Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty

by Richard Rorty, Kent Puckett (Editor)

Nystrom and Puckett's pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty's political views. This is Rorty being avuncular, cranky, and straightforward: his arguments on patriotism, the political left, and philosophy—as usual, unusual—are worth pondering. This pamphlet will appeal to all those interested in Rorty's distinct brand of pragmatism and leftist politics in the United States.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[m · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

Download a free copy of Against Bosses (19,600 words) here:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/50156...

Over the years Rorty gave many interviews, a dozen of which were collected for this 2005 book of interviews; equally good later-dated ones are available here, here, and especially here.

Also, there are two especially good Rorty interviews on Youtube, one in which he converses with Robert Harrison (Nov. 2005), available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMGmq...

And a second interview of Rorty chatting with Donald Davidson, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Pit...

(Someday I hope to post a transcript of highlights from both interviews because Rorty says many helpful & profound things in both that deserve to be read, not merely heard.)

Against Bosses is a wide-ranging, fun conversation conducted by Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, both of whom attended UVa, so I presume they're former students, though they don't report such. Nystrom's homepage does say Against Bosses has been translated into Portuguese, German, and Japanese—a nice feather in his cap.

Their Introduction provides a good, short (3,600 words) overview of Rorty's career. The conversation itself (16,300 words) is lively throughout, as Rorty's replies are always pithy, sometimes peeved or laugh-out-loud funny, and often profound, wise.

There's a string of questions (probably from only one interlocutor) that revolve around late-1990s hot topics such as "the politics of difference" & "whiteness studies." Rorty's replies, betraying his exasperation & bafflement at these developments within the academy, are on point and often inadvertently funny. Nowhere is the difference in sensibility between the interviewers and interviewee in greater contrast than when the questions turn to identity politics. Note the verbiage in the windup to this question, and Rorty's pithy commonsensical reply:
___________________________

Question: I wonder if your criticisms of the cultural left's "theoreticism," its need to theorize, is more of a philosophical objection than a political one. For your main critique of the cultural left seems to be that they are concerned more with "naming the system" than with crafting specific reforms. But I wonder if we can't see that this naming the system is similar to what the right did from the '60s on. Sure, they had a whole bunch of policy positions, but they also concentrated a lot of energy on cultural strategy, on changing the terms of debate, changing the ground on which we argue about public policy. And this is perhaps what the cultural left is trying to do for the reformist left or with the reformist left, if anything—that naming the system may be a way of naming lousy vocabularies in which we're conducting our public conversations, and making some suggestions about new vocabularies or new conversations that would be more amenable to the kind of public policy decisions we would want to have happen.

Rorty: It's a nice idea, but I can't see what new vocabularies have been suggested. My feeling is that there's a tacit collaboration between right and left in changing the subject from money to culture. If I were the Republican oligarchy, I would want a left which spent all its time thinking about matters of group identity, rather than about wages and hours. I agree that the oligarchy managed to make the term "liberal" a bad word, and thus shifted the Democratic Party toward the center. It was a rhetorical triumph. The left hasn't managed anything of the sort. What it has done is to capitalize on the success of the civil rights movement, and to get more and more breaks for various oppressed groups over the last twenty-five years. It seems to me that all the work of getting those breaks was done without notions of "culture." It was done using the kind of rhetoric Martin Luther King used, modified for the use of women, gays, and what not. King was not interested in African-American culture. He was interested in getting African-Americans the life-chances that whites always had.
________________________________

Here are other notable Rorty lines:

Rorty: I was at Chicago until '52, and then I was at Yale from '52 to '56. I remember watching the Army–McCarthy hearings at Yale. Chicago was perhaps the left-most American university except maybe CCNY and Columbia. When the communists took Czechoslovakia in '48, I was a member of the Chicago student senate (or whatever they called it). I introduced a resolution of sympathy with the students of Charles University who'd been killed by the Communists. It was killed 40-2, because it was seen as lending aid and comfort to the capitalists. It was viewed as red-baiting. In those days, Chicago students genuinely believed that saying anything nasty about Stalin counted as red-baiting. The student newspaper was communist, and eventually it turned out that the editor had been registering for one credit a quarter. He was getting paid, believe it or not, by Moscow gold. He was being paid by the [Communist] party to run the [U of C] student newspaper. When McCarthy came along and said the Communists had infiltrated everywhere, he could produce lots of similar examples.
But, of course, Chicago was not typical of the American academy at that time. I spent my time at Chicago making red-baiting remarks, as I had been brought up to do. I became unpopular with my fellow students for making them.

Rorty: I haven't the foggiest idea what Althusser meant by "science." His book seemed to me bullshit from beginning to end. I've got no conception of what turned people on in Althusser. There were a lot of people who found him important. But he completely baffles me.

. . . black-white intermarriage ... seems to me the only way in which black-white relations are going to be improved.

. . . what bothers me about the politics of difference is the suggestion that you have some duty to embrace it rather than forget about it.


Rorty: My feeling is that there's a tacit collaboration between right and left in changing the subject from money to culture. If I were the Republican oligarchy, I would want a left which spent all its time thinking about matters of group identity, rather than about wages and hours.

Rorty: Do you save the working classes of the advanced old democracies by protectionism, or do you give up protectionism for the sake of the Third World? Do you try to keep the standard of living in the old democracies up in order to prevent a right-wing populist, fascist movement in the USA, or do you try to re-distribute the wealth across national borders? You probably can't do both. I wish I knew how to resolve the dilemma, but I don't.

Rorty: The adjuncts worry me a lot more than the TAs. I can't get really excited about how much money the TAs get. I can get upset about employing adjuncts. It seems to me that for the three or four years that you are a TA, the university says that in exchange for starving for these three or four years, you're getting a chance at a better career than you would have gotten if you had taken a job for real money. Maybe that's a fair trade. It's not a very conclusive argument, but it's an argument. I just don't have strong views one way or another. Adjuncts, on the other hand, seem to me quite capable of wrecking the system. You could de-professionalize higher education by hiring enough adjuncts. You could eliminate faculty control, take away the role of the universities as sanctuaries of the left, as sanctuaries of tolerance . . . all the roles it has played in post-war America. If you completely commodify academic labor you can get all the teaching done for roughly a third of what you can get it done for now. But I hope they don't completely commodify academic labor. It would proletarianize the faculty, and take away whatever cultural and political clout universities currently have.


Rorty: So if you want a majoritarian politics then you may want to separate talk about the level of the minimum wage from talking about race and gender. The dream of the left, particularly after Marxism seemed to have given us such a beautiful way of tying things together, is that we can integrate all of our concerns into a single consolidated vision. But usually we can't. We have to say one thing to one audience at one time and other things to other audiences at other times.


Rorty: Consider Clinton's last State of the Union Address: something for everybody, no overall integration of policy: just I propose this and I propose that. That's about as much integration as politics needs. I think of the intellectual left as dominated by the notion that we need a theoretical understanding of our historical situation, a social theory which reveals the keys to the future development, and a strategy which integrates everything with everything. I just don't see the point. I don't see why there shouldn't be sixteen initiatives, each of which in one way or another might relieve some suffering, and no overall theoretical integration.


Rorty: [Marx] said that nothing could change without a total revolution, one which abolished private property, created new ideals to replace bourgeois freedom and bourgeois independence, and so on. The rhetoric was entirely one of "No piecemeal solutions." The left got hooked on this no-piecemeal-solutions idea, and on the claim that if you do propose solutions they'd better be integrated in a general theoretical package. But most of the good has been done by piecemeal initiatives that came out of left field. Stonewall came out of left field. Selma came out of left field.

There's a new book coming out by Richard Posner, in which he talks about the difference between academic moralists and moral entrepreneurs. It's sort of a polemic against Dworkin and other Kantian moral philosophers. He distinguishes academic moralists, who have a moral theory which tells us that we must do so and so, from moral entrepreneurs, like Catherine McKinnon. She is his paradigm of a moral entrepreneur. She doesn't have a theory—she has a polemic. Most of the good is done by opportunistic moral entrepreneurs, who have a very specific target, call attention to a very specific set of instances of unnecessary suffering. Later on the academic moralists and social theorists come along and tie everything up in a neat package. But this latter activity usually doesn't lead to political results.


Rorty: I agree with William James that there needn't be a conflict between science and religion because they serve different ends. They needn't cross. Metaphysics was the place where they crossed, and so much the worse for metaphysics. It's essentially the same argument as in Contingency: we contain copresent but distinct sets of equally coherent sets of desires. These may not always be able to be made coherent with one another, but they may not be any the worse for that. Plato was wrong: you don't have to get everything to get together.

One good thing about Mill is that he doesn't have that longing. The longing was the product of specifically neo-Kantian strains of thought. These didn't reach England, at least enough to affect Mill. As soon as you think that total reconceptualizations are necessary for political thinking, you've already separated from reformist politics and are on your way toward Leninism.

[Isaac Clemente ríos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ligeramente panfletario e izquierdista (según el marco político estadounidense), interesante por momentos, desenfocado en otros. En las respuestas se encuentra poso de reflexión y también honestidad, con diferente acierto. Hay cuestiones interesantes que todavía no se han respondido.

[Márcio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faltam-me conhecimentos de ciência política e da filosofia norte-americana para fazer uma análise mais aprofundada desse livro, que na verdade é uma entrevista realizada com o filósofo Richard Rorty. Apesar disso, achei interessante que quando os entrevistadores tentam induzi-lo à certas respostas, Rorty é bem perspicaz e acaba por contorná-las, dando as respostas nas quais acredita.

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bite the Bullet, Spit It Back: A Short Study of Rorty's Incisive Wit and No-Nonsense Personality
This book is unlikely to be of wide interest, even for the committed pragmatist. The transcribed interview mostly offers idiosyncratic responses to specialized topics and concerns within Rorty's pragmatism and politics. For readers of Rorty, the interview may be of particular interest, though: As the interviewers themselves note, Rorty’s in-person arguments and explanations tend to be more brash, off-the-cuff, and no-nonsense than his writings.

The interview is split into various sections with the two interviewers mostly asking for clarifications on Rorty’s previous work and pressing him with critiques from the academic left. These critiques express concern with retaining and advancing the legacy of Marxism and how to reclaim group identity and marginalization as a source of political power and solidarity. Rorty is having none of this unnecessary and restrictive view of left politics. Again and again, Rorty quickly dismisses seemingly complex critiques with that old pragmatist saw: who cares how something is done or what it’s called?—what matters is what works (46, 38, 17, 58-59). More trenchantly, he argues that too much concern with theory is a distraction from effective, practical changes (18, 20-21). (Quotes can be found in full below the review.)

One of the most useful clarifications I got was how seriously Rorty takes the dangers of complexity, opportunism, puritanism, and fragility. He anticipates white resentment and coopting of politics of difference (44); he’s doubtful of the robustness of a stateless leftism (34); he criticizes the monolithic conceptualization of identity in terms determined by out of touch academics (22-23); he’s realistic about tradeoffs and unintended consequences for social policy (48).

These ideas I think stem in part from a philosophically conservative thread in his thinking which is the cause of cultural left’s distrust and incredulity toward him. Of course, Rorty is still a center-left liberal, so he gains some of the insights of the philosophical conservatives, but doesn’t fully espouse their views and is far from social conservatism. If the cultural leftists were paying attention or focusing on outcomes, they’d see that Rorty supports just as much “good” in the world as them, but he saves a lot of time and effort by opting out of internecine definitional and moral arms races.

———
Favorite Quotes
"if you don’t want to call it socialism, don’t call it socialism. Don’t get hung up on whether it’s socialism or not.” (17)


"I don’t see why social democrats can’t quote Gramsci, or for that matter Marx, with a perfectly good conscience. But it seems to me the kind of leftist who says we must never desert Marx cares more about his own authenticity than about what might be done. Loyalty to Marx has become a fetish.” (18)

"Q: My main question, though, is what do you say to people who would argue that what Rorty is asking us to do is to repress a Marxist tradition.
RR: How about not repressing it, but taking it fairly lightly? You can argue that if it had not been for Marx, Engels and their friends, we wouldn’t have gotten the welfare state. Bismarck wouldn’t have been so scared, Lloyd George wouldn’t have been so scared, and so on. You can argue analogously that had it not been for Luther and Calvin we would still be buying indulgences. Both claims are probably true, but do you really want to bother about whether you’re maintaining a Lutheran or a Calvinist tradition?
Q: So you see it as a ladder we have climbed so that it may be discarded afterwards?
RR: It’s a ladder that is covered with filth because of the marks of the governments that have called themselves Marxists. You have two reasons for forgetting it. First, it’s become a distraction. Second, it’s acquired a bad name.” (20-21)

Q: . . . [I]n the more sophisticated versions of the politics of difference, the idea seems to be precisely that we do try to craft our own individual identities, but we do so because we’re part of different communities.
RR: Often we just put the communities behind us. Going to college, growing up, or getting away from home, should leave people free to say: I used to be a Vietnamese-American, or a Baptist, but now I’m past all that. They don’t have to say this, but I don’t see why they should be expected to have any particular loyalty to such groups.
Q: But it’s not just loyalty; it’s that this is part of the blind impress...
RR: No, it isn’t. The blind impress is your unconscious. Group identity is what your parents tell you about— what we Vietnamese suffered on the boats, for example, or what we Irish suffered before they took down the “No Irish Need Apply” signs. You can remember that suffering, or you can do your best to ignore it—it’s up to you. Whatever a left politics is, it shouldn’t have views on which choice a person should make in that situation.” (22-23)

"The problem for stigmatized groups is not to get their “culture” accepted, but to get the stigmatizers to stop thinking that lack of a penis, black skin, or whatever, is a shameful thing.” (24)

"RR: . . . You can’t write your autobiography without mentioning the stigma you inherited, but the stigmas were somebody else’s idea, not yours.
Q: But what about the very simple fact that, in the culture we live in, your group identity is marked, and your life chances are limited or expanded as a result of that identity, and that there’s got to be some kind of gesture of recovery to say, “I’m going to embrace this identity that I’m told I’m supposed to be ashamed of.” This is a rather powerful tool towards achieving some kind of political and social equality.
RR: That’s one tool among others. You can forget about it; you can embrace it; you can do various things in between. I guess what bothers me about the politics of difference is the suggestion that you have some duty to embrace it rather than forget about it.” (27)

"Q: . . .Over the past 30 years, the Republicans have been very good at saying, instead of imagining the welfare state as this thing we have to ameliorate poverty, see it as an extension of Big Brother.
RR: I don’t want to question the need for bringing a purer sense to the words of the tribe—changing the vocabulary used by the masses to describe this or that
phenomenon. As you say the Republicans have been
brilliantly successful at doing this. But I can’t see it as an argument for the use of theory. Do the Republicans have a theory?” (32-33)

"Q: . . .Why not draw from some of this populist fear of large bureaucratic structures and craft a less statist kind of leftism that can still do the kinds of things that we want the welfare state to do?
RR: Does anybody know how to run a non-invasive welfare system? I don’t think you can. You’re just going to have to settle for lots and lots of Foucauldian webs of power, about as weblike and powerful as they always were, only run by the good guys instead of the bad guys.” (34)

"the conflict [between Rorty and many on the cultural left] is the product of tone and rhetoric—that you dislike their revolutionary posturing, emphasis on righteous anger, and infatuation with theoretical language, and they dislike your casual, laidback and some would say even complacent tone. In addition, your rhetoric tends to be on the debunking, simplifying side, and theirs on the complexifying side.” (34)

"This whole idea of solidarity with the oppressed on the part of the bourgeois intellectual strikes me as one of the many phony problems that we inherited from Marxism.
. . .
Q: How can one acknowledge this point in one’s writing and still say something useful, though?
RR: Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowledge it for me? Everybody knows that I’m an overpaid, privileged humanities professor. They knew it before they read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagellation?” (36-37)

"I don’t really care about whether there’s solidarity between these two social groups, as long as they are serving the same ends.” (38)

"Q: One of the arguments that seems rather persuasive to me is that, given the racial composition of the working class and the poor, if white intellectuals interested in class are silent on race, or at least hold that these issues are separable, it will look like a class movement being crafted for white workers only. The danger is that blacks won’t feel that they’re part of the movement.
RR: And the danger of the academy’s concentration on race and gender is that white workers think they were being neglected by the academy. So you’re going to lose either way. The white workers are being neglected. (44)

"Q: It seems that [talking about race and class at the same time is] what the recent work on whiteness studies is trying to do.
RR: What’s that?
Q: This idea that you start talking about whiteness as a racial identity just like any other racial identity.
RR: [groans] God.” (45)

"I think of the intellectual left as dominated by the notion that we need a theoretical understanding of our historical situation, a social theory which reveals the keys to the future development, and a strategy which integrates everything with everything. I just don’t see the point. I don’t see why there shouldn’t be sixteen initiatives, each of which in one way or another might relieve some suffering, and no overall theoretical integration." (46)

"The rhetoric was entirely one of “No piecemeal solutions.” The left got hooked on this no piecemeal solutions idea, and on the claim that if you do propose solutions they’d better be integrated in a general theoretical package. But most of the good has been done by piecemeal initiatives that came out of left field. Stonewall came out of left field. Selma came out of left field." (47)

"Q: What about Habermas’s fear that local solutions may clear up one kind of suffering while exacerbating another kind of suffering somewhere else?
RR: He’s absolutely right. I think this will continue to happen until the end of time. All social initiatives have unforeseen, and often bad, side effects. The idea that you can step back and fix it so that your initiative won’t interfere with anybody else’s initiative is crazy. It’s as crazy as the idea that someday the meshes of the webs of power will be less tight than they are now.” (48)

"I still think of a bazaar surrounded by private clubs as a good model for a global civilization. . . There would still be some people who would always be trying to become members of the club on the other side of the bazaar. Those would be the intellectually curious people who read novels, history, and anthropology. There would be other people without such curiosity. . . But with luck, the clubs would have some exchange memberships." (49)

"He’s in comparative literature, so the job he cooked up for me is as professor of comparative literature. But I’ll still be teaching philosophy to literature students, just like I have been doing at UVa. I didn’t care about the title. I suggested I be called Transitory Professor of Trendy Studies, but nobody liked the idea." (56)

"Q: I wonder in that case how one would practice pragmatism politically, especially considering the number of Americans still influenced by religion. I heard Cornel West once talk about how something like 95% of Americans believe in God, and 85% believe that God loves them. That being the case: does the pragmatist try to mobilize these kinds of belief in, I guess, a Leninist way?
RR: Whatever works: Cornel talks Christian; other people talk Marxist; I talk pragmatist. I don’t think it much matters as long as we have the same hopes. I don’t think it’s inauthentic to talk Christian, or to talk Marxist. You use whatever phrases the audience learned when growing up, and you apply them to the objects at hand.” (58-59)

[Geoffrey Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I turn to Rorty (1931-2007) for clues as to how to confront crises that he didn't live to see, but maybe aren't so different from those he did. A man of the Left (his capitalization), a discerner of irony and a pragmatist, unwedded to any philosophical system — which is what both irony, always seeing or suspecting other sides to any story, and pragmatism imply — his interest is not in political theory but in the practical actions we can take to increase the life-chances of everybody, including their chances to refashion themselves using whatever bits of culture and opportunities they can grab. He has no patience for what people are calling "identity politics," where somebody wraps him/herself in some commitment to an idealized group and tries to behave accordingly. I copied several provocative remarks to give them more thought; here's one I especially liked, about one of Rorty's political heroes, Martin Luther King, as an answer to "identity" fetishists: «King was not interested in African-American culture. He was interested in getting African-Americans the life-chances whites always had.»
More problematic, in an especially acute way in this age of Trump and "MAGA", is his insistence that the Left should "wrap itself in the flag" if it hopes to practice "majoritarian politics." Patriotism came naturally to the American left before the 1960s, but the Vietnam war, Watergate and a particular strain of Marxism convinced theoreticians of the New Left that America was hopelessly corrupt and unredeemable. Not satisfied with anything short of total revolution, they refused to do the work of "achieving" America, that is, making America live up to its founding and long-held promise of liberty and justice for all. Meanwhile, fortunately, other more pragmatic activists were taking the little steps, from integrating lunch counters to demanding equal pay for women and rights and respect for gays, to widen freedom.
Despite Trump and his "America first" slogan to cover up his profiteering, I'm convinced that Rorty is right in his insistence on patriotism — enlightened patriotism, that is, celebrating not the violence or military power but the libertarian values of America. Likewise in any country, because national pride is essential for self-respect and especially for a cohesive social movement and every country has its own powerful Left traditions, which is a kind of patriotism to build on.
This little book, or pamphlet, includes a quick introduction to the range of Rorty's thought by the editors/interviewers. The interview took place in 1998, shortly after publication of Rorty's book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, which I'll be reading next.

[Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am neither a humanities professor nor a cultural leftist per se, but I thoroughly enjoyed this pamphlet and feel slightly smarter having read it. The overall feeling is similar to having a few glasses of wine with an aged professor, who indulges in a little cattiness and sectarian in jokes. Made me feel a little guilty about being an adjunct -- and inspired me to rent the documentary "Arguing the World." One to ponder.

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scattershot interview with a cantankerous old-left philosopher. Relevant to America's current predicament, in places.

[H.d. · Rating 5 out of 5]

O livro tem dois grande predicados: por ser uma entrevista, tem exposição do pensamento Rortyano em primeira mão (inclusive com algumas posturas mais firmes, algo não usual na sua obra escrita) e os textos de introdução dão uma visão geral e rápida do pensamento do filósofo. Um conjunto de ideias em toda sua coerência pragmática, que em vários momentos podemos discordar com prazer, e ainda assim (ou até por isso) apreciar ainda mais a leitura.

[graceofgod · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rorty sickens me tbh. :\