Jaipur • New Delhi • Bengaluru • Guwahati • Kolkata
Recent political thought has grappled with a crisis in
philosophical foundations: how do we justify the explicit and implicit
normative claims and assumptions that guide political decisions and social
criticism? In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin presents a
critical reconstruction of the work of Richard Rorty that intervenes in the
current surge of methodological debates in political thought, arguing that
Rorty provides us with unrecognized tools for resolving key foundational
issues.
Chin illustrates the significance of Rorty’s thought for
contemporary political thinking, casting his conception of “philosophy as
cultural politics” as a resource for new models of sociopolitical criticism. He
juxtaposes Rorty’s pragmatism with the ontological turn, illuminating them as
alternative interventions in the current debate over the crisis of foundations
in philosophy. Chin places Rorty in dialogue with continental philosophy and
those working within its legacy. Focused on both important questions in
pragmatist scholarship and central issues in contemporary political thought,
The Practice of Political Theory is an important response to the vexed
questions of justification and pluralism.
Part I: Rorty and Political Thinking
Introduction. Theory and Method:
Reconstructing Rorty
1. The
Authority of the Social: A Pragmatic Ethos of Inquiry
Part II: Rorty and Continental Political
Thought: Ontology, Naturalism, and History
2. Theorizing
After Foundations: Ontology, Language, and Heidegger
3. Reconstructing
Naturalism: Pragmatic or Ontological?
4. History
and Modernity: Self-Assertion and Critical Reflexivity
Part III: Rorty and Contemporary Political Theory:
Pragmatic Sociopolitical Criticism
5. Pragmatic
Political Thinking and Contemporary Critical Social Theory
6. How
Pragmatism Constrains and Enables Political Thinking
Clayton
Chin is senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Melbourne.
