American philosopher, the major late-twentieth-century inheritor of Dewey's pragmatism, and the most consequential American academic philosopher of his generation to have written continuously for a public beyond the discipline. His break with the analytic mainstream in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) was followed by thirty years of work on the political and moral consequences of taking pragmatism seriously — a project culminating in the small political book Achieving Our Country (1998), whose prediction that the abandonment of economic populism by the academic left would produce the election of an authoritarian strongman has been widely re-read since 2016.
Rorty was born in New York in 1931 to two left-wing literary journalists who had recently broken with the Communist Party (his mother was the daughter of the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch). He spent his teens at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins–Adler "great books" era, graduated at nineteen, took an MA at Chicago and a PhD at Yale, and from 1961 to 1982 taught analytic philosophy of mind at Princeton, where he was a respected member of the discipline he was about to abandon. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) was the abandonment: the book argued that the post-Cartesian project of philosophy as the foundational discipline that adjudicates how the mind "mirrors" reality was a mistake from the start, and that Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey — three philosophers his colleagues regarded as having little in common — had each in their own way helped us out of the picture. The book was a scandal in analytic philosophy and a liberation outside it.
Rorty left Princeton in 1982 for the University of Virginia, and in 1998 for Stanford comparative literature, the disciplinary location matching his sense that philosophy in the inherited foundational sense had been replaced by the broader conversation he called "edifying" — Wittgenstein, Heidegger, late Dewey, Davidson, and increasingly novelists. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) is his major statement of the position: the figure of the "liberal ironist" who holds her deepest moral and political commitments while recognizing their historical contingency, who pursues self-creation in private and solidarity in public, and whose moral education comes not from philosophical foundations but from the sentimental literature — Dickens, Orwell, Nabokov — that expands the imaginative reach of "people like us."
Achieving Our Country (1998), based on the Massey Lectures, is the political book. Rorty distinguished the older "reformist left" of Dewey, Whitman, the labor movement, and the New Deal from the "cultural left" of the post-1960s academy, and argued that the latter's withdrawal from economic struggle into theoretical critique of "America" had abandoned the working class to right-wing resentment. The book contains the now-famous passage predicting that the American electorate, if pushed far enough, would "start looking around for a strongman to vote for," and that "all the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet" — a passage circulated everywhere after November 2016.
Rorty died of pancreatic cancer in 2007. His last essay, The Fire of Life, published in Poetry magazine, described his own dying in terms of the consolation he had taken in poetry rather than philosophy.
Rorty earns his place because Achieving Our Country (1998) is one of the most prescient pieces of American political writing of the late twentieth century, and because he is the late-twentieth-century philosopher who took most seriously the pragmatist conviction — already present in Dewey and James — that philosophy's job is to help democratic citizens live with one another, not to ground their convictions in necessity. He is the natural completion of the pragmatist line the graph already follows.