse and, in particular, the meaning of pragmatism. Where Rorty dismisses philosophy as a
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genre now surpassed by literary criticism, Taylor, by contrast, insists on a form of pragmatism which retains a strong notion of truth, thus preserving philosophy’s relevance. Less broad in scope, Ju¨rgen Habermas’s essay reprises his long-standing debate with Bernstein over the relation between the ‘good’ and the ‘right’ in moral and democratic theory. However, the
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