‘Who Are We?’ On Rorty, Rhetoric, and Politics

Abstract

It is not unusual to think of Rorty’s work as a success in rhetoric and a failure in political philosophy. In this article we re-evaluate this assessment by analyzing a typical feature of Rorty’s writing: his frequent use of “we so-and-so.” Taking stock of the existing literature on the subject we discuss how Rorty’s use of the “we” was received by peers and how he himself made sense of it. We then analyze Rorty’s oeuvre in order to show that a better understanding of his rhetorical “we” could make his politico-philosophical “we” more appealing. We suggest that Rorty’s pragmatist take on “ethnos” is preferable to other notions that are currently championed in political theory and philosophy.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

2. Herbert W. Simons, The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990), vii.

3. Paul Trembath, “The Rhetoric of Philosophical ‘Writing’: Emphatic Metaphors in Derrida and Rorty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47.2 (1989): 169–73; Áine Kelly, “The Provocative Polemics of Richard Rorty,” Minerva 12 (2008): 78–101.

4. Janet S. Horne, “Rorty’s Circumvention of Argument: Redescribing Rhetoric,” Southern Communication Journal 58.3 (1993): 169–81.

5. Péter Csato, “Antipodean Conversations: Rhetorical Strategies of Discursive Authority in Richard Rorty’s Metaphilosophy and Political Thought” (2009) at: http://unideb.academia.edu/PeterCsato/Papers; accessed 5 August 2012.

6. Mario Moussa, “Misunderstanding the Democratic ‘We’: Richard Rorty’s Liberalism and the Radical Urge for a Philosophical Foundation,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 17 (1991): 297; Christopher M. Duncan, “A Question to Richard Rorty,” The Review of Politics 66.3 (2004): 387 n. 5.

7. Rebecca Comay, “Interrupting the Conversation,” Telos 69 (1986): 119–30.

8. Michael Billig, “Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The Text as a Flag for Pax Americana,” New Left Review 1.202 (1993): 69–83.

9. Lynn A. Baker, “‘Just Do It’: Pragmatism and Progressive Social Change,” Virginia Law Review 78.3 (1992): 697–718.

10. Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15.4 (1987): 554.

11. Mark Kingwell, A Civil Tongue. Justice, Dialogue and the Politics of Pluralism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), 36–41.

12. Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 31–47.

13. Jonathan Rée, “Strenuous Unbelief,” London Review of Books 20.22 (1998): 8.

14. Jenny Teichman, “The Philosophy of We,” The New Criterion 17 (1998): 60.

15. Daniel Conway, “Irony, State and Utopia: Rorty’s ‘We’ and the Problem of Transitional Praxis,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 55–88; Moussa, “Misunderstanding the Democratic ‘We’,” 307.

16. Anthony Gottlieb, “The Most Talked-About Philosopher,” The New York Times, 2 June 1998, at: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/02/books/the-most-talked-about-philosopher.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm; accessed 5 August 2012.

17. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyan Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139.

18. David Rondel, “Liberalism, Ethnocentrism, and Solidarity: Reflections on Rorty” (2009), at: http://www.davidrondel.com/David_Rondel/Papers_files/Reflections%20on%20Rorty.pdf, 1–19 [16 n. 4]; accessed 5 August 2012.

19. Richard Rorty, “Response to Bernstein,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr (London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995): 69.

20. Richard Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 32.

21. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 59.

22. Steven A. Miller, “Richard Rorty’s Sellarsian Uptake,” Pragmatism Today 2.1 (2011): 101.

23. Tom Hilde, comment posted on “Peter Levine: A Blog for Civic Renewal,” 1 March 2006, at: http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000805.html; accessed 5 August 2012.

24. Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 172–229. In this work, Barthes argues that rhetoric is not only a technique (i.e., the democratic art of persuasion) but also a system of instruction (i.e., the standard education of the affluent youth in ancient Greece and Rome), a science evolved over 2,500 years (i.e., the observation, classification and explanation of a vast array of linguistic phenomena), an ethic (i.e., rules for proper speech and writing), a social practice (i.e., the public demonstration of the affluent class’s ownership of cultured language), and a ludic practice (i.e., the poor’s reversal of the affluent’s ethic and social practice by rhetoric-rich humour).

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Rhetorik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Lectures 1872–76 (Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1922), 287–319. In this connection, rhetoric is nothing but a technique organising and exploiting the inherent rhetorical character of human language, also known as “rhetoricality” among scholars (e.g., John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return to Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990], 3–41).

26. Cf. Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique.”

27. Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1935), §1431, §1434 and §1430.

28. Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

29. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, ed. Lee Honeycutt, trans. John Selby Watson, at: http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/ (95); accessed 5 August 2012.

30. Pareto, The Mind and Society, §1407, §1932.

31. William Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43.

32. Cf. Teichman, “The Philosophy of We.”

33. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 19, 51.

34. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 62.

35. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA University of California Press, 1969), 20.

36. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 172, 41, 43 (emphasis in original).

37. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 21, 178 (emphasis in original).

38. Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 200. Cf., Billig, “Nationalism and Richard Rorty,” 73.

39. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 18.

