Last weekend I worked through a book by Neil Goss on Richard Rorty: Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Rorty gave the author access to personal correspondence and Gross combines a biographical study of Rorty with a network/sociological analysis of changes in American culture and the American academic world. It is a fascinating read.

Biographically Gross traces Rorty's educational path from his parents background through his MA thesis at the University of Chicago (written under Charles Hartshorne on metaphysics!) to his PhD program at Yale and his dissertation (again, a metaphysical dissertation). He then follows his immersion in the American analytic tradition in order to gain tenure at Princeton and then his isolation within his department as the analytic tradition become more and more technical and isolated. Finally, he shows how Rorty broke from within the analytic tradition to address analytic/continental philosophy issues. I remember well in graduate school when Rorty called "an end to philosophy" as an academic department and moved to the University of Virginia.

In chapters 9-11, Gross argues: "The argument that I now want to make is that the developments considered in chapters 1-8 reflect not Rorty's idiosyncratic and entirely contingent biographical experiences but the operation of more general social mechanisms and processes that shaped and structured his intellectual life and career. . . we can construct a more theoretically informed explanation for Rorty's moves if we see him, not as a being spinning out ideas on the basis of a transhistorically rational consideration of their objective merits or as someone pushed this way and that by his personality or character, but as a social actor embedded over time in a variety of institutional settings, each imposing specific constraints on his opportunities and choices and influencing him with respect to the formation of his self-understanding, his evaluation of the worthiness of various lines of thought, and ultimately his intellectual output" (p. 234).

What interests me, however, is a process wider process that I think