Rorty's account of philosophy here was profoundly exciting to read, and I think his approach of Pragmatism here is almost unassailable. It just nulls out so many of the tricky problems in philosophy, gives it a place with the other disciplines, and accords much more with how persuasion actually functions in the real world.

There are complaints that he "misrepresents" Dewey, James, etc. by only borrowing the parts he likes—but that's literally his philosophical criterion for everything, to characterize things by how useful they are instead of some nebulous idea of representation! And as we see from his writing in this book, Rorty is very generous in spirit to each of these writers, examining their works as situated in their time and place and particulars and subject to the constraints thereof.

And that point, that you can't lift something out of its web of relations, ends up biting Rorty a bit here because I think his account of US history is wrong and unduly whiggish, sanding down American Exceptionalism down to just Emersonian hope and insisting on building his political program around it. He's writing here in the mid-90s, when you could still plausibly tell that account using the popular understanding of our history without bending things too much. But then the Bush years happened, bringing the War on Terror and all the ensuing invasions and sadism.

One would hope that if Rorty had survived until today, he would have a more plausible political account to give—one that doesn't prop up the same hopelessly-violent patriotism as pre-game flyovers and post-9/11 flag-fucking.