Rorty's Nation 

One can sometimes feel rather protective towards Richard Rorty. This is especially so when he is being set upon by members of the realist old left: those salt-of-the-earth socialist internationalists who enjoy looking backward to the great days of organized labour, wringing their hands over yet another opportunist who has proved unequal to the struggle and sold out to the blandishments of bourgeoisdom. For those who like taking left offence, Rorty is a most dependable supplier of what turns them on.

But the comrades have got quite the wrong end of the stick. For one thing, they are unaware of Rorty's funny side. He may or may not be, as Harold Bloom has claimed, 'the most interesting philosopher in the world today', but he is certainly one of the drollest. The glum self-descriptions he goes in for are particularly enjoyable, those where 'we Western leftists', for instance, are made to coincide with 'we bourgeois liberals', and admonished, after 'dumping Marx', to become 'more willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualised so far'. These reiterated “we's” may be questionable as statements of fact, but of course they are really something else: needles for puncturing our conceits, comic devices for winding up those of us who cannot bring ourselves to admit that our righteous political attitudes may not be quite so self-evident when seen in their broad practical context, or when measured in terms of their long-range historical effects.

For those who get wound up by Richard Rorty, he is guilty of three principal betrayals. The first is that he has given up on all a priori universal necessities, and so cannot believe in universal natural human rights -- a belief which they may well take to be historically and logically indispensable for all kinds of progressive or critical politics, even perhaps for politics as such. The second is that, given his pragmatism or anti-foundationalism, Rorty can never have any grounds for criticizing existing social relations: after all, if no description is necessitated by reality as such, then intolerable injustices will always be open to face-saving redescriptions that will make them out to be inevitable or even desirable. And the third dereliction -- perhaps gravest of all from the point of view of solemn European leftists -- is that Rorty is not ashamed of being a citizen of the United States of America, and, indeed, that he has called on his fellow citizens to 'rejoice' in their Americanness and build up their 'shared sense of national identity' by yielding to an 'emotion of national pride'.

The point about Americanism can perhaps be disposed of quite quickly. European leftists should be a little wary of anti-Americanism: it may, after all, have more to do with a Euro-aristocratic disdain for uppity colonials than solidarity with the cause of the oppressed, including the oppressed in America. The patriotic Rorty does not deny that there has been massive unnecessary unhappiness in the history of the United States at home and abroad; and perhaps he is only saying -- quite plausibly -- that if one compares the legal and political systems of different countries and ranks them according to their ability to tackle injustices old and new, then those of the United States come pretty near the top.

The idea that Rorty does not treat human suffering with sufficient gravity is also based on a misunderstanding. Despite the fact that Rorty is one of philosophy's most effective controversialists, Roy Bhaskar is convinced that his sceptical anti-realism leads automatically to 'apologia for, and so normalization, and thence eternalization (and so divinization) of the social status quo'. Bhaskar is so exasperated that he can only taunt Rorty with hysterical questions as if Rorty were a kind of stony-hearted political scrooge: 'how about a famine', he asks, or 'an earthquake or a stillborn child?' But he obviously mistakes the character of the argument. Rortyan pragmatists will no doubt be anti-realists about famines, but that does not make them into postmodern Marie Antoinettes, telling the hungry to make do with words when they cannot get bread. Their pragmatism will be perfectly even-handed, applying to food as well as famines, and in practice the two anti-realisms will cancel each other out. Indeed, if activism is to be our criterion, then one might suppose that a pragmatist conception of food and famine would be a more effective spur to action than a realist investigation of its nature.

