What Can We Hope For?
Essays on Politics
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces.
In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties.
Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thought-provoking essay collection, philosopher Rorty (1931–2007) weighs in on the relationship between politics and philosophy, the "practical superiority of democracy to any other imaginable system," right-wing campaigns to discredit leftist academics, racial injustice, and other matters. Throughout, Rorty, whose 1998 book Achieving Our Country predicted the rise of a "strongman" president supported by white, working-class voters disillusioned with globalization and "the political establishment," stresses the importance of reducing economic inequality to ensure the proper functioning of democracy and calls for his fellow intellectuals to offer concrete solutions rather than "detached critiques or self-serving rationalizations of the status quo." In "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096," Rorty imagines that a "breakdown of democratic institutions" lasting from 2014 to 2044 ended when a "coalition of trade unions and churches" toppled the country's military dictatorship, in part by shifting the focus of political discourse from protecting individual "rights" to fostering "fraternity." Elsewhere, Rorty discusses how waging the Cold War "subtly and silently corrupted our country from within," advocates for liberals to move away from "identity politics" and toward consensus building, and scrutinizes how "elitist disdain" has widened the gap between America's intelligentsia and middle class. Fiercely argued yet thoroughly empathetic, these political musings are littered with valuable insights and astute analysis.
