Beyond analytic and continental in contemporary political thought: Pragmatic methodological pluralism and the situated turn

Introduction

The analytic and continental divide is a significant example of a common problem within political philosophy. This is the problem of methodological plurality; how we engage frameworks with very different vocabularies, questions and priorities in common conversation. Recent years have seen a surge of reflection on the divide attempting both to clarify it and to initiate productive enquiry across it. While such analyses often highlight their diverging conceptions of philosophy and its method, ¹ they rarely ask how we mutually engage such contrasting philosophical lenses. However, the fact of methodological plurality raises a methodological question: how do we structure a common conversation for divergent approaches which avoids implicitly prioritising one set of concerns and conceptions?

This problem is only compounded by the nature of the division. The analytic/continental divide is not simply methodological but a split between two understandings of a common practice with diverging historical, cultural and political backgrounds. It is a debate between what philosophy, philosophising and politics amount to and how they should be practised. Responses to this situation have varied. Beyond the essentialising chauvinism of the past, and its delegitimising claims to ‘real philosophy’, there have also been ecumenical pushes to productive cross-border work. These analyses tend to the deflationary, often rejecting that the divide entails any substantive differences beyond style. However, in the face of valid concerns with comparing such large, internally diverse traditions, this approach tends to restrict cross-border work to comparative engagements of specific thinkers (Prado, 2003: 9, 14).

While these analyses are valuable, they are also limited. Specifically, they fail to ‘plumb the depths of important structural and methodological differences that continue to be part of the contemporary philosophical landscape’ (Reynolds et al., 2010: 3). While we must be cautious of caricatures, critically characterising macro-trends cannot be avoided. While these can be simplistic, when undertaken within an approach of methodological plurality, they are necessary to establishing a democratic mode of thinking. Similar to the fact of pluralism within contemporary democracy, theorists cannot avoid inter-methodological dialogue because of large-scale differences and the resulting difficulties. Rather, they must confront this task of identifying the resources within wide perspectives. Only in this manner can we initiate wide-scale cross-border work utilising strengths on either side of these methodological boundaries.

This analysis, thus, has two distinct tasks. First, it identifies one area of potential overlap, one constellation of perspectives it argues can be a site to bridge an aspect of the analytic and continental divide, and the associated division between liberal normative theory and post-structuralism. Second, it begins establishing an approach to such inter-methodological exchanges, a methodology for methodological conflict, by examining the resources within one perspective of this constellation. Pragmatism is unique in contemporary political thought in its theorisation of an approach overcoming this central philosophical division and its specific attempts to do so. Further, self-consciously existing outside this typology, it is uniquely placed to act as a philosophical mediator in contemporary political thinking. Thus, by both placing it within wider trends to more ‘situated’ forms of political thought (i.e. those that resort to the level of social practices) and examining the inter-methodological approach of Richard Rorty and its development in recent work within pragmatism, this analysis initiates developing resources for overcoming methodological divides in political theory.

This article begins by examining, what it calls, the situated turn in political thought as a unique opportunity for work across the analytic/continental divide and an example of the sort of cross-border linkages needed today. Pragmatism’s emerging role in bringing these situated traditions together illustrates its potential methodological contributions to such attempts. To develop this approach, it turns to Rorty’s understanding of language and methodology, re-read through his final works and recent criticism, in order to draw out a pragmatist framework ideal for such inter-methodological exchanges. Finally, it examines recent attempts to link pragmatism to genealogy to illustrate how this intellectual and political framework has developed to allow for a democratic methodological plurality. The task of moving beyond the analytic/continental divide requires both methodological reflections and situated connections between traditions initiated from multiple angles. This article initiates particular versions of both of these tasks with the hope that together they will engender a more pluralistic and democratic form of political thinking.

The situated turn in recent political thought

Periodically, a common trend concurrently emerges from multiple traditions. Presently, from continental political theory, liberal normative theory and pragmatism, there is an emerging situated turn whose commonalities present a unique opportunity for moving beyond the analytic-continental distinction. These groups share emphases on two structural conditions for thinking about politics: contingency and pluralism. Though members of the turn figure them differently, all assert the inherent contingency of human history and the political reality of pluralism. Further, all three share a common orientation responding to these conditions. They do not seek to overcome these limitations through recourse to another, more foundational, level. Rather, they cope with this limitation on political theory (contingency) and this situation for human politics (pluralism) by shifting the discussion to the level of human social practices. They conceive of politics, and theorising about it, as activities. In this, the situated turn constitutes a common identification of the fundamental conditions of political thought, a common ethical response to those conditions, and a common theoretical shift.