Much the same can be said of the other betrayal of which Rorty stands accused: his refusal to bow down to the idea of universal human rights. 'If there is no truth, there is no injustice', according to Norman Geras, another wound-up realist leftist. 'If truth is wholly relativized or internalized to particular discourses or language games or social practices', Geras says, then 'there is no injustice'. But the pragmatist argument is not that we should turn our back on absolute truth; it is that, however much we may regret it, absolute truth is not on offer. The pragmatists may be right or wrong - it is, after all, a very abstract dispute indeed, way above the heads of most of us. But it is surely petulant and self-destructive to suggest, with Geras, that if the pragmatists win the meta-philosophical argument then the struggle against injustice should be called off. Indeed the boot would seem to be on the other foot: if direct activism is the goal, it is surely better to let it be motivated by immediate 'sentimentality', rather than to wait for the always uncertain results of a rationalistic calculus whose bottom line we may never reach.

But this defence of Rorty comes at a price. One may be willing to consider his case respectfully when he compares the political system of the United States with others elsewhere. But such global comparisons will need to be discussed in a carefully differentiated vocabulary of social description, with a high degree of historical self-awareness -- and in that case Rorty has no business to dismiss social theory a priori, or to speak so robustly about 'dumping Marx'.

And, secondly, if the serious realists are wrong to imagine that pragmatism undermines the possibility of committed social and political action, it is because the issue does not make much practical difference one way or the other. Only a true-believing realist metaphysician has any cause to worry about the nature and definition of metaphysics. Indeed, it is hard to see why a Rortyan pragmatist should be the slightest bit interested in the task of dividing books into two separate piles, the realist and the anti-realist, with Plato and Marx and Mill in one pile and Dewey, Dickens and Proust in the other. Surely only a metaphysician of the kind Rorty most keenly wants not to be could suppose that doctrines fall into unambiguous natural kinds. In any case, the issue is not so much which books to read, as how to read them. Ex-philosophers intent on reinventing themselves as ironists still have some way to go if they have not yet conquered their reality-anxiety sufficiently to give up on the distinction between books that are metaphysical and books that are not. Were comrade Rorty ever invited to make a self-criticism, in short, it would not be for being too anti-realist, but for not being anti-realist enough.

The same applies to Rorty's needling of the idea of universal natural human rights. There is, indeed, no point in pretending not to be ethnocentric: we cannot not make judgements, and the fact that our opinions will always be those of someone who comes from where we come from is hardly a reason for holding them back. Otherwise, as Rorty says, we will be so open-minded that our brains fall out. And that is why, according to Rorty, there is nothing to the language of human rights beyond our capacity for a sentimental identification with other people. This identification may be worked up and practised upon by journalists and novelist, as Rorty sees it, but not by moral and political philosophers - certainly not by any of those he has just dumped in the skip labelled 'metaphysics'.

Rorty may be right to say that 'feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient', and that 'such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary'. But this 'anti-anti-ethnocentrism' provides no support for the values of patriotism or nationalism. Rorty evokes American liberal concern for poor young blacks in American cities. 'Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings?', he asks. 'We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans -- to insist that it is outrageous that a fellow American should live without hope.'

Here Rorty seriously underestimates the complexities of the sympathetic imagination. Why assume, for instance, that we feel solidarity only with those whom we take to be similar to us? Surely we are all susceptible to sympathies that leap straight over our neighbours and peers and equals and familiars to people we take to be totally unkith and unkin? Otherness can be a motive for love and passion as well as hatred or indifference, and distance is often a positive aid to identification. The weeping of children whose language one cannot even understand, and whose haircuts and clothing one cannot decipher, is far more affecting than the ungrateful snivelling of the kids in expensive trainers who loiter on one's street smoking classy streets and asking for money, shouting insults at you and trashing cars. We have to take care, in this case, to apprehend them hazily, as if through a bobbly glass - to see them as mere fellow humans and as abstractly possible conversation partners, rather than as the spiteful violent racists we immediately take them to be.

