The Practice of Political Theory by Chin Clayton

Author:Chin, Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

CONCLUSION

This chapter has focused on the role of historicism in Rorty’s thought and the type of political reflection it enables. It built on the analyses of language in chapter 2, which addressed Rorty’s rationale for the linguistic turn and critique of continental political theory, and my discussion in chapter 3 of his naturalistic frame and its injunctions on political thinking. Historicism is the positive pathway away from these themes. As the epigraph to this chapter notes, when political thought is situated only within our social practices, and when an understanding of the world and humanity’s relation to it is necessary to frame the account of social practices, and when language is understood to provide the only unproblematic access to the critical and normative resources already present within language, then narratives of the development of those languages and practices become critical political resources. Further, as Rorty hints in his work on Hegel and his justification of modernity, all of these themes together, in both how they limit and enable sociopolitical criticism, provide for the possibility of a critically reflexive method for political theory that remains both antifoundational and normative. This discussion has raised the question of what political theorizing is for and how best to achieve its ends. The point here has been that it can’t simply be first-order normative pronouncements of faith but must engage in second-order critical clarification. This is properly the subject of the next two chapters and their overt turn to Rorty’s methodology for sociopolitical thought.

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