Only Connect

Richard Rorty’s case for “prosecuting campaigns” (“Movements and Campaigns,” Dissent, Winter 1995) rather than “defining movements” rests on a carefully built construction of superimposed oppositions: tactics versus strategy; focusing on “what is to be done here and now” rather than on the “significance of events”; concern with “what the strong are doing to the weak” rather than with “deep questions about the spirit of the age or about underlying causes of social and cultural change”; “fighting injustice” versus self-promotion in “intellectual or political circles”; pragmatism versus “fantasy”; reformism versus changing things “utterly”; plurality versus a pattern centered on a “single thing”; taking things “in one’s stride” versus total identification, “self-purification,” and “self-surrender”; seeing history as an “endless network of changing relationships” and a “process of random mutation” rather than as an “immanent teleology of maturation” leading to “a process of emancipation and en...