In any case, the positive concept of 'nation' which Rorty thinks should structure our sentiments and sympathies, divides us up in all the wrong ways. Once again, Rorty seems not to have conquered his old realist longings. The principle of nationality may be a very recent conceptual fabrication, but it is probably the most metaphysical way of grouping people together that was ever invented. Nationality is an attribute one is stuck with purely in virtue of one's birth; it is probably harder to change than one's sex; and, under the modern world system, it is absolutely compulsory that everyone should unambiguously have at least - and probably at most -- one of them. Presumably Rorty was reaching out for was an idea of bonds of solidarity that are local and affective and particular and plural; but what he actually picks up in the institutions of compulsory nationality is quite the opposite: the process of nationalization may foster global differences between nations, but it also obliterates local differences within them.

It is all quite contradictory. Rorty rightly mocks those old leftists who can think of nothing but their 'wish to nationalize the means of production'; but he himself is intent on nationalizing the sources of social solidarity. This is not just a play on words: the two kinds of nationalization have exactly the same structure. In economic arrangements as in sentiments of solidarity, both assume that the only alternative to the atomistic individual as the unit of social construction is the conglomerated nation -- that the only choice lies between privatization and nationalization. If we want to free ourselves of this prejudice, and broaden our bourgeois liberal experience a little, then we could do worse than read Marx on the manifold variousness of the forms of property and belonging that have been potentialized and actualized in the contingent course of history. We might even, if we are disillusioned with the idea that 'nationalization' is the only alternative to private property, find ourselves nodding in belated recognition at Marx's prescient descriptions of how separate capitals within a national economy may become consolidated into 'communal capital', with 'the community as a universal capitalist'.

Unfortunately, Rorty would deny us access to such intellectual resources, on the a priori ground that we cannot have anything to learn from books of 'philosophical theory' written by 'metaphysicians like Plato and Marx'. We should avoid such 'deep thinkers', he says, and lend an ear instead to such 'superficial dreamers' as H. G. Wells and Edward Bellamy.

This is, surely, perverse. We may agree that the idea of national planning by experts accountable only to other experts was one of the great disasters of twentieth-century politics; but no one did more to put it into the susceptible heads of socialists, a century or so ago, than the writers on Rorty's alternative reading list. It was Wells who tried to bludgeon socialists into what he called a 'delocalised' mentality as opposed to a 'localised' one, and it was he who in 1912 put forward the idea that 'we need nothing less than a National Plan of social development'. And Wells did not derive these statist notions from Marx - that 'malicious theorist', as he called him, the rabid anti-statist who offered 'to the cheapest and basest of human impulses the poses of a pretentious philosophy'. If anything, Wellsian ideas of scientific national planning were taken not from the other novelistic authors Rorty recommends, like Edward Bellamy.

Bellamy's Looking Backward , published in 1888, is the story of How Socialism Came to the United States, told from the vantage point of the year 2000. It may well be the first work explicitly to link the idea of socialism with that of a 'National Party' whose programme would be, in so many words, to 'nationalize the functions of production and distribution'. The National Party, in Bellamy's Bostonian Utopia, had established socialism by first routing the Reds (in the pay of the capitalists, of course, for their services in making socialist rationality repulsive to the masses) and then establishing the American 'nation . . . as the one great business corporation . . . the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists'.

Bellamy's dream is a nightmare of immovable authoritarianism. Rorty may think this too literal-minded a response: after all it is a time-travel love story, not a philosophical treatise. But the difference in generic category is no excuse: it was precisely the paralysis of critical intelligence induced by such political fairy-tales that enabled national-authoritarian delusions to enter the practice of the socialist activists of the twentieth century in the first place.

Surely these tragically unironic socialists -- mournfully honoured by Rorty as 'the most decent, the most devoted, the most admirable people of their times' -- would have been well advised to think a little harder than either Wells or Bellamy encouraged them to. It is a pity they were not a little more suspicious of that most metaphysical of ideas -- the idea of a homogeneous nation -- as a basis either of human solidarity or of the ownership of the means of production: they would, in short, have done better to attend to such great ironists as Plato, Mill and Marx.

Professor Jonathan Rée teaches at Middlesex University. This is an edited version of a talk he gave at the CSD Symposium 'An Encounter with Richard Rorty', held on 20 May 1997.