Pragmatic Methods in Contemporary Political Theory: Rorty and Critical Social Theory

This paper brings together two contemporary conversations. On the one hand, while the political significance of Richard Rorty and pragmatist theory more broadly were largely written off in the 1990s, a recent third wave of pragmatist scholarship has been re-reading Rorty around his relation to politics. Focusing on his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), it is re-examining the breadth of his work to reconstruct a coherent and consistent methodological project a situated form of socio-political criticism. The broad thrust of this literature is that while surely some of the problems previously identified in Rorty’s politics are present, there is a set of methodological imperatives and injunctions deeply insightful and attuned to contemporary debates in political theory, especially around issues of pluralism, and situated political thinking. On the other hand, as in Rorty, there has been a recent uptake in methodological reflections in political theory. While the discipline has often been anaemic to such conversations, the present diversity of approaches and the rise of considerable and foundational criticisms of some of the most dominant clusters of perspectives, has forced the issue out into the open. These challenges run the gambit from the development of non-ideal theory and realist challenges to analytical liberal theory, to both new understandings of genealogy as a political method and new materialist and weak ontological challenges to the tradition of critical social theory that has dominated Anglo-American versions of Continental thought. However, these two literatures have never been brought into substantial dialogue; a task which this paper will undertake in the following steps. First, drawing on these new readings of Rorty, it will summarize its own interpretation of his key methodological insights. It will argue that Rorty offers a situated form of socio-political thinking specifically attuned to the contemporary theoretical and democratic condition of pluralism. In light of his wide body of work on the problem of foundations and the constraints and capacities of enquire, he offers a sociological and naturalistic framework for linguistic political justification that is specifically oriented against the problems of universalising or reifying our critical and normative standards; faults he accuses much of Continental critical social theory of committing. Finally, to draw out the significance and potential of the broad methodological frame Rorty offers, it connects his key imperatives to the recent method of James Tully, who it argues implicitly operationalizes many of these injunctions in his distinct form of “public philosophy”. In this manner, this paper offers a reading of some of the little-known insights of Rorty’s work to articulate an original framework and further some existing dynamics within contemporary critical social theory.