40. Taking into account rhetoric, ‘they’ may even mean ‘we’, as when Rorty refers to “historicist philosophers like Ortega [y Gasset]” and writes that “they think” and “but Ortega would reply” while it is obvious that Rorty thinks and would reply in the very same way. See Richard Rorty, “Philosophy-envy,” Daedalus 133.4 (2004): 23.

41. Richard Rorty, “Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage,” Diogenes 173 (1996): 5.

42. John Tambornino, “Philosophy as the Mirror of Liberalism: The Politics of Richard Rorty,” Polity 30.1 (1997): 67.

43. Duncan, “A Question to Richard Rorty,” 412 and 413.

44. Keith Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” American Political Science Review 89.4 (1995): 961.

45. Chantal Mouffe, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Difference,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 9.

46. Tambornino, “Philosophy as the Mirror of Liberalism,” 78.

47. Simon Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 25; Graeme Garrard, “The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Rorty,” Critical Review 14.4 (2000): 428.

48. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 120.

49. Richard Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 17.

50. Richard Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 45.

51. Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 37.

52. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 207.

53. Mouffe, On the Political, 87.

54. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 354 n. 59.

55. Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” 954.

56. Christopher Voparil, “Rortyan Cultural Politics and the Problem of Speaking for Others,” Contemporary Pragmatism 8.1 (2011): 125.

57. Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” 963.

58. Urs Marti, “Die Fallen des Paternalismus. Eine Kritik an Richard Rortys politischer Philosophie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44.2 (1996): 268.

59. Clifford Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity,” Michigan Quarterly Review 25.1 (1986): 113.

60. Richard Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” Michigan Quarterly Review 25.3 (1986): 526.

61. Marianne Janack, “Rorty on Ethnocentrism and Exclusion,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12.3 (1998): 214.

62. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 33.

63. Richard Rorty, “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1982), 210 n. 16.

64. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 354 n. 59; Marti, “Die Fallen des Paternalismus,” 269.

65. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward,” 541 and 556; cf. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 207; Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” 24; Farid Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8.2 (2000): 224.

66. Shapiro, Political Criticism, 37.

67. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward,” 545, 547.

68. Robert Burch, “Conloquium Interruptum: Stopping to Think,” in Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning, ed. Evan Simpson (Edmonton, Canada: Academic, 1987), 102.

69. Bernhard Waldenfels, Verfremdung der Moderne: Phänomenologische Grenzgänge (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 74.

70. Richard Rorty, “Response to Udo Tietz,” in Hinter den Spiegeln: Beiträge zur Philosophie Richard Rortys, ed. Thomas Schäfer, Udo Tietz, and Rüdiger Zill (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 110; English draft available at Richard Rorty born digital files, 1988–2003, University of California, Irvine: MS-C017-FD029.

71. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 21–34.

72. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 173.

73. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 177.

74. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” 530.

75. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 191.

76. Rorty, “Response to Udo Tietz,” 108.

77. David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II,” The American Historical Review 98.2 (1993): 328.

78. For such a question-begging attempt, see: Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 193 n. 5.

79. Ethan J. Leib, “Rorty’s New School of American Pride: The Constellation of Contestation and Consensus,” Polity 36.2 (2004): 178.

80. Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 15.

81. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’?” 328.

82. Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 211.

83. Richard Rorty, “Letter 4: Richard Rorty to Anindita Balslev,” in Cultural Otherness: A Correspondence with Richard Rorty, ed. Anindita Niyogi Balslev, 2d ed. (Atlanta, CA: Scholars Press, 1999), 70.

84. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” 526; cf. Pablo Quintanilla, “Truth, Justification, and Ethnocentrism,” Pragmatism Today 3.1 (2012): 112.

85. Rorty, “Response to Udo Tietz,” 111.

86. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” 15.

87. Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” 200–201.

88. Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Ethical Perspectives 4.2 (1997): 145.

89. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 191.

90. Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” 145.

91. Richard Rorty, “Response to Thomas Schaefer,” in Hinter den Spiegeln, 198; English draft available at Richard Rorty born digital files, 1988–2003, University of California, Irvine: MS-C017-FD029.

92. Rorty, “Response to Udo Tietz,” 109.

93. Udo Tietz, “Das ‘principle of charity’ und die ethnozentristische Unterbestimmung der hermeneutischen Vernunft,” in Hinter den Spiegeln, 102.

94. Rorty, “Response to Udo Tietz,” 112.

95. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 189.

96. Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 172.

97. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 385.

98. Rorty, “Response to Thomas Schaefer,” 198.

99. Richard Rorty, “The Demonization of Multiculturalism,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 7 (1995): 74.

100. Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity,” 167.

101. Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” 30.

102. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” 13.

103. Richard Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 90.9 (1993): 452.

104. Rorty, “Who Are We?” 8.

105. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” 15.

106. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 112.

107. Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” 45.

108. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” 13–14.

109. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism and Liberalism,” 15 n. 29.

110. Richard Rorty, “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Response to Jean-François Lyotard,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers I, 214.

111. Leib, “Rorty’s New School of American Pride,” 191.

112. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’?” 328, 329.

113. Richard Rorty, “A Pragmatist View of Rationality and Cultural Differences,” Philosophy East and West 42.4 (1992): 589.