Richard Rorty in Retrospect  

Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal …



Defending the Enlightenment  

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman Harcourt, 2008, 480 pp., $27.00 Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen Yale University Press, 2008, 116 pp., $22 In 2001 Susan Neiman published Evil in Modern Thought: …





Situated Left  

The Situationist City by Simon Sadler MIT Press, 1999, 233 pp., $18.95 paper Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith; foreword by T. J. Clark University of California Press, 1999, 188 pp., $17.95 paper On November 30, 1994, …





Democracy and “Distinctive Status”  

Multicultural Citizenship by Will Kymlicka Oxford University Press, 1995. 296 pp., $35. In recent years there has been a profusion of interest in the concept of citizenship—a development that is far from surprising. In her classic study The Origins of …



Noam on the Range  

Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a moment of truth emerges. Chomsky is lecturing at the University of Wyoming. He has just finished his familiar stump speech: fifty reasons why we live in …