Abstract
Political theory is often more backward than forward looking, more concerned with the philosophical foundations of political principles than their modus operandi. Such a style of political reflection has many expressions, but most recent and widely familiar are the various contractarian models of social justice found in the writings of authors such as Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin, and Ackerman.1 What unites these otherwise disparate philosophies is the hope that social justice can be grounded in something more solid and permanent than existing norms and conventions. All are instances of foundational political theory. Deliberately cast at the level of ideal theory, more philosophical than political, immensely imaginative about the rational genesis of political principles, honoring above all logical coherence, foundational theory’s goal is to purify political reflection of partisan interests or the influence of any particular locale. Rawls’ veil of ignorance and Ackerman’s conception of a neutral dialogue illustrate this purification process. Each is a device for capturing the methodological highground from which universal value claims can be safely protected from the assaults of historicism and relativism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971;
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1974;
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978;
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980.
Steven Lukes, Essays in Social Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 189. For Lukes’ position on cognitive and moral relativism, see Essays 7 & 8.
James S. Fishkin, ‘Liberal Theory, Strategies of Reconstruction’ in Alfonso J. Damico (ed.), Liberals on Liberalism, Totowa, NJ, Roman & Littlefield, 1986.
John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 163.
Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Deconstituting Politics, Robert Nozick and Philosophical Reductionism’, Journal of Politics, February, 1977, 39, 2–23.
Ibid. p. 13.
In a defense of political theory from the criticisms of John Gunnell, Richard Flathman says many sensible things about what can and cannot be claimed for foundational political theory. Flathman, ‘Philosophy, Political Theory, and Practice’, unpublished ms. Also, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation, Cambridge, Winthrop Publishers, 1979.
John Dewey explains this switch in terms of the difference between “truth” and “validity”. “There is a distinction”, he writes, “made in my theory between validity and truth. The latter is defined, following Peirce, as the ideal limit of indefinitely continued inquiry. This definition is, of course, a definition of truth as an abstract idea…. Apparently, Mr. [Bertrand] Russell takes the statement to apply here and now to determination of the truth or falsity of a given proposition — a matter which, in the sense of validity as just stated, is determined, on my theory, by a resolved situation as the consequence of distinctive operations of inquiry…. The ‘truth’ of any present proposition is, by the definition, subject to the outcome of continued inquiries; its ‘truth’, if the word must be used, is provisional; as near the truth as inquiry has as yet come, a matter determined not by a guess at some future belief but the care and pains with which inquiry has been conducted up to the present time.” ‘Experience, Knowledge and Value, A Rejoinder’, in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey, New York, Tudor, 1939, pp. 572–573.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979,
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982. For a helpful analysis of Rorty’s central themes,
see Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind’, Review of Metaphysics, June, 1980, XXXIII, 745–775.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 3.
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xix.
Ibid. p. xxxvii.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 12.
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xlii.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 329–330.
Ibid. p. 315.
The phrase, “pursuit of intimations”, is explained in Oakeshott’s now justifiably famous essay on ‘Political Education’. See Rationalism in Politics, New York, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 111–136. Rorty would seem to agree down the line with Oakeshott about the type of political understanding and action that makes sense once we understand what theory can and cannot do. He has, for example, explained that he intends the phrase “conversation of mankind” to stand for the entire human enterprise in a fashion much after Oakeshott’s essay on ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’. See ‘A discussion, Rorty, Taylor, and Dreyfuss’, Review of Metaphysics, September, 1980, 34, p. 52.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 367–368. I have slightly altered the order of the sentences.
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xl. Cf. “To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of the other participants in the conversation.” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 392.
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 172.
Ibid. pp. 173–174.
William E. Connolly, ‘Mirror of America’, Raritan, Summer, 1983, p. 129.
Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 207, 210.
Ibid. p. 229.
Ibid. p. 166.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, pp. 26–27.
Ibid. p. 156.
Dewey, ‘Social Science and Social Control’, in Joseph Ratner (ed.), Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, New York, Random House, Modern Library, 1939, pp. 951–952.
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 165.
In making this comparison, I have often followed Garry Brodsky’s ‘Rorty’s Interpretation of Pragmatism’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1982 18, 311–337.
Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, New York, Henry Holt, 1938, pp. 105–107.
