What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics

by Richard Rorty, Wojciech Małecki (Contributor), Christopher J. Voparil (Contributor)

Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces.

In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties.

Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Essays, Nonfiction, History

248 pages, Hardcover

Published May 10, 2022

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Philosopher And His Country

Richard Rorty (1931 -- 2007) is a controversial American philosopher, usually described as a "neo-pragmatist" whose works continue to be read. His books include "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity", and "Achieving our Country". I have learned a great deal from Rorty over the years.

Rorty achieved more recognition from a broad readership than most philosophers can hope to receive with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. A passage in the third lecture "The Cultural Left" in Rorty's "Achieving our Country" (1998) appeared to presage the election of a Trump-like figure and garnered him attention as "the philosopher who predicted Trump".

In this new book, "What Can We Hope For" Essays on Politics" (2022) scholars W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil have gathered together nineteen essays of Rorty written between 1995 and 2007, four of which are published for the first time in this volume. The essays explore the relationship between philosophy and politics, or its lack, in Rorty's thought. In their Introduction to the volume, "The Philosopher and his Country" Malecki and Voparil point out that Rorty would have been uncomfortable with the label "the philosopher who predicted Trump" because, in his view, it gives too much credence to a view of philosophers as "people whose special expertise allows them to see the world more clearly than everyone else". According to the editors, Rorty believed that the American left, with which he identified, was "overphilosophized" and had boxed itself into a corner in understanding the United States and in offering solutions to social issues. Still, and in uneasy tension with his critique of philosophy, the essays in this volume convey "Rorty's pragmatic philosophy of democratic change" and his "recommendations for concrete reforms to ameliorate injustice and inequality and his positive visions for what safeguarding our democracy and its highest aspirations requires."

I was gratified to find this book prominently displayed in the "new books" section of my local public library, as it deserves a broad, non-specialist readership. As always, Rorty writes beautifully and provocatively. The essays in this book are accessible to readers without prior knowledge of Rorty. Malecki's and Voparil's Introduction provides a good introduction to Rorty's life and writings and to the essays themselves to help the reader along.

The essays are divided into three parts which move from the more general to the more specific. Part I, "Politics and Philosophy" consists of five essays which attempt to minimize the current importance of philosophical or religious thinking in building a better, classless United States and minimizing human suffering. This is particularly the case with the opening thoughtful and difficult essay, "Who Are We" which attempts to redirect philosophy from the question "What is Man" which Rorty finds shared by Plato and the Enlightenment to "Who Are We", or identifying and expanding the human community to which we belong.

Part II, "American Politics" consists of eight essays on a variety of issues centering on the Academy and on the tension between Liberal and Conservative in America. These essays emphasize hope for the American future and patriotism, which is often minimized by Rorty's fellow Liberals. The key essay in this Part is, again, the first in its breadth and difficulty: "Does Being an American
give one a Moral Identity?"

Part III "Global Politics" includes five essays on the United States and its relationship to the international community. As a book reviewer, I found of most interest the essay "A Queasy Agnosticism" in which Rorty reviews a novel "Saturday" by Ian McEwan, bringing to bear his own breadth of reading and perspective.

The essay "Intellectuals and the Millennium" serves as an Afterword to the collection. Rorty reiterates that neither philosophy nor religion are likely to serve as a basis for politics in the United States going forward. Rather, he sees the possibility of hope in a "breed of leaders with sufficient imagination to propose bold yet concrete solutions -- solutions to be debated by the newly literate populations of the world's democracies."

This book is challenging and inspiring. I found most important Rorty's American patriotism and his hope for the future as evidenced in the figures and visions of individuals including Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Herbert Crowly, John Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. American patriotism and hope remain in short supply. I am unconvinced by Rorty's attempt to reject philosophy as it may help in political thinking. Rorty remains a philosopher, in my view, almost in spite of himself. I am also skeptical of some of Rorty's own political views, and find that his work has much to teach to Americans of varying political outlooks.

It is always valuable to read Rorty and to think about philosophy and the United States. I learn a great deal from him.

Robin Friedman

[Ryan Boissonneault · Rating 1 out of 5]

Typically, I try to not write a review without reading the entire book, but in this case, I couldn’t get past the second essay. So take this review for what it’s worth. But also keep in mind that the reader does not need to get very far into the essays to see exactly the type of philosopher they’re dealing with.

To encounter an anti-philosophical attitude in a scientist has come to seem normal and expected; to find this in a philosopher is more surprising, and somewhat disturbing.

Even among philosophers, it is one thing to say that metaphysics is useless in our understanding of the natural world, and that it has been supplanted by science (this is not correct, but we won’t get into that here), but it is quite another to make the claim that philosophy is trivial in terms of ethics and politics. Whereas it may be true that contemporary political debate is very un-philosophical, this is simply a statement of the way things are, not the way things ought to be (and who would argue that modern political discourse is ideal right now?). Political discussion would be better off if people were more skilled at articulating the first principles from which they hold views, rather than simply adopting wholesale the views of their chosen tribe.

Which makes it all the more disturbing to see Rorty write about the “irrelevance of philosophy to democracy.” This couldn’t be more off-base. The idea of equality, for example, can only be defended on philosophical grounds. There are no experiments that can be run, or historical cases to examine, that will tell you the ideal distribution of resources in any given society. Various redistribution schemes can be proposed and defended, and if you lean more progressive in this area, you have to make the case for why inequality, at its current levels, is a bad thing to begin with. This is necessarily a philosophical stance.

Inequality is not an empirical question; if not enough people feel that equality is important, philosophically, then calls for redistribution can be rejected out of hand. The same applies to democracy itself; if the idea of democracy is not defended, on philosophical grounds, authoritarianism can creep back in, as we’ve seen happen throughout the world. If anything, what we most need is a renewed philosophical defense of democracy, making Rorty’s essays worse than irrelevant.

Also consider this statement from Rorty:

“...it helps to remember the point I made at the outset: that when the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century broke out, the quarrel between religion and philosophy had an importance it now lacks.”

Is it even worthy of elaboration to point out why this is a ridiculous statement, given the rise of the powerful and well-funded religious right? The battle of reason against superstition is perennial, and takes place squarely on philosophical grounds.

The essays get harder to read as you go. In speaking about “leftist intellectuals,” Rorty writes that “they are annoyed and distrurbed by the writings of antifoundationalist philosophers like myself who argue that there is no such thing as ‘human reason.’”

It’s been said that Rorty is often mischaracterized as a relativist, but with statements like that, he has no one to blame but himself. Like any other run-of-the-mill relativist, he seems totally unaware of the fact that he’s arguing, using REASON, that there is no such thing as human reason. If this type of writing is your thing, then by all means purchase the book, but I, for one, have no patience for it.

On a final note, Rorty is overly praised here for “predicting” the presidency of Donald Trump, but he was hardly the only thinker to see that globalization and rampant inequality could create a class of disaffected individuals who would be susceptible to the incoherent ramblings of a demagogue.

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty is still Essential

To the Trumpfinity, and Beyond

Yes, Richard Rorty is the political thinker, pragmatic philosopher, and public intellectual who not only predicted Trump but also identified and predicted the causal antecedents of Trump. Essays he wrote in the 1990s read as if they were written last week about the current American political/cultural/social/economic crisis. To this we can add that comparisons to Weimer Germany which are becoming uncanny and haunting. I also read his 1998 book ‘Achieving Our Country’ which I highly recommend as well.

Even if Trump is defeated in 2024, the antecedents of Trump will still be present and have been building to their current crescendo level since the 1990s and earlier as identified by Rorty. In my view, all social progress comes from material reality. Social progress comes when most of the population feels ‘well-off’ and not threatened by change. A reduction in the general perception of wellbeing often translates into cataclysmic political changes. In the 1990s, Rorty predicted the long-term anti-democracy consequences from the globalization of labor markets and the general reduction in the standard of living of the vast majority which destroys democratic consensus and brings class division and fascism. When people believe ‘the system’ (liberal democracy) no longer works for them, they are prepared to overthrow it. The transition to fascism in the U.S. is almost inevitable because the causal antecedents are only growing stronger. The main driver is the ever-growing wealth disparity with many once well-paying jobs being moved overseas and whole communities being devastated by the closure of businesses and the moving facilities overseas based on private decisions grounded on profits, not social stability, fairness or equity. These are willful business decisions made based on purely economic grounds with no other consideration. This, with inadequate public action to aid the victims and mitigate the community damage contribute to destabilize what is only a fragile social consensus. This is how a community of hope, trust and cooperation is transformed into one of resentment, distrust and vengeance. Material conditions are paramount to community health and basic humanitarian impulses, not universal moral values, or established ethical principles. With the achievement of the ‘Trumpfinity’, we are now ready for more upheaval to follow, as predicted by Rorty, in a new brutal world in the form of an urban versus rural unrest spiraling into seething open conflict in the U.S., as well as the creation of a new and cruel worldwide feudalism complete with contempt for women as well as racial and ethnic epithets for all. We are now in the process of combining a corrupt plutocracy and the vulgarization of American culture with an ignorant and arrogant brutish authoritarianism. The shift from constitutional democracy to totalitarian autocracy will be irreversible.

Pragmaticism Misunderstood

Rorty himself once said that pragmaticism will not provide one with reasons for not being a fascist but nor will it provide one with reasons for being a fascist. The same could be said of slavery or any other ‘evil’. Pragmatism is not a code of ethics or a set of moral principles to guide human behavior. I see pragmaticism as an explanatory tool. Pragmaticism does not justify or condemn fascism or slavery, but it does explain how these systems of human behavior come and go and how they are justified by the advocates and condemned by the opponents. Trying to understand slavery based on so-called self-evident truths collapses into endless rationalization in trying to reconcile a set of universal self-evident principles with real human behavior. Ethical codes and moral principles do not explain actual human behavior in the material world and cannot be used to understand the unfolding of historical events. As Rorty explains, what we call ethical codes and moral principles are really just social conventions. The practices, norms and behaviors attain first, we then infer principles and call them universal rules or abstract codes and set them antecedent to our present norms, current behaviors and extant social consensus. Human action is not first based on a prior universal principles or abstract codes. Pragmaticism as a method of analysis explains why humans act in the ways that do given the context and circumstances in which their actions take place. It does justify or condemn such actions. For example, Christian beliefs and principles are useless in terms of understanding the end of slavery because Christian beliefs and principles were used to both justify and oppose slavery. Pragmaticism offers a way of understanding the conflict, not a way justifying or condemning one side or the other. Ending slavery and avoiding fascism are a matter of human judgment as risky as that is. Morality is set of duties we owe each other and the understanding of these duties is a matter of humanistic education which is greatly lacking thus encumbering human judgment and immersing it in confusion and creating the pragmatic risk of a fascist reemergence. No abstract principles govern human action in the world we inhabit but pragmaticism can help us to understand these actions. Moral progress comes from human judgement in practice, not abstract principles in theory. Pragmaticism helps us to understand this process. We are not comfortable admitting it, but all truths and moral principlse are arrived at through a pragmatic process of compromise and consensus; trial and error; experimentation. An old consensus simply gives way to a new consensus and this is what are pleased to call progress when it is beneficial to human wellbeing. Pragmaticism is matter of calculating consequences, not appealing to principles.

Hope

I have always thought of hope as being fit only for the hopeless providing two choices as such, to be fooled by hope or to be made a fool out of by hope. Reality and hope do not exist in a single vision. Reality does not comport to hope so we must temper the conceit of our felicity for attainable hope by not placing it in politics if we desire rational politics. As Rorty says, all that is needed to sustain a rational democracy is a commitment to reduce cruelty and suffering. But even this minimal commitment is disrupted by the insistence upon appeals to a fictious eternal ‘reality’. We need banality, not hope. That is, the banality of cultural improvement and social progress.

