Strong Poets and Utopia: Rorty's Liberalism, Dewey and Democracy

Richard Rorty is one of the most controversial philosophers today. He argues, among other things, that philosophy should be replaced by literary writing and that it has nothing to say to politics. Yet his own more recent writing has been more and more about political issues. This article focuses upon the inconsistency of his politics with the philosophical influence which he has consistently identified as the strongest on his writings; that of John Dewey. At the root of this incompatibility lies the failure of his theoretical project to carry over his synthesis between Deweyan pragmatism and Nietzschean poststructuralism into the realm of politics.