Each one of the above traditions contains a sub-trend articulating these two conditions, orientation and consequent prioritisation of activity. From liberal political theory, ‘New Realism’ has emerged rejecting the abstraction of Rawlsian (and, to a certain extent, Habermasian) ideal theory (North, 2010). For realism, high liberal normative theory ‘makes the moral prior to the political’ by subordinating political activity to a foundational standard of justice. By focusing exclusively on the task of making normative claims within politics, they illegitimately divorce themselves from the world and the conditions of politics. In contrast, realists assert the autonomy of politics as a sphere and activity. Fundamentally contingent, politics is situated in an unscripted sociality (Galston, 2010: 389–393). In this, there is a ‘contestability at the heart of realism’ that results in the inevitability of pluralism and disagreement (Philp, 2012: 9). Thus, unlike the high liberalism from which it deviates, it does not attempt to overcome plurality in an underlying commitment to moral and political agreement. However, while New Realism is an important member of the situated turn, and key to its identification, this article focuses on the relation between the situated forms of continental political theory and pragmatism. New Realism will only be used for contrast below. ²

Within continental political theory, the situated turn is present in a nascent move beyond the dominant ontological approach to more practice-oriented conceptions of politics. ³ Compared to New Realism, this trend lacks self-consciousness. However, there is a group of theorists turning genealogical methodologies toward the analysis of contemporary democratic practices (Allen, 2010; Patton, 2010; Tully, 2008). ⁴ The difference between this emerging position and the Foucault scholarship that has characterised continental political theory is the status of genealogy. Here, genealogy is not a ‘theory’ but a methodology, a toolkit for the embedded activity of enquiry. On this reading, Foucault does not give us theoretical positions but equipment for practices of critical enquiry. This is the difference between an axiology of fundamental types and an analytic of patterns relative to a position. The space between these conceptions can be clarified in terms of the concept of contingency. On the Foucault-as-theory reading he is asserting that the world is contingent. This is a necessary, ontological, claim about the world. On the Foucault-as-method reading, he is enquiring into how the world is contingent. This is a situated reading of the history and development of a particular practice into our present. Importantly, this latter conception is a situated claim about the consequences of a practice relative to ‘our’ situation. It invites normative reconstruction, turning us to present practices to better them (Koopman, 2013b: 9–10, 21; Koopman and Matza, 2013: 821–831). ⁵ Thus, the genealogical members of the situated turn differ from previous genealogical models in the status of genealogical enquiry and in turning toward the central normative questions within democratic theory. For them, genealogy is a method for critiquing politics rather than a theory of it.

James Tully is an exemplar of genealogy in the situated turn. Beyond offering a developed genealogical method of political criticism (addressed below), he has connected this methodology to the idea of a situated turn in political thought (Tully, 2008: 1–3). For him, a tradition of ‘public philosophy’ has developed over the past 250 years, which originated in the practice-based philosophies of the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Mill), was critiqued and reformed around the turn of the 20th century (Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Arendt, Dewey) and has been significantly reworked recently by historians of political thought (Skinner), hermeneutists (Taylor), Wittgensteinians (Rorty, Heyes) and genealogists (Owen, Patton, Brown) (Tully, 2008: 17–18). It represents an alternative to the scholastic and Kantian traditions that still dominate political theory today. However, while Tully emphasises the centrality of practice to this implicit tradition, he declines to fully delineate its central themes. For that, we need to turn to recent pragmatism.

While New Realism is the most self-conscious trend, and genealogical political theory the most developed situated methodology, pragmatism is unique. Its distinctive capacity arises out of its overt identification of the themes that unify the present situated turn. However, these accomplishments and their capacity to mediate philosophical divisions have been obscured by pragmatism’s contentious history. The dominant narrative focuses on its eclipse. In this story, pragmatism arose out of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, came to dominance in the early 20th century and waned after the influx of the Vienna School into American Philosophy departments in the 1930s. By the 1950s, it was fully eclipsed by positivism, logical empiricism, the philosophy of science, the new logic and ordinary language philosophy and conceptual analysis. Its eclipse coincided with the birth of the analytic/continental divide, only ending with the seminal publication of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and the birth of neo-pragmatism. The product of this has been a second ‘death’ to pragmatism resulting from the (political) rejection of Rorty’s work in the 1990s under the dominant perception that it led to a ‘politics of acquiescence’ (Festenstein, 2003; MacGilvray, 2000). Rejected by almost every major tradition, pragmatism did seem to recede within contemporary political thought. However, a recent ‘third wave’ of pragmatism is unsettling this narrative.

