Richard Rorty was one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. McClean re-evaluates Rorty’s work in the light of his liberal cosmopolitan outlook, showing how it can be applied to a range of social and political issues.

Neil Gascoigne provides the first comprehensive introduction Richard Rorty’s work. He demonstrates to the general reader and to the student of philosophy alike how the radical views on truth, objectivity and rationality expressed in Rorty’s widely-read essays on contemporary culture and politics derive from his earliest work in the philosophy of mind and language. He avoids the partisanship that characterizes much discussion of Rorty’s work whilst providing a critical account of some of the dominant concerns of contemporary thought. Beginning with Rorty’s early work on concept-change in the philosophy of mind, the book traces his increasing hostility to the idea that philosophy is cognitively privileged with respect to other disciplines. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this led to a new emphasis on preserving the moral and political inheritance of the enlightenment by detaching it from the traditional search for rational foundations. This emerging project led Rorty to champion ‘ironic’ thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, and to his attempt to update the liberalism of J. S. Mill by offering a non-universalistic account of the individual’s need to balance their own private interests against their commitments to others. By returning him to his philosophical roots, Gascoigne shows why Rorty’s pragmatism is of continuing relevance to anyone interested in ongoing debates about the nature and limits of philosophy, and the implications these debates have for our understanding of what role the intellectual might play in contemporary life. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Rorty’s work and an innovative critique which contributes to ongoing debates in the field.

Offers a fresh perspective on Richard Rorty by situating his work in the arena of political theory. Reinterpreting Rorty's antirepresentationalism as a Romantic affirmation of the power of imaginative writing, this work provides an assessment of this important thinker's value to the political discourse of the 21st century.

Liberal democracy needs a clear-eyed, robust defense to deal with the increasingly complex challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately much of contemporary liberal theory has rejected this endeavor for fear of appearing culturally hegemonic. Instead, liberal theorists have sought to gut liberalism of its ethical substance in order to render it more tolerant of non-liberal ways of life. This theoretical effort is misguided, however, because successful liberal democracy is an ethically demanding political regime that requires its citizenry to display certain virtues and habits of mind. Against the grain of contemporary theory, philosopher Richard Rorty blends American pragmatism and romanticism to produce a comprehensive vision of liberal modernity that features a virtue-based conception of liberal democracy. In doing so, Rorty defends his pragmatic liberalism against a host of notable interlocutors, including Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Hilary Putnam, Richard J. Bernstein, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

A critique of Rorty's own provocative political philosophy, as well as an in-depth look at both the issues concerning the relationship between the public and the private, and arguments on the role of reason in liberal political discourse generally.

"Markar Melkonian meets Rorty head-on, taking him to task for insufficiently repudiating universal values, essentialism, and other metaphysical views he claims to have abandoned. Melkonian does this in the course of making the case that the existing liberal democracies Rorty wants to defend bear little resemblance to Rorty's own liberal utopia, in which "the quest for autonomy is impeded as little as possible by social institutions." Without denigrating such institutions as a free press, independent judiciaries, and representative democracy, Melkonian suggests that socialism - conceived as the state power of workers, rather than capitalists - holds greater promise than Rorty's liberal utopia for the supreme purposes of extending freedom and ameliorating suffering."--BOOK JACKET.