In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty criticizes what he calls the cultural Left for its “Gothic” account of American history, an account that is haunted by specters of power and hypocrisy and that condemns the United States for atrocities for which no future acts can atone. He contrasts this account to the pride the older reformist Left had in the United States and its commitment to fulfilling its still-unachieved ideals of freedom and equality. This paper argues that in relation to a morally burdened past Americans need to learn to practice a form of cognitive dissonance, learning to elide neither its failures nor its possibilities and progress.

This chapter, paired with Chapter 2, suggests a close connection between politics at all levels in Atwood’s thinking, contrasting Somacarrera’s discussion of personal power politics with Rao’s analysis of power politics at the national level. It traces the development of themes of home and exile across selected texts: Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. The argument focuses on concepts of home and estrangement, showing how discourses of home are an extension of discourses of nation and national belonging, and how across Atwood’s later novels discourses of home have shifted into discourses of insecurity and alienation. Here storytelling is of paramount importance, providing patterns of meaning and a form of therapy as it becomes a poetics of survival in a postapocalyptic world where any idea of habitation is fragile and home is no longer a place of safety.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.

In this paper I first worry that Rorty’s attack on various conceptions of “the world” has an alarming tendency to veer from opposition to the kind of realism that he associates with various philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, or even Kant, into skepticism about ordinary activities including those of observing things and referring to them. I try to uncover the roots of this slide in various semantic doctrines, and explore the distinction between minimalist or deflationist theories of truth, and any wider, and less plausible general doctrine of semantic minimalism.

This chapter explores the variety of genres within which Atwood has chosen to write about history, interweaving historical fact with imaginative rewriting and reinventing, with reference to her poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her nonfiction essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” and her novels. The focus is on Atwood’s narrative art, with detailed analyses of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin. These novels with their splicing together of different genres (historical documentary, fictive autobiography, crime fiction, dystopias, Gothic) illustrate the multiple scripts and alternative perspectives through which history may be told, in Atwood’s reappraisal of Canada’s national history and heritage myths, as she reinterprets Canadian themes through her contemporary social, ethical, and global concerns.

Where contemporary thinkers well disposed towards Rorty tend to emphasize the significance of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, more skeptical voices are apt to impugn his relevance to ongoing debates in philosophy on the grounds that that work’s attempt to dispose of the traditional conception of the discipline in the name of a nebulous “literary criticism” is little more than an exercise in self-therapy. The contention of this chapter, then, is that the antagonism this emphasis generates is both unfruitful and ill-conceived. Taking as its starting point reactions to criticism of his early (eliminativist) materialism, it argues that Rorty’s work in the 1970s offers a vindication of the activity of traditional philosophy, albeit within the broader conception of intellectual inquiry we’ve come to call neopragmatism and – latterly – “cultural politics.” From this perspective, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is just one (perhaps self-revealing) prophetic-theoretical proposal amongst many that neopragmatism/philosophy-as-cultural-politics makes possible. But that in turn shows how important this period of Rorty’s work is, not only to understanding his later output but also to elucidating the options available to contemporary philosophy.

In “Globalization, the Politics of Identity, and Social Hope,” Rorty presents a pair of claims: tinkering with the concepts of “identity” and “difference” cannot be made politically useful, but tinkering with the concepts of “rationality” and “truth” can be made politically useful. In this chapter, I use this pair of claims to explain Rorty’s reasons for thinking that leftist critics of his liberalism fail to recognize that they are themselves part of the liberal “we” to which he regularly refers. When Rorty claims that tinkering with rationality and truth can be made politically useful, he has in mind the anti-authoritarian idea that moving from philosophy to redescription makes room for social progress. When he claims that tinkering with “identity” and “difference” cannot be made politically useful, he is making two points: the politics of identity as a philosophical program is overly theoretical and overly pessimistic, but the politics of identity as a political project is nothing other than good old-fashioned liberalism. Together, these claims leave leftist philosophers and activists in a position where we cannot radically undermine liberalism, but where we can work to gradually reform it.

This chapter considers the central place of dystopia in Atwood’s work since 2000 in its discussion of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments. The focus is on the contrasts between the trilogy with its epic dimensions of postapocalyptic speculation and the two later dystopias that return to the network of human relations in situations close to our contemporary world. Analysis of the trilogy traces its narrative arc across three volumes from global disaster to futuristic vision, while The Heart Goes Last is darkly comic social satire addressing anxieties around threats to human freedom in the age of corporate capitalism, high-tech surveillance, and biomedical experiments. In The Testaments Atwood reclaims her story in real time with its update of Gilead, focusing on patriarchal tyranny and women’s strategies of resistance, ending with a glimmer of hope. An emphasis on Atwood’s storytelling with its genre-crossing strategies establishes connections between these dystopias, identifying the distinctive Atwood idiom.

Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s engagements with Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. It argues that, however much he enjoyed these encounters, Rorty’s philosophical views were largely unaffected by them. He tended to endorse what could be assimilated to his own Deweyan pragmatism and reject the rest. In this way, Rorty endorses Heidegger’s diagnosis of the history of European philosophy, while disavowing his criticism of modernity and his nostalgia for an authentic language of Being. He denounces Foucault’s supposed commitment to anarchism and revolution as incompatible with his preferred Deweyan social democratic politics. Only his writings on Derrida provide evidence of deepening understanding of and sympathy with a philosophical project irreducible to his own. Overall, Rorty refuses to accept any philosophical invention on the part of these thinkers. Derrida’s deconstructive argument in favor of an elusive quasi-metaphysics of difference, and Foucault’s genealogies of present institutions and ways of thinking are either ignored or denounced as residues of the tradition they seek to escape. Rorty characterizes each of them as essentially private thinkers, “ascetic priests” who aspire to stand apart from the herd and to be in touch with a reality more profound than the life they share with others.

This chapter begins by arguing that the common tendency to write off Rorty’s views on morality on the grounds that they are vulnerable to straightforward charges of relativism is mistaken if only because it ignores the fact that those views are conceived independently of his epistemological behaviorism. It then moves on to examine the relationship between Rorty’s notion of selfhood and his distinction between public and private morality. In exploring that relationship, a number of problematic issues are identified concerning: Rorty’s dependence on a Freudian multi-personality account of the self, his excessive optimism regarding the demands of self-creation in modern societies, and whether the very idea of morality as a private concern can carry the weight he places upon it. Some of the literary critic Lionel Trilling’s views on the burdens of self-making are introduced to temper Rorty’s utopian expectations.

Despite his role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to classical pragmatism Rorty’s work has blocked the road of inquiry. His selective interpretations spurred sharp lines of demarcation distinguishing “classical” or “paleo” pragmatism from its “neo” and “new” offspring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from Rorty’s distortive readings. This chapter seeks to move contemporary pragmatism beyond these impasses by investigating largely unexamined avenues of shared commitment between Rorty and Peirce, Dewey, and James. I argue that Rorty is best read as reconstructing classical pragmatism rather than misunderstanding it. After establishing Rorty’s underappreciated early engagement with pragmatism, I trace the influence of Peirce on Rorty’s thought, which includes a commitment to language and to a distinct form of realism which was later obscured. Recognizing Rorty’s notion of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a close relative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as cultural criticism yields complementary insights overshadowed by the experience vs. language debate. I then elucidate the shared ethics of belief that emerges from James’s “unfinished” universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency to guide their commitments to agency and a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true.

Rorty’s liberalism strays so far from its classical form that one might wonder why we cluster him together with thinkers such as Locke, Kant, or even more recent writers such as Rawls. Clarifying the particulars of Rorty’s political philosophy – his particular liberalism – requires one to enter into a set debates about metaphysics, epistemology, and social thought that go beyond liberalism, veering into literary criticism, critical theory, and Marxism. This chapter begins by laying out the contours of Rorty’s political commitments, beginning with how they first came together in what he calls his “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism.” It then shows how his liberalism finds its fullest expression in the “ideally liberal society” set out in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It goes on to examine how, in subsequent work, Rorty revised his description of that society in response to criticisms from feminist theorists. It concludes that his later writings indicate that Rorty’s position is potentially more radical than he, or his readers, recognize.

This chapter focuses on Atwood as a Canadian writer and the evolution of her global persona as an international literary celebrity, major thinker, and public spokesperson on global issues of environmentalism and ethical questions related to biotechnology and human rights. Illustrated by its generous inclusion of quotations from Atwood herself, the chapter traces her career development in three stages: “Mapping Her Canada” concentrates on when Atwood addresses fellow Canadians with her early poetry collections, notably Survival and Surfacing; “Interpreting Canada Abroad” reads Canadian themes through an increasingly internationalist lens, featuring The Handmaid’s Tale, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, three short story collections, Kanadian Kultcher Komics, and children’s stories; “Canada in the World” moves between Toronto in her three 1990s historical novels to her postapocalyptic dystopia, the MaddAddam trilogy, returning to Canada with Stone Mattress and Hag-Seed, then back to the United States with The Testaments.

The principal difference between Rorty’s pragmatism and that of Peirce, James, and Dewey is his commitment to the nominalism that Peirce identified as the Achilles’ heel of modern philosophy. In their different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey sought to eliminate nominalism from empiricism. That is their shared “radical empiricism.” Rorty, by contrast, was deeply impressed by the nominalism, and especially the anti-empiricism, of Analytic philosophy, especially in Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Brandom. The result of Rorty’s effort to undo the trenchant antinominalism of the classical pragmatists is a pragmatism without much pragmatism, but a strong linguistic relativism, an ironic pragmatism more ironic than pragmatic.

In this introduction, I offer a sketch and overview of some major themes in Rorty’s thought (antirepresentationalism, liberalism, irony, anti-authoritarianism) and try to indicate how they hang together in a coherent (albeit controversial) whole. While Rorty’s work might appear disjointed and occasional given the immense range of this interests, I argue that his philosophy is unified on the whole. I also show how a broadly Darwinian world picture is at the center of Rorty’s philosophy and how this profoundly shapes all of his thinking.