These pragmatists oppose this account, arguing for the unique place of pragmatism within contemporary thought. Richard J. Bernstein (2006: 3) has argued that the 20th century was in fact a ‘Pragmatic Century’. This is not an argument for direct influence but a nuanced illustration of how pragmatic themes have become increasingly central within both analytic and continental thinking. For him, these themes centre on the pragmatist project, initiated by Peirce, of rejecting the Cartesian image of philosophy and its sharp distinctions between mental and physical, subject and object, its foundational image of knowledge and attempt to bracket all prejudices in methodological doubt. Instead, pragmatism offers a non-foundational conception of human enquiry based on how humans are shaped by and participate in shaping normative social practices (Bernstein, 2010: ix–x, 17–19). The key themes of anti-foundationalism, fallibilism, critical communities of enquiry, sensitivity to radical contingency and the irreducible plurality of perspectives are all oriented to providing this shift in philosophy’s orientation. What this amounts to is a shift to human practices as the primary context of thought (Bernstein, 2006: 3; Green, 2013: 6).

For Bernstein, these themes became central to both analytic and continental thought in the 20th century. Rorty himself notably argued for the persistence of pragmatism in the analytic thought of Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson and the post-analytic movement (Rorty, 2009: 10). More recently, Bernstein connects pragmatism’s project with dominant trends within continental philosophy through the influence of two figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. The former’s connection to pragmatism is well established in the literature, while the latter has been the subject of quite a bit of pragmatist scholarship in recent years (Brandom, 2005; Dreyfus, 1991; Rorty, 1991a). For Bernstein, while neither can rightly be called pragmatists, they are linked by a common rejection of Cartesianism, its dualism and foundationalism. Further, ‘each of them seeks to rethink a more adequate way of understanding our forms of life and our being-in-the-world … [they] shift our attention to know-how, to how we engage in the world in social practices’ (Bernstein, 2010: 19). In this, they start with the same problematic and emphasise similar, socially situated, responses.

Recent pragmatism builds on these analyses by employing itself as a philosophical mediator to more effectively combat the analytic/continental divide. This has been called ‘pragmatism’s advantage’, it is ‘distinctly unfinished (in a way analytic and continental philosophy is not) – as a result of its own scattered history’ (Margolis, 2010: 140). Its recent and current versions, which have been cross-pollinated with themes from both analytic and continental, illustrate a capacity for open-ended hybridisation. The truth of this contentious macro-claim will be examined in the subsequent discussions of Rorty and genealogy; important here is the specific claim, repeated by several pragmatists, that pragmatism’s contemporary relevance stems from its theorisation of contingency and enculturation (and necessary pluralism). While these themes are common to the situated turn and much of contemporary political thought, pragmatism is unique in arguing that contingency and pluralism require a naturalistic framework (Margolis, 2010: ix–x, 10, 55).

Pragmatism’s distinctive strength is to have overtly theorised a non-reductive form of naturalism. Continental thought has tended to be hostile to naturalistic frameworks as reductive and scientistic, and hence avoided it as a perspective. However, for recent pragmatists, naturalism is defined by a rejection of extra-natural properties or functions, of what exceeds the realm of lived human experience broadly construed. This is a rejection of what Rorty called ‘conditionless conditions’, philosophical abstractions identifying some condition of (im)possibility which explains this world without itself being explainable by it. It is a relation outside of our web of relations that, by default of its externality, gains a privileged status. ‘I shall define as naturalism the view that anything might have been otherwise, that there can be no conditionless conditions… that there is no such thing as a non-causal condition of possibility’ (Rorty, 1991b: 55, 1989: 4, 2006). On this definition, naturalism is neither scientistic nor reductive; it is a contingent figuration of our embodied, finite, social limitations which resists reifying this figuration into a necessity. It is simultaneously an articulation of contingency and pluralism and a rejection of metaphysics and foundationalism. ⁶

Pragmatism, thus, reveals what unites the situated turn: hostility to external standards (non-political and non-human – that is, non-naturalist) as measures for political analysis and normative reconstruction. New Realism rejects ideal theory’s subordination of politics to foundational moral theories and asserts the autonomy of politics as a sphere and activity. Recent approaches to genealogy have shifted its self-understanding from theory to method. Pragmatism, on a more expansive historical scale, has consistently refocused discussions from external standards to present social practices. Thus, the move to practice as the primary realm for thinking politics in the situated turn should be understood as a naturalistic methodological development.

The significance of pragmatism is its direct elaboration of this and its capacity to foment inter-methodological work in contemporary political theory. First, its naturalism directly responds to two conditions central to current debates in that discipline, where there is a self-conscious attempt to account for the contingency of political events and the ubiquity of pluralism. Second, it does so without reference to philosophical standards outside human practices. Third, as developed overtly by Rorty, this naturalism allows it to directly address the central concerns of both the analytic and continental traditions. In its history it has engaged the central questions in Western democratic and public traditions, and it has employed a methodology that features a similar understanding of the conditions on political reflection as continental political thought. This has not gone unnoticed within continental theory and it gives it the capacity to engage both traditions in a shared conversation (Patton, 2006: 128). Thus, pragmatism has both a special place between analytic and continental and within the situated turn, between New Realism and methodological genealogy.

It is unimportant whether these themes emerged first in pragmatism. The point is that pragmatism is uniquely situated to effect substantive inter-methodological work within the situated turn and across the analytic/continental divide in contemporary political theory. Further, as discussed below, it achieves this through an understanding of the relations between languages and methods which naturalise methodological pluralism. What is important here is that the situated turn is broadly unified by naturalism in both an attempt to remove the political sphere from determination by external standards and a consequent turn to the primacy of present social practices. Importantly, this structures it with the capacity to effect methodological plurality across the analytic/continental divide within contemporary political thought.

Cultural politics: Rorty’s framework for methodological exchange

The problem of methodological disputes was at the centre of Rorty’s work. His earliest writings were concerned with the nature of linguistic change and, as recent literature argues, this developed throughout his career into a project to transform philosophy into a form of situated socio-political criticism. This section builds on this literature demonstrating how this model allows for the inclusive engagement of both competing theoretical frameworks through a re-conception of their status. Importantly, this allows for a different set of relations between competing perspectives leading Rorty to re-construct the analytic/continental divide in his later work. This section begins by examining Rorty’s understanding of language and methodology. It then illustrates how these naturalised understandings allow him to theorise philosophy as ‘cultural politics’ before turning to the consequences of this in his reconstructed typology of contemporary Western philosophy, the analytic/conversational divide. The argument is that Rorty’s naturalisation of language and philosophical frameworks pluralises and democratises our conception of theoretical frameworks. This allows for the productive reconstruction of intractable philosophical barriers and creates new opportunities for inter-methodological work.

Recent Rorty scholarship has fought an uphill battle. As discussed above, a critical consensus emerged in the 1990s with the persistent view that his work fell short of both critical and normative resources for thinking contemporary democracies. In fact, of the over 1200 entries in a comprehensive bibliography of secondary literature on his work compiled in 2002, only a handful are ‘friendly to Rorty’ (Bernstein and Voparil, 2010; Rumana, 2002: ix). Recent literature from within pragmatism has acknowledged the partial validity of previous critiques, while illustrating alternative uses of his work. They have re-read his philosophy through his last volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), and its title concept (e.g. Castro and Ghiraldelli, 2011; Gröschner et al., 2013), convincingly arguing that the conception of philosophy Rorty offers, as cultural politics, is both consistent with his earlier work and makes important reforms that productively contribute to central methodological questions.

These contributions originate from Rorty’s reflections on the persistent problem in the history of philosophy of ‘dialectical impasses between competing schools’ (Rorty, 1962: 322). He was keenly aware that the usual response to such impasses has been the establishment of a new method, one that on some criteria claimed ‘presuppositionless’. However, this recurrent strategy has consistently failed because of the absence of two conditions: just such a presuppositionless starting point that is not itself dependent on some substantive philosophical position and a common set of criteria for agreement on a solution to a philosophical issue (Rorty, 1967: 4). Rather, the terms philosophers offer for such criteria are always relative to each framework for their meaning. Consequently, they can always be cast in a manner advantageous to one’s own method. The result is that each approach within philosophy and political thought tends to have its own set of meta-philosophical criteria that justify itself and disallow competitors. This situation makes productive inter-methodological work difficult and does much to explain the persistence of the analytic/continental divide. It is important to clarify here the sense in which I have used ‘method’. Rorty was notably sceptical of the idea of method within philosophy due to the attempt to equate methods with those in the natural sciences. However, in the absence of actual agreed-upon procedures, method here only denotes how we might proceed and what we should focus on when we do. In my view, this is the most naturalised sense we can get out of the term.

