Priorities to democracy: The pragmatisms of William James and Richard Rorty compared

This dissertation considers the under-explored influence of William James on Richard Rorty's pragmatism, but it also unearths significant differences between their versions of pragmatism that ultimately lead to very different visions of a liberal and pluralist political order. While Rorty recognizes his debt to James for his version of pragmatism, he also admits that sometimes he creates a “quasi-Jamesian position” in order to say what James “should have” said if he had been more consistent and “not betrayed his own better instinct.” This “quasi-James” helps Rorty to define a much-reduced pragmatic theory of truth (chapter 2), to justify a Nietzschean and linguistic turn in philosophy (chapter 3), and to promote a fully secular society oriented by “romantic polytheism” and committed to the total privatization of religion (chapter 4). Each of these chapters offer—in contrast to Rorty's pragmatism and his “quasi-James”—a more generous reading of James's philosophy, which recognizes James's radical empiricism, meliorism, and pluralism as integral to his pragmatism. This more faithfully rendered James disagrees with Rorty on the substantive question of this dissertation: Can political institutions stand independent from a set of foundational metaphysical claims about man, our society, and our relationship to the world? While James hoped that pragmatism and radical empiricism would reconcile faith and reason, Rorty is convinced that pragmatism keeps them forever separate, serving irreconcilable private and public purposes, respectively. Because of this position, Rorty's pragmatic liberalism contains internal tensions that undermine religious freedom (chapter 5). In contrast, James's pluralist liberalism eases these tensions by preserving a place for public religious belief under a more generous form of social pluralism and provides a better justification for political pluralism than Rorty's resignation to incommensurability. And unlike Rorty, who denies that liberal democracies can have common and timeless social goals, James provides for the commensurability of diverse human activities around the loosely defined goal of “the salvation of the world.”...