Response to Egginton

Abstract

We have been collaborating for many years with William Egginton, and it is not simply because he is a brilliant philosopher and literary theorist, but also because he is an admirer and disciple of the late American thinker Richard Rorty. Rorty was not only a close friend of ours, but also of “weak thought,” which he endorsed on several occasions. This week Rorty has returned to the pages of The New York Times, The Guardian, and other papers around the world, because in one of his last books, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), he predicted in the near future the election of a “strongman”, “someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”