A conversation with Richard Rorty

by Scott Stossel

April 23, 1998

Richard Rorty, one of the most famous living philosophers in the United States, would seem an unlikely person to be exhorting the American Left to "kick the philosophy habit." And yet in his new book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, that is exactly what Rorty does. Arguing that political liberalism in this country has been derailed by the abstract theoretical dithering of what he calls the Cultural Left -- Who cares what Lacan says about repression? What does Foucault's theory of knowledge have to do with diminishing wage inequality or broadening civil rights? -- Rorty calls for a more engaged Left dedicated to narrowing the wage gap, alleviating poverty, reducing social injustice, and pursuing other historically Progressive causes.

Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy -- most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) -- Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe. While continuing to publish philosophical papers from his academic roost in the philosophy department at the University of Virginia, Rorty also publishes regularly in such publications as The Nation and Dissent, consistently urging a stronger connection between left-wing intellectuals and grassroots political activists. Reforging the connection between leftist intellectuals and leftist politics is also one of the main objectives of Achieving Our Country, a polemical little book that, though just published this month, has already come in for criticism from some journalists and ruffle-feathered intellectuals, who accuse Rorty of confusion or political naiveté or both.
 

Richard Rorty

Yet while Rorty's knowledge of politics and political movements may sometimes be suspect (he freely confesses to never having been really engaged in politics himself), the question he asks in Achieving Our Country is clearly germane to the main problem facing the American Left: How can a Left still fractured by the divisions of the late sixties -- and now newly distracted by the esoteric academic pursuits of the Cultural Left -- become relevant enough to address the problems besetting America today?

The answer, Rorty says, is to emulate the model of politically engaged intellectuals of the past. The two examples he gives are the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and the poet Walt Whitman. For Rorty, the America we should be trying to achieve is a fair and classless society, one that looks for its ultimate authority not to God or a monarchy or even to some abstract notion of Nationhood, but rather to an ever-mutable democratic consensus. Developing this consensus, as both Whitman and Dewey understood, requires more than cynical commentary or rueful disengagement -- it requires intellectual labor and hard political work. With effort and engagement, Rorty writes, a good society is possible, but without them, he warns, a permanently caste-ridden society -- or, ultimately, even a totalitarian one -- is also possible.

It's an allusion to James Baldwin's use of the phrase. I thought of Baldwin as throwing himself into the project of the classless, casteless America, and so I guess "achieving our country" means achieving a casteless and classless society.

In your dedication you invoke Irving Howe and A. Phillip Randolph, but not Baldwin. Why those two?

Just because they happened to mean a lot to me when I was young. My parents worked for Randolph at one point, and I met him in the course of working as an office boy. I was impressed by the stories about what he'd had to do to organize the Pullman strikes and by his combination of organizing and writing articles. And I was impressed by Howe's combination of writing articles about literature and writing political manifestos. They both seemed to be figures who managed to do everything I always wanted to do.

Who do you see as the ideal audience for this book?

For some reason, while I was writing it the audience I kept having in my head was foreigners -- European intellectuals who, it seems to me, have no grasp of the history of the American Left -- and so I think I was writing for them, trying to tell them, "You know, we're an old leftist country, too. We have a Left with a distinguished history."

The two most prominent figures in your book are Whitman and Dewey, and Dewey is for a number of reasons a distinctly American intellectual. There's a strain of intellectualism in American life that is more anti-intellectual than Europe's. Do you think that's true? How would you characterize the difference between a European intellectual and an American one?

I don't see Dewey or Whitman as anti-intellectual. I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing. Whitman and Dewey were bookish in the relevant sense. I think that if there's anything distinctive it's the thoroughgoing secularism of Dewey and Whitman, which is described in my book. There's no God, no reality, no nothing that takes precedence over the consensus of a free people. What I like about Dewey and pragmatism is the anti-metaphysical claim that there's no court of appeal higher than a democratic consensus. It's the same idea Jurgen Habermas has been putting forward for the last thirty years in Germany, but we did it first.

At one point in your book you say that if the intellectuals and the unions can ever get back together again, and could reconstitute the kind of Left that existed in the forties and fifties, we might enter a second Progressive era. Couldn't a critical reader accuse you of being overly nostalgic here, just as the social conservatives are?