The aforementioned tendency raises an important question: how do we structure dialogue amongst groups that lack agreed-upon criteria? Rorty’s conception of cultural politics addresses this. It rests on a naturalistic understanding of language he articulated throughout his career, one that lacked an external anchor universally justifying its criteria. His point was not to offer another presuppositionless option from which specific criteria flowed, but to provide a framework that allowed different perspectives to engage in productive contestation over those criteria. It is for this reason that he takes (his version of) the linguistic turn; by rethinking the nature of language, he could re-conceive the status of intellectual frameworks and their relations. More importantly, he could offer a naturalistic understanding of normative authority that would allow these disparate perspectives to make claims against each other. Rorty’s critics have often assumed that in his zest to be anti-foundational he failed to provide for normativity. However, his turn to language is actually the attempt to be anti-foundational and anti-sceptical, to provide normativity without foundations (Koopman, 2011a: 68–69).

This is achieved by understanding language as a social practice. Language is something we do, a behaviour we collectively engage in to effect consequences. Rorty follows Wittgenstein in conceiving languages (or what he calls vocabularies) as tools. Understood as such, language is simply another form of a complex set of practices that humans engage in. They are not defined by correspondence with or representation of the world (as in analytic philosophy) or by their relation to Being (as in some forms of continental thought). Rather, language is a practice that allows communities to cope with each other and their environment (Rorty, 1989: 1, 2007d: 107). Viewing them naturalistically in this manner has two consequences. First, it emphasises that authority within languages is a social product, internal to a language. We justify (and make normative claims) by relating one bit of language to another, not by connecting linguistic claims with external standards (e.g. truth, Reality, Being). Consequently, such justification is inevitable; the languages we employ always come with normative constraints and authority claims. For Robert Brandom, this is Rorty’s ‘pragmatism about norms’, the claim that all authority is ‘ultimately intelligible only in terms of social practices that involve implicitly recognizing or acknowledging such authority’ (Brandom, 2000: 159). Justification is only intelligible within the practices of some vocabulary.

Second, inter-vocabulary justification becomes relative to the purpose of a language. It depends on the role and effects of that social practice within our wider set of practices. Conceived of as tools, vocabularies always enable groups to engage in some set of practices that have real effects on their relationships to each other and the world. Importantly, this does not close languages off from each other. Inter-vocabulary assessment just becomes relative to purpose. In Rorty’s ‘vocabulary of vocabularies’ ‘it [only] makes sense to make normative comparisons of tools once a task is specified. Hammers are better than wrenches for driving nails. But it makes no sense to ask whether hammers or wrenches are better, simply as tools’ (Brandom, 2000: 168). We can only compare languages in terms of the social practices they make possible. Importantly, this has two senses for Rorty. New ways of speaking can be assessed for what they allow us to do, in this broad sense, but also in terms of their ability to help us develop new purposes (Rorty, 1989: 12–13).

Rorty’s later turn to the language of cultural politics examines the specifically political issues around this conception of language and normativity, while also clarifying how we might proceed. This entailed not just turning to social and political issues, but engaging with the present socio-political-cultural matrix. ⁷ Cultural politics responds to the present in being specifically tailored to those two contemporary conditions of politics: contingency and pluralism. It is Rorty’s conception of inter-vocabulary normative exchange in the absence of agreed-upon criteria and without reference to external authority. The upshot of this is that political exchange cannot occur along the lines of rational argument or ontological questioning as traditionally conceived. Rather, it can only be understood as an interpretive intervention into the existing set of socio-political discourses. The point here is to modify the languages used and the resulting conceptions of who we are, what we are doing and what is important. This allows us to alter both our purposes and the practices we use to achieve them (Rorty, 2007e: ix–x). This means that self-consciously engaging other languages in imaginative redescription is the only way to avoid the unproductive methodological impasses of the past. We have to play off one approach against another, finding particular points of contact and divergence in order to offer new vocabularies that might build on aspects of each. For Rorty, this expands the logical spaces we inhabit to include new groups and new languages (Rorty, 2007b: 19–20). As situated and finite beings, we can only initiate such dialogues from within our present networks and identifications. Single, authoritative frameworks become impossible.

