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33Paradoxes of Plain ThinkingHistorical Materialism 25 (2): 214-227. 2017.Whatever common sense may be, it includes much else besides practically confirmed truisms. InCommon Sense: A Political History, Sophia Rosenfeld describes the backstories of modern common sense, locating its origins in debates among small groups of professors, publishers and pamphleteers in several cities on both sides of the Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions. From the eighteenth century on, champions and enemies of the rising ‘middling’ classes have brandished common sense as an ‘unspectac…Read more
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9Richard Rorty's politics: liberalism at the end of the American centuryHumanity Books. 1999.Much of what Richard Rorty has to say about the triumph of American liberalism is largely accepted and unquestioned by a wide variety of scholars. Yet there are inconsistencies in Rorty's work, and his defense of liberalism does not depend on familiar Enlightenment assumptions about reason, human nature, historical progress, and the like. So argues Markar Melkonian, who critically examines Rorty's brand of liberalism stripped of its Enlighenment rationales. Melkonian initially compares Rorty's s…Read more
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45Achieving Our Country: Leftist ought in Twentieth-Century America; Philosophy and Social Hope; Against Bosses, Against OligarchiesHistorical Materialism 15 (2): 202-209. 2007.
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35The Fool's Dream: The Fall of Another New Eden and the Utopian Appeal of Ethnic SolidarityUtopian Studies 18 (2). 2007.
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Rorty on Liberty and DemocracyIn Alan R. Malachowski (ed.), Richard Rorty, Routledge. pp. 3--95. 2002.
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17Richard Rorty's Liberalism: A Marxist PerspectiveDissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1997.A sympathetic reviewer has noted that the best a critic of Rorty can do is to compare his views invidiously to alternative views. Taking this advice to heart, I contrast Rorty's social and political views to Dewey's, and then to an alternative account which I elaborate. My standards of comparison are two liberal ideals than which, according to Rorty, none others are higher. These are: amelioration of suffering, and leaving people alone to pursue their own visions of personal perfection. ;In Chap…Read more
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