Sure, there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but I think what the conservatives want is a difference in sexual mores, but what I want is to remedy inequality, opportunity, and the gaps between the rich and the poor. The consciousness of the need to do that was, I think, much more present in the forties and fifties than it is now.

In the forties and fifties a lot of the impetus behind the organizing on behalf of social equality was catalyzed by unions. How realistic is a resurgence of the old leftist reform program without a strong union movement?

I think that's a prerequisite: only if the unions can do for the service workers what they did for the manufacturing workers is the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor going to stop.

How much of the decline in union participation and union political power is attributable to the fracturing of the Left that occurred in the 1960s over identity politics and such?

I don't think that had much to do with it. The blue-collar workers may have experienced a certain disgust for the hippie Left, but that didn't have much to do with the decline of the unions -- it was just the decline of manufacturing and the endless attempt by the Right to find ways to prevent the unions from organizing. The government has had a lot to do with it. It has made it fantastically difficult to organize.

You say at one point that when a Left becomes "spectatorial and retrospective" it ceases to be a Left. What exactly do you mean by spectatorial and retrospective?

Spectatorial in the sense of looking on and saying, "Hey, everything is going to Hell" without having much of an idea of how you can stop it. Retrospective in the sense of looking back at how terrible we've been rather than looking forward to see how much better we could make ourselves.

So that's why you call the Left "the party of hope"?

I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.

But couldn't people on the right argue that they care about tradition insofar as it will help us in the future?

Sure. They can say that, but as long as they don't think about the same issues that the Left thinks about, it's hard to take them seriously. If you had a Republican program for narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, that would be one thing, but they have no interest in any such program.

At one point in your book, you talk about the leftist jargon that's cluttering up our vocabulary. You say that the Left-versus-liberal distinction is sort of meaningless. But it seems that's a useful shorthand, because if there's a continuum that runs from, say, liberal to Left, you can distinguish The American Prospect from The Nation by calling the former mainstream liberal and the latter Left. And Dissent is more Left than, say, The New Republic, which has historically been progressive.

I really can't see much difference between the journals. The Nation has a tone of skeptical hopelessness, but the measures favored by the people who write for The Nation are pretty much the measures favored by the people who write for The American Prospect and The New Republic. It seems to me a matter of tone rather than of politics. Nobody wants to nationalize production, and so in that sense you've lopped off what used to be the big difference between Left and liberal. We're all social democrats now, and we all favor about the same stuff.

I'd also like to change the way we use the word "Left." Some people say that instead of calling ourselves liberal we can call ourselves progressive. I'd like to call ourselves Left just in order to remind us of the continuity between contemporary social-democratic proposals and those made in the Progressive era, those made by the British Labour Party, those made by the German Social Democratic Party, and so on. And I'd say to the Europeans, "Yeah, we do have a leftist party, it used to be the left wing of the Democratic Party, it's pretty weak these days, but it's a continuous tradition capable of being revived."

Speaking of Europe, do you see recent events -- Britain's Labour Party winning in a landslide last May followed by the Socialist victory in France -- as the beginning of a trend that might cross the Atlantic? Or is the real trend simply that formerly left-of-center parties (including the Democratic Party in America) are just becoming more centrist?

Partially it's that they're becoming more centrist, but I think that it has mostly to do with individual conditions in individual countries. I think there isn't going to be a swing to the left here until the Dow Jones goes down to 5,000 again and we have a severe recession and a sense of economic insecurity grows. Then centrism no longer will look as palatable.

You were saying that nobody on the Left is talking about nationalizing the means of production, and in fact you, in your first lecture, disavow the use of Marxist terms. Later in the book, when you start talking about the effects of globalization, you say, "This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900 had with the immigrants who manned their enterprises." Isn't this a violation of your disavowal in some sense?

I don't think so. For all I know, fighting off the cosmopolitan super rich might require such drastic legislation on the part of the individual nation states that it might be tantamount to some kind of nationalization. But I don't have any concrete notions about what kind of remedies can be applied. What bothers me is that the power of the individual states was used against the power of the very rich at the beginning of the century to break the trusts, tame the robber barons, that kind of thing, and since we don't have a functioning world government there isn't any analogue for today's globalized economy.