We cannot expect hope from politics. Nor should we seek the implementation or achievement of an agenda in politics. The last thing we need in politics is a political agenda. The most we can ‘hope’ for is routine consistency, coherence, and banal predictability of government policy from politics and the administration of the state with a mission of eliminating cruelty and reducing suffering. In this way, citizens can get on with their lives as they see fit without worrying about whose agenda or values will dominate the law and administration of public policy.

Commitment

There is no such thing as human nature because we humans make ourselves up as we go along, at least I do. Philosophical commitments can be as dangerous as religious commitments when taken too seriously. Religion claims human beings are made in the image of God and philosophical universalism makes claims to fundamental principles true of all human beings. These amount to the same thing. The fight between philosophy and religion is one over the ‘correct’ fundamental or foundational principles for social organization and political governance when there really are no such principles. Religious and philosophical questions simply conceal political questions about human relations and governance. We are better when we treat religion and philosophy as forms of literature or art, but not as essential truths, or rules for living or for providing fundamental principles of governance. There is no ideal human community that follows from a universal human nature, self-evident truths or foundational principles. The only fundamental principle of governance needed is a commitment to eliminate cruelty and reduce suffering as well as render assistance to fellow community members when needed. The so-called principles of social organization and political governance are those that create and maintain a just and equitable society which eliminates cruelty and minimizes suffering. Neither reason nor faith can be relied upon to provide sufficient moral, social, or political guidance.

Optimal social organization results from the contingent unfolding of history and the sequence of events; trial and error within an information feedback loop, not on discoverable self-evident philosophical principles. Democracy is simply the best system thus far tried for incorporating new knowledge (ending slavery, emaciation of women, equal rights etc.) into the social order to drive future progress in a continual knowledge-based feedback loop based on actual human experience. Moral insight does not come from faith or rational reflection. There is nothing above and beyond history or human experience by which to judge history or human experience. There is nothing we can appeal to outside of the historical record to judge whether one cultural experiment or set of social experiences is ‘better’ for promoting human wellbeing than another. The fundamental principles of human relations cannot be discerned through reason or arrived at by faith. Human intuitional arrangements are the product of material realities. History and material reality matter most. Society creates philosophy and religion just like it creates literature and art to fill human needs. Philosophy, religion, literature and art do not create human society. Moral awareness is a product of historical events and material conditions, i.e., experience.

[Rhys Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book neatly divided into sections and essays which makes it quite digestible, especially where it delves into philosophy specifically.

Also quite liked the general idea that’s consistently present, which is to be practical and give ourselves a chance to make genuine (if gradual) progress, rather than giving up and only criticising things because we won’t reach a perfect world.

A lot of these essays are from the 90s or 00s when Third Way-ism ruled everything though, they seem to be somewhat inspired by it. It can come across a little bit technocratic where good policy and government would simply do the right things and solve all problems. If it were that simple we’d have already solved all problems the book highlights.

Doesn’t take away from it being a good read (ha ha) and would recommend it.

[NIcholas Munyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appreciated the thoughtful commentary criticizing the lack of pragmatism in identity politics. Very interesting how these 20+ year old essays still ring true in many ways today.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

a bit repetitive for readers familiar with rorty's work. feels like a collection of op-ed pieces stating the points made in Achieving Our Country. Nonetheless very enjoyable and readable - not something one can say of many philosophers writing about current events

[Bart · Rating 5 out of 5]

6000 WORD REVIEW

When I saw the spine of this newly published book in the awesome Athenaeum bookshop in Amsterdam last summer, I decided to see if Richard Rorty could still teach me something. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics collects 19 essays that were written between 1995 and 2007 – 4 of which unpublished, and many lesser-known and hard to find pieces. It also has a 17 page introduction by editors W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil.

I want to stress the collection is accessible to readers without any prior knowledge of Rorty.

Included is “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096”, a kind of science fictional essay that first appeared as “Fraternity Reigns” in the New York Times in 1996 and was also reprinted in Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection from 1999. Rorty imagines a future American history, looking back from 2096 to “our long, hesitant, painful; recovery, over the last five decades, from the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years (2014-2044)”, a recovery that “has changed our political vocabulary, as well as our sense of the relation between the moral order and the economic order”.