There are several virtues to this conception of language and politics. First, resonating with the situated turn, it provides a detailed justification of why a language cannot be measured by another (non-linguistic) standard. A focus on language as practice removes the idea that it is justified by that relation, that it must be adequate to something else. Rorty’s version of the linguistic turn allows us to be anti-foundationalist and anti-metaphysical, and retain normative authority within our linguistic practices. Further, by shifting our methodological focus to the actual languages employed by human groups, it does this ‘methodologically rather than metaphysically’. Rather than hypostasising language into all there is, as reductive versions of the linguistic turn have, it only claims language ‘offers a privileged point of departure for philosophical work that seeks to explicate our forms of normativity without appealing to foundations’ (Koopman, 2011a: 70). In this, it manages to emphasise the contingency of our languages, relative to purpose as they are, without turning contingency into a universal condition. For Rorty, this is a more thorough de-divinisation of our thought and acknowledgement of our finitude.

Second, the resulting status of languages in cultural politics more productively provides for inter-vocabulary relations within the situation of linguistic and methodological pluralism. A common criticism of liberal attempts to structure the public sphere is that they implicitly assume the neutrality of their categories. That in various forms (e.g. Rawlsian public reason, Habermasian communicative rationality) they claim a neutrality that excludes other perspectives and ignores pluralism. Importantly, this compromises their critical reflexivity, as they obscure real assumptions within their thinking that privilege their perspectives and delegitimise others. However, Rorty’s model retains this reflexivity by levelling the discursive field and normative authority. For him, even the language of cultural politics is a move in the game of cultural politics. He does offer us a vocabulary with which to speak about the many linguistic frameworks that exist. Yet, operationally this model is thoroughly pluralistic and democratic. By evaluating languages as tools useful for certain purposes, it asserts the present and future contingency of those purposes and tools. It acknowledges the multiplicity of goals and solutions without erecting a universal standard to judge either. This ‘democratize[s] philosophy itself by expanding who counts as a competent audience and conversational partner’ (Voparil, 2011a: 133–135). Applied to inter-methodological exchange between contemporary analytic and continental political thought, this model enables pluralistic and democratic exchanges. Importantly, this does not make this approach any more neutral than previous pretenders. It is only uniquely useful for inter-methodological engagement.

This model overlaps with a growing voice in recent political theory that bears out this capacity. It follows Tully, whose importance within genealogy was indicated above in his proto-identification of the situated turn, in making philosophy only a participant, rather than an arbiter, of political thinking. Rejecting the task of a normative theory of justice or democracy, Tully (2008: 16) describes his public philosophy as a practical, critical and historical approach, a ‘way of living’ that focuses on the practices of governance experienced as problematic in the present. His two-step approach attempts to establish the conditions of possibility of a specific practice. In this, it redescribes this practice, illustrating the how of its contingency to expose the nature of the present set of limits, to open up alternative manners of collectively organising that form of cooperation. Importantly, this provides a reciprocal relation to the present, an ‘on-going mutual relation with the concrete struggles, negotiations and implementations of citizens who experiment with modifying the practices of governance on the ground’ (Tully, 2008: 17). Public philosophy is inherently democratic. Reciprocally engaged in the practical activity of actual struggles, it is not different in kind to other citizen activity. Rather, it is only ‘the methodological extension and critical clarification of the already reflective and problematized character of historically situated practices of practical reasoning’ (Tully, 2008: 29). This democratised shift in the status of theory removes barriers between it and everyday political activity. The value of Rorty’s naturalised understanding of language and model of cultural politics is how it extends this intellectual democratisation, removing barriers between theoretical frameworks. Beyond arguing for the primacy of practice, as Tully does, it provides a way of understanding the contemporary intellectual matrix that avoids privileging one perspective/criterion.

There are weaknesses here. For present purposes, the most important is in Rorty’s attempt to work across the analytic/continental divide. However, this is not a condemnation of this model but evidence of his failure to live up to it. Throughout his career he was a noted trailblazer, working across the divide with unmatched skill. Rather than junking it, his understanding of method and language led him to reconstruct the analytic/continental distinction along the lines of the situated turn. For Rorty, the concrete methodological and philosophical differences we perceive in this division flow from a metaphilosophical difference in the role of the philosopher/philosophy. Analytic and continental have different ‘self-images’ of what philosophy is and does. Analytic thought continues to model itself on the sciences, as engaged in a mode of conceptual analysis, ‘in the hope of finally getting knowledge, or morality, or mind, or justice, right’ (Rorty, 2007a: 123). For analytics, without this aim and the conditions for its possibility, philosophy becomes ‘mere conversation’.

Taking this up, Rorty recast the divide as one between analytic and conversational philosophy. In the place of a mixed geographical and methodological division, he centres it on the issue of foundations and the resulting role of philosophy in human life; on, ‘whether there is something that philosophers can get right’ (Rorty, 2007a: 124). For Rorty, this analytic project is appropriate where there is consensus about the aim of enquiry and its criteria. Philosophy has neither; it is a contested tradition with little stability as a group of vocabularies. Conversational philosophy is an admittedly wide category for him defined by rejecting this image. Making several points of contact with my description of the situated turn, it includes that wide swath of philosophies that think complete agreement in philosophy and politics impossible. Rather, on some understanding, they acknowledge that we only ever engage in ‘cultural politics’, in ‘suggesting changes in the uses of words and by putting new words in circulation – hoping thereby to break through impasses and to make conversation more fruitful’ (Rorty, 2007a: 124). The important consequence is that various traditions within this grouping lose absolute separation from each other and from other areas of culture. Expanding Tully’s model of public philosophy, this re-conception of the division is a democratisation and pluralisation of thought.

Despite this productive reconstruction, the weakness is in Rorty’s specific engagements of pragmatist and continental thinkers. While these readings precede the full development of his model of socio-political criticism, they expose a concern with the understanding of cultural politics he offered. In the 1980s and 1990s, Rorty’s continental critics attacked his readings of various continental figures, arguing that there was no ‘fusion of horizons’ in the dialogue Rorty established between pragmatism and continental thought, but only a pragmatisation of the latter (Caputo, 1983: 682). ⁸ This connects with a pragmatist concern with Rorty’s model of cultural politics. This framework seems designed to render inclusive our current conversation. In the context of a global, pluralistic world with unevenly distributed power, such a project is at least question-begging (Voparil, 2011b: 123–125). While this concern is perhaps less relevant in our current discussion of inter-vocabulary relations within contemporary political thought, it necessitates turning to recent pragmatism for an illustration of how Rorty’s project can be implemented.

A situated engagement of genealogy and pragmatism

The recent surge in pragmatism has been explicitly turned outward to engagement with other traditions. Importantly, it has developed Rorty’s call to take up existing frameworks and use them to form new approaches advancing debates according to concerns and criteria in each. One prominent line of inquiry employing his model of methodological plurality examines the connections between pragmatism and genealogy. These analyses emphasise a series of commonalities in the theories of knowledge, language, truth and politics between these two frameworks. Similarly, they often highlight the resulting shift to human practices and situated forms of socio-political analysis (Allen, 2009; Colapietro, 1998; Koopman, 2011b; Stuhr, 1997). However, while such backward looking identifications of commonalities are important for inter-methodological work, the forward looking methodological mixes Rorty calls for are essential for utilising the best resources across contemporary political thought.

Colin Koopman’s recent work on genealogical pragmatism is an archetype of how such engagements can advance methodological debates. Beyond establishing specific connections between pragmatists and genealogists, he has attempted to articulate a wider project of developing a genealogical and pragmatist political methodology. While he has not explicitly systematised his method for achieving this, it occurs through several steps. First, Koopman establishes broad thematic connections between pragmatism and genealogy, each of which he has undertaken extended studies of (Koopman, 2009, 2013b). For him, they are linked in a shared historicism and model of philosophy as a form of ‘transformational cultural critique,’ where critique is a situated practice addressing a particular context. Second, Koopman illustrates how their different emphases in conceiving historical critique both explain recurrent criticisms of each tradition and provide for the possibility of a methodological alliance. As mentioned above, pragmatism has been repeatedly accused of acquiescence, of the inability to distinguish good from bad in politics. This is the product of two common criticisms that (1) it lacks a sense of the tragic and (2) fetishises instrumental rationality. Contrariwise, Foucault and genealogy have repeatedly been criticised for lacking normative resources considered imperative to the task of critical thought.

For Koopman, rather than being cause for rejection (for which they are often employed), these concerns are the product of different emphases within a common prioritisation of the practice of critique. ‘But whereas the pragmatists practiced critique as a reconstructive problem-solving activity, Foucault practiced critique as an act of problematization’ (Koopman, 2009: 215). The result has been that, while pragmatists have a detailed method of meliorative reconstruction, theorising how to recreate problematic social practices, they lack sufficient mechanisms for identifying which problems to reconstruct. Equally, while genealogy has established an important method of problematisation, of disclosing practices as oppressive, it under-thinks normatively reconstructing those practices. In this manner, building on the identification of shared emphases, Koopman establishes productive relations for a common benefit between these two traditions. He highlights strengths and concerns in each in order to advance a new methodology that utilises those strengths and rectifies those weaknesses.

My concern here is not the accuracy of Koopman’s readings of genealogy and pragmatism but his project. He follows Rorty in understanding pragmatism and genealogy as methodologies rather than theories. In naturalistic terms, they are webs of concepts, ideals and approaches whose significance is relative to the purposes they enable. Importantly, this changes the status of their respective emphases and the critical and normative standards contained in each without affecting those actual standards. This allows Koopman to integrate these two ‘phases of thought’, Foucauldian problematisation and pragmatist reconstruction, to advance a critical project neither is capable of alone. This philosophical and historical integration focuses on the specific connections, and diverging purposes and goals, within both approaches to move them forward. The claim is not that pragmatists and genealogists say the same thing, but that they say things that, taken together, importantly contribute to contemporary debates in critical political methodology (Koopman, 2009: 229). Following Rorty’s prioritisation of language, the advantage of this reconciliation is that it occurs only at the methodological (not metaphysical) level. It is not a philosophical synthesis, a project which always risks reducing methods to their common denominators or rendering one framework into the other’s terms. This seems to be the trap Rorty falls into in his usages of some continental figures. In contrast, Koopman offers ‘a more modest retail combination of the methodological strengths found in each tradition’ (Koopman, 2013b: 222). He develops Rorty’s naturalistic approach by illustrating how to advance conversations that have stagnated in divisions between a series of approaches unable to engage in justification beyond the confines of their particular perspectives and self-justifying criteria. By naturalising our understanding of our languages and approaches, as the situated turn implicitly does and Rorty explicitly theorises, we can move beyond unproductive absolutist conceptions of theory.

Conclusion

Thinking of language and method in Rorty’s way allows us to engage in the ecumenical task of hybridising philosophical frameworks within the situated turn. This project is nascent within that group’s shared emphases, which ideally structure them for this methodological pluralism. What they implicitly share, and Rorty theorises, is a levelling of different theoretical frameworks through a naturalisation of language and its differences. As Tully (2008: 29) summarises,

contemporary political theories are approached, not as rival comprehensive and exclusive theories of the contested concepts, but as limited and often complementary accounts of the complex uses (senses) of the concepts in question and the corresponding aspects of the problematic practice to which these senses refer.

While such ‘reciprocal elucidation’ between traditions is not exclusive to Rorty, his naturalistic conception of linguistic and methodological frameworks allows us to bridge divisions in a more productive way. His model, along with Koopman’s particular instantiation, acknowledges the contingency and pluralism of languages, and incorporates those conditions as reflexive critical standards, without reifying these criteria into absolute external criteria. While disciplinary purists will surely demur at this, it is my hope that this democratic methodological pluralism will flourish, pushing contemporary political thinking across traditional barriers like the analytic/continental divide. The situated turn is an ideal cluster of perspectives for initiating this wider project.

This article has attempted to achieve several interrelated tasks. First, it has identified an important trend in political theory, the situated turn, and established pragmatism’s particular significance. Second, it has begun to expose Rorty’s philosophical resources for methodological pluralism in contemporary political thought and connected this to recent work in pragmatism and political theory. Finally, it has indicated how this provides a framework for moving beyond the analytic/continental divide in future political thought. Rorty’s model of cultural politics and conception of language not only develop the situated turn’s conception of the role of philosophy, but give us a framework for engaging diverse theoretical perspectives and extending many of the core themes present in that emerging philosophical trend. Both turning our methodological resources toward situated areas of overlap and extending those resources through pluralistic methodological interaction allows competing explanations to productively advance enquiry and methods. This provides a contingent and pluralistic role for political thought within this complex and multifaceted world.