What's the solution? There are organizations like the IMF and the World Bank and the United Nations, but as you say, there's no analogue.

Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia. We don't have anything remotely like that. But if we don't develop something like this then I think the super rich retain all the power.

Do you think that the future conflicts engendered by these widening gaps between rich and poor and other symptoms of globalization are going to be between, like you say, Europe versus Indonesia, or between the very rich in Europe and the U.S. and the left-behind in Europe and the U.S.?

Well, I think that the old democracies sooner or later will realize that the idea of classlessness has been abandoned and that we're freezing into a hierarchical society, and this will cause some kind of populist upsurge. I just hope it's a leftist upsurge instead of a fascist one.

Speaking of populist upsurges, the most successful person, so far, at addressing lunch-bucket economic concerns in America is Pat Buchanan. If the Left is going to be politically successful in the coming years it's going to have to effectively deploy the rhetoric of class. But how can you do this without sliding into the kind of nativist-protectionist jingoism that Buchanan falls into?

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues. You don't have to have a homophobic, racist version of populism. Protectionism is a separate question. I don't know how you avoid protectionism. I say at some point in the book that this seems to me the real dilemma facing the Left: without protectionism you just watch economic inequality growing in the old democracies. With protectionism you cut off the workers in the Third World and probably wreck the economy in other ways.

In your book you say that your left-most students are your favorite students. Is that just because you identify with them politically?

Yeah, they seem to me the most lively minds, the most curious, easiest to talk to, the people anxious to read the most books, stuff like that.

You've been teaching for quite a few years now --

Forty.

How do you think today's kids compare with earlier cohorts? I would guess, based on your book, that you think that today's students are less politically engaged than they were in the sixties.

Yeah, but in the sixties the kids I taught never dreamed they could possibly fall out of the middle class. And these kids think they could do it very easily. So they're just much more insecure.

And this makes them more politically engaged, or less?

I think it makes them less. It's as if they don't have time to think about politics. They've got to think about their careers.

So, was the activism of the sixties simply a matter of students having more time then?

I think it helped a lot. I think that the affluence of the country in the fifties and sixties made the civil-rights and antiwar movements possible.

In Arguing the World -- a new documentary about four of the New York Intellectuals (Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol) -- the despair of Bell and Glazer at what was wrought by the New Left is palpable. They seem to see the student radicals as almost destroying the project of the Left. You're less critical of the revolutionaries of the late sixties. How would you explain your stance on the New Left, relative to Bell or Glazer's?

I think that the student Left of the sixties probably gets the credit for stopping the war, and if you can't take that away from them, then the fact that they said a lot of stupid things, that they alienated the unions -- alienated Bell and Glazer, alienated a lot of people -- is, well, you know, no big powerful movement that has accomplished something has avoided alienating a lot of people. Seems to me that it's time for the remnants of the old Left and the remnants of the sixties Left to get together and say that we're all part of the same overall trend, or share the same overall hopes.

To what degree do you think the distinction between the old Left and the New Left is reducible to just economic versus cultural?

I think the New Left, in the sense of the sixties Left, was as moved by economic issues as by cultural issues. The present academic Left isn't as moved by economic as cultural issues. I think that there's an academic Left that has obvious links to sixties radicalism, but you can't really bring them under the same umbrella.

Those are the notorious "tenured radicals."

Yeah.

In one of your lectures you say that the Left should try to "kick its philosophy habit." Isn't that an odd thing for you to say? You are an academic philosopher, still practicing. What exactly do you mean by kicking its philosophy habit?

The analogy I had in mind was with the Marxist discussion groups in the cubicles in City College, discussing dialectical materialism for hours and hours and hours, and eventually realizing that this wasn't much to the point of achieving the ends of social democracy, and that you couldn't get much out of Marx or anybody else in the way of knowing how to make political decisions for America. It seems to me that Marx has been replaced by Foucault these days, and people seem to believe that if you know enough about Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, then somehow you're in a good position to think about politics. That seems to me just as false as the thirties idea that if you read a lot of Marx, Engels, and Lenin then you would be in a good position to think about politics.

So, in other words, stop theorizing and start organizing?

Yes, start thinking about specific reforms and stop trying to generalize about what stage of world history we're in.

Why do you think people gravitate to the theorizing? Is it just that it's intrinsically more interesting and less dispiriting?

It's easier and more fun.

What do you see as the role of literature and literary criticism for an activist, reformist Left?

Nothing special. I mean, it happens that somebody like Irving Howe was both a good literary critic and a good political activist. It's hard to think of anybody who meets that description today. But there's no reason there shouldn't be some in the future.

In other words, it's not a necessary requirement of an activist, reformist Left that there be good literary critics as part of it?

Not at all. It helps occasionally, but I don't think it's essential. What I find weird is the thought that the departments of English literature are now the left-most departments of the universities. That seems purely accidental. And it's no great help either to literary criticism or to politics.

If you were going to propose, say, three or four concrete policies, fairly general ones, that aim to rectify the widening gap between rich and poor, and mitigate the effects of globalization and worker displacement, what would they be? 

Well, I tried to do this in an article in The Nation a while back. The things I listed were campaign financing, health care, and local financing of primary and secondary education. But that's a fairly arbitrary choice. My feeling is that as long as you pay the legislators salaries that are minute in comparison to what their peers are earning in business and law, and require them to raise 25 million bucks for TV ads to get reelected, the country will in effect be on sale. The level of bribery at this point has become so ridiculous and so accepted that unless that breaks there's just not much hope for democratic government. I think this is very widely believed among the electorate. But I don't think either party intends to do a damn thing about it.

In the Winter, 1998, issue of The Wilson Quarterly you contributed to a collection of articles, including one by E. O. Wilson, about whether all human knowledge can be reduced to a single set of principles. Have you read Wilson's book Consilience, which was excerpted in the March and April issues The Atlantic?

Yeah, Wilson sent me the manuscript of Consilience before I wrote the article for The Wilson Quarterly.

How would you characterize the nub of your disagreement with him?

Wilson's idea of consilience is one more ambitious attempt to set up a single discipline as if it were the keystone of culture. With Marx it was political economy. With Wilson it's evolutionary biology. It seems to me that specialists in a given area are always telling us that everything really comes back to their specialty, and Wilson is one more example of that.

Do you think Wilson's argument is more convincing than Marx's, because whereas Marx was arguing from a theoretical social-scientific perspective, Wilson is arguing from a naturalistic scientific one?

I don't think Wilson is arguing from a scientific perspective. I think he's just saying it would be nice if we could bring ethics, religion, and social science together on the basis of our knowledge of what's hardwired into the brain. The only sense in which that could be done would be if knowledge or brain physiology or evolutionary biology gave us a way of saying that this social experiment will work, that other social experiment won't work -- that is, if it gave us policy directions. And there doesn't seem to me to be the slightest evidence that there's any way to get from hardwiring of the brain to what will and won't work in institutional policy. His book doesn't seem to me to show how you'd get from here to there.

Over the last four or five years or so, with Wilson's book, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal, and a whole slew of books on evolutionary psychology, there seems to be a trend toward reducing all human behavior, all human society -- in some ways all human knowledge -- to a biological basis. Why do you think that is?

I wish I knew. It seems to me as desperate as the attempts by Reagan to find out what was going to happen in the Middle East by reading the Book of Revelation. I really don't understand what the attraction is. It's as if people thought if they could find a science then they wouldn't have to think politically anymore. That was one of the attractions of Marxism: if you really understood the basic determinants of everything then somehow your politics would be prescribed for you. But Marx at least had a good cause to take up -- namely, the fact that the workers weren't getting enough money. Pinker and Wilson don't even have a good cause to take up.

If you're looking at the political landscape, say between now and the next presidential election, or the next two presidential elections, what do you foresee, not necessarily in terms of which party is going to win, but what's going to galvanize the electorate? Will anything galvanize the electorate?

I think it would galvanize the electorate if Clinton suddenly said, "I've been moving toward the center all my life, and it didn't work. The country is in much worse shape than when I took office six years ago, the trends have all been downhill, so I am going to start moving away from the center, and I am going to propose the following radical legislation."

Do you think there's any chance of that happening?

No, no. I think he's a remarkably decent and intelligent man, and I can't see why he doesn't do that, but I don't know whether it'll ever happen.