I highlight this here already, because political philosophy is clearly a matter of the imagination. In the remainder of this text I shall try to summarize some of Rorty’s main points, and also compare some of his ideas to those of Kim Stanley Robinson – another intellectual & writer, one who has thought about the future too, in the hope of bettering the world.

As such, this post can be read as a companion piece to my recent analysis of Antartica – KSR’s epistemological novel, in which Robinson ties together science, ethics, utopian praxis, imagination, ideologies and stories.

This post will be quote heavy, because I simply can’t say it any better than Rorty himself.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know THAT i read author's book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity many years ago but don't remember much about it, so should probably revisit after reading this posthumously-edited/collected set of essays on the relevance of his pragmatism for political issues of the late 90's/early 00's.

Many of the essays, probably expressed best and most clearly in "first projects, then principles" (1997) seemed in my reading to boil down to advocating that liberals should take a break from (a) denouncing "the system" and despairing of the utility of any change made within it, (b) trying to derive consensus positions on contentious issues from abstract principles of justice and by doing so argue their opponents into submission, or (c) emphasize identity politics and the value of multiculturalism.

Instead, they should be proud of admittedly flawed American history, recognize that things have gotten gradually better in fits and starts, and rally around practical steps that would advance the cause of equality and democracy and protect against tyranny/cruelty/racism -- ex., not basing school funding on local property taxes, adopting single-payer national health insurance, creating a much better-funded/equipped/trained UN peacekeeping force..............

Some of the specific issues/debates/legislation he tackles are dated, but certainly not all, and the overall style is engaging. Reminded me of some of the arguments in the late Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations to the effect that there's more to gain from showing what it would look like if people were to adopt your outlook and sort of inviting them in, as vs. the classic antagonistic debate style of attempting to dominate/"own" your opponent by invoking a higher and more abstract p.o.v. from which you derive that they're stupidly mistaken.

[Justinas Mickus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book’s key strength and appeal lie in showing Rorty’s prescience and practical focus. None of the essays in the collection are among Rorty’s best; none are the best example of writing on the specific topics they deal with — multiculturalism, identity politics, inequality, (anti)racism, America’s character and role in the world — simply by virtue of how many books and essays have been written about them, especially since 2016. But all ot Rorty’s essays get the essentials right, about twenty years before liberal/left America’s current reckoning with itself began. And almost all offer not only a considered overall perspective, but concrete solutions for a productive path forward. As a time capsule, this book is thus invaluable: it allows to provincialize our contemporary debates (they’re nothing new and often belabored) and reminds us that there were always opportunities for action — giving hope that we can create new opportunities in the future.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty was, and continues to be a formative figure in my intellectual life. I loved these essays written for non-research-academic journals. There's some I disagree with -- what the editors point out is "tone deaf" to today's readers -- but Rorty got so much right, about left politics, the ideals and realities of the American democracy, and the actual role of philosophy to make a better world. He makes me proud to still call myself a card-carrying pragmatist.

[Jayson Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic and accessible essays on American politics by a worthy American philosopher. Most of the issues covered in the essays are still relevant today such as economic inequalities and the dangers of nationalism in any form.

[Burwell56 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought the book was very interesting. Had not heard a lot of this before. A collection of writings, most of it was written 20 to 30 years ago and so much of it seems to be exactly right. Don't agree with everything though.

[Mr T · Rating 5 out of 5]

As ever Rorty is excellent.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good but philosophical/academic af not in a buzzy way. Wouldn’t call it a fun read, but it is a good read.

[George Togman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rorty’s general anti-Platonism and its liberal ironist implications for politics are convincing. I really enjoy his discursive (in the best sense) style of writing.

[Adam F · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is sad to see how many of Rorty's takes still resonate in American society, even the more controversial ones. Most essays can be skipped, but the first chapters give a sense of something to hope for in these harsh times.