The practice of political theory: Rorty and continental thought
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The practice of political theory: Rorty and continental thought Clayton Chin Columbia University Press, New York, 2018, xi + 293 pp., ISBN: 978-0-231-17398-8 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00332-0
Why Richard Rorty now? A long time has passed since it was commonplace to pay him the tribute, with varying degrees of affection and irritability, of ritual denunciation and/or to preface papers with a seemingly obligatory prophylactic warning to the effect that, whatever far-fetched assertion was on its way, it did not, of course, go as far as Rorty. In this timely and significant book, Clayton Chin contributes to an important new wave of writing about Rorty and pragmatism that seeks to offer a bracingly positive answer to this question. He painstakingly puts Rorty’s work in conversation with a range of contemporary theoretical positions, which he gathers under the rubric of continental political thought. Wisely narrowing the scope of the latter, Chin in particular seeks to tease out the relationship between Rortyan pragmatism and the kind of approach captured a little while ago by Stephen White’s concept of ‘weak ontology’. While these perspectives share criticisms of ideal liberal theory, rejecting what they take to be its excessively abstract normative vision, they provide two contending pathways for a post-foundational conception of political theory. Weak ontologists think that some particular view of political reality, ‘both fundamental and contestable, both unavoidable and ungrounded’ (p. 16), is needed in order to ground political claims. For the Rortyan pragmatist, there is only ‘cultural politics’, the process of trying to provide more fruitful, humane and useful descriptions: the ontologists’ effort to get things right is just likely to be a relatively fruitless endeavour. In elaborating this contrast, Chin reads Rorty as making a distinctive theoretical intervention ‘at the meta-level, concerned with the conditions of possibility of inquiry. The main task of the theoretician is to negotiate between our various vocabularies’ (p. 60). This surprisingly Kantian-sounding project ‘can structure interframework dialogue, as a shared linguistic practice, in a way that avoids presuming the standards of any particular perspective, while remaining reflective and critical’ (p. 60). Chin develops this argument in the three parts of his book. 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
Part 1 outlines the contours of Rorty’s work, from the earlier Peirce- and Wittgenstein-inspired reflections on metaphilosophy, via the critique of epistemology in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and its invocation of hermeneutics as an alternative philosophical method, to the later Deweyan-inspired (however interpretatively dubious) project of locating authority in human purpose and social practice. This last project, which Chin only sees as reaching fruition in Rorty’s later work under the rubric of ‘cultural politics’, notoriously
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