Richard Rorty

The Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz believes he has found the philosophical underpinning for Obama’s pragmatism. It’s based on the 1990s work of Richard Rorty (1931-2007)[picture], an Ivy League philosopher who revived the early 20th century school of thought launched by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism stands for flexibility in solving problems as opposed to solutions based on religious dogma or rigid moral and political agendas. At its extreme, pragmatism denies the existence of objective truth, arguing that opinions we declare true are merely those that have proved useful to one interest or another.

Rorty’s work gives pragmatism a partisan meaning, earning him a place in philosophy departments, among political theorists, in law schools, and in the university world Obama inhabited. Rorty subordinated philosophical questions to political questions, and posited that the proper political question in America is how to promote progressive ends.

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Rorty maintained that "nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one's country really is, what its history really means." Nevertheless, Rorty seemed to believe the right in America is the party of the status quo, fighting to preserve inherited privilege. By contrast, the left that takes its cue from Walt Whitman and John Dewey--"prophets" of a "civic religion"--is the party of hope working to bring America into harmony with democracy's progressive promise.

Flatly rejecting biblical faith as childish nonsense, Rorty celebrated democracy's progressive promise as an alternative faith. Rorty wanted the pragmatist to make "shared utopian dreams" his guide to politics. Yet while purporting to focus on practical consequences and dismissing the distinction between true and false as a delusion, Rorty equated what works with actions that increase government's role in promoting social justice, and treated the progressive interpretation of America as, in effect, good and true. Thus under the guise of inclusiveness, Rorty denigrated and excluded rival moral and political opinions.

Pragmatism as a religion, the only true faith. Ironic, no?