Yeah, it’s true that my reading is written in haste. And I agree that Rorty may well have had in mind a certain reading of the 20th century socialist revolutions (I don’t really know of any evidence that he would have lumped Nazi Germany in with them, though — as far as I can judge from that biography by Gross, at least).

That said, here’s the logic that leads me to read this as self-interest: Rorty says that revolutions may make things worse. But it’s important to remember that, on his own view, if you’re in the working class, you already are getting “trodden” on, such that you don’t have a “decent” life or even the possibility of a “decent” life. So I take it that if after the revolution, your working-class life is still exploited and indecent, that’s not necessarily a qualitatively worse situation than it was before. By process of elimination, then, isn’t it the cultured bourgeoisie that Rorty belonged to that really stands to lose out in the revolution? In other words, if Rorty thinks the workers are already miserable, then a revolution would seem to at worst reformat their already bad life, or worsen things in a sort of quantitative way.

I guess one might say that getting killed in a violent revolution is worse than being a cog in the machines of the captains of industry and erudition, but then, given that the Vietnam War was raging in 1971, working-class Americans were already dying pointlessly for their political leaders. Probably they weren’t dying on the scale of massacres that happened elsewhere in the world, but I don’t think Rorty’s argument is that effective if it’s only based at the level of quantitative comparisons between different regimes of misery.

As to Rorty’s arguments about the contingency of vocabularies and values, yeah, I’ve read some of those arguments, and I’m not very persuaded on the basis of this passage that when translated into political terms they are very persuasive. In the terms that Zizek and Sloterdijk have since elaborated, Rorty is basically a passionate advocate of “enlightened false consciousness,” that is, someone whose awareness of the ideological fantasies driving their praxis ultimately amounts to a form of overtheorized passivity. Or rather, one reading of Rorty — as an ultimately contented social democrat — would point in that direction; the other, which I think is floating around in the letter I quoted above, suggests that Rorty actually was aware that his political compromises were indeed compromising: aware in a sense that his politics were a kind of despair. I admit that many of his texts don’t point in that direction, but this letter takes liberal guilt to its breaking points, which is what I find fascinating about it.

thanks for your thought-provoking comment, at any rate!

eli

But I am surprised that you are so quick to read “I don’t trust the aroused workers and peasants to do themselves or anybody any good…I’m afraid of finding something worse when the revolution is over” as the expression of self-interest. He mistrusts the peasants and workers because, in fact, recent revolutionary movements of that kind seemed to have made them worse off rather than better off. One can surely disagree with that evaluation of the 20th century’s revolutionary tradition–although I think it’s at least worth talking about–without reducing it to class-interest. It’s important that the list of such revolutionary surges would include not just the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communist Party, but also the Nazis, all of which were, in their way, democratic.

And then, I’d say, a great deal of Rorty’s philosophical project was dedicated to explaining how one’s “standards of decency” could be contingent (that is with uncertain or merely historical legitimacy), embraced ironically (or, here, cynically), and yet also be an important and progressive source of solidarity. (*Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity*, 1989.) That is, you know that you live by stepping on the neck of another (if we’re honest, we admit that we all do to some extent), but one doesn’t allow this knowledge to push one into self-denying mysticism, revolutionary violence, or simple cynicism. rather, one tries to be a good social democrat (basically), and leave the world better, according to your limited lights, than you found it.