Dewey, ‘Having an Experience’, in On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1960, p. 160.
Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929, pp. 166–167, 244–245.
Dewey, ‘Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth’, in Problems of Men, New York, Philosophical Library, 1946, p. 337. Cited in Brodsky, p. 331. In a less technical statement of this point, Dewey writes that “the lost man [confronted with a problematic situation] has no alternative except either to wander aimlessly or else to conceive this inclusive environment; and… this conception is just what is meant by idea. It is not some little physical entity or piece of consciousness-stuff, but is the interpretation of the locally present environment in reference to its absent portion”. Essays in Experimental Logic, New York, Dover Publications, 1953, pp. 238–239.
Dewey, The Public and its Problems, Chicago, Swallow Press, 1927, p. 158. Another statement of the connection between human cognition and human sociality reminds us that “indeterminate situations” are never merely personal. “The incompleteness is not personal. I mean by this that the situation is not confined within the one making the judgment; the practical judgment is neither exclusively nor primarily about one’s self… [I]t is a judgment about one’s self only as it is a judgment about the situation in which one is included, and in which a multitude of other factors external to self are included.” Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 337.
H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, p. 151. Cited in Brodsky, p. 324.
Dewey, op.cit. p. 6.
For one of Dewey’s more polemical defenses of pragmatism’s “forward looking” nature, see The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’, in On Experience, Nature, and Freedom.
Dewey, The Public and its Problems, p. 149.
Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958, p. 58.
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 162.
Rorty, Ibid. pp. xv, 207.
The comparisons between Dewey and Marx can be found in Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. For his comparison of Rorty with those working in the Marxist tradition, i.e., Habermas, see Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, esp. pp. 186–231.
Shlomo Avineri, The Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 58–59.
Also, see the excellent comparison by John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, esp. chaps. III & IV.
In a more general sense, my thoughts on how Marx carries out various adjustments to change the context of political thought so that it becomes a theory of practice has been greatly influenced by Robert Denoon Cumming’s Human Nature & History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969, 2 volumes. J. S. Mill is the central figure of Cumming’s study. But the books are a brilliant study of how political theories differ according to the radically divergent contexts, psychological, moral, historical within which they study political problems.
Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York, W.W. Norton Company, 1978, 2nd edition, p. 16.
In The Holy Family, Marx ridicules the emptiness of German speculative philosophy. “If from real apples, pears, strawberries, and almonds I form the general idea ‘Fruit’, if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea ‘Fruit’, derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then, in the language of speculative philosophy, I am declaring that ‘Fruit’ is the substance of the pear… I have extracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea. By this method one attains no particular wealth of definition.” Karl Marx, Selected Writings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, edited by David McLellan, pp. 135–136.
Tucker, op.cit. pp. 154–155.
Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth’ in Toward A Marxist Humanism, p. 46. Cited in Bernstein, Praxis and Action, p. 73.
Tucker, op.cit. p. 15.
Marx’ ‘Essay on the Jewish Question’ is the locus classicus for the attack upon the language of rights in civil society. That attack has generated much commentary on the differences between a Marxian theory of justice and more juridical, i.e., liberal theories. See Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice, The Radical Critique of Liberalism, Totowa, NJ, Rowman & Allanheld, 1982.
Tucker, op.cit. p. 4.
Tucker, Ibid. p. 85.
Thesis II on Feuerbach.
Bernstein, Praxis and Action, pp. 306–307.
Tucker, op.cit. p. 150.
Ibid. p. 197.
See Damico, ‘Impractical America, Reconsideration of the Pragmatic Lesson’, Political Theory, February, 1986, 14, 83–104.
Tucker, op. cit. p. 5.
Ibid. p. 84.
Kariel, ‘Neither Sticks Nor Stones’, Politics and Society, Winter, 1973, p. 183. Cited by William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983, 2nd edition, p. 180.
Sanford Levinson, ‘On Dworkin, Kennedy, and Ely: Decoding the Legal Past’, Partisan Review (1984) LI:263.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1988 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Damico, A.J. (1988). The Politics After Deconstruction: Rorty, Dewey, and Marx. In: Gavin, W.J. (eds) Context over Foundation. Sovietica, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2903-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2903-6_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7808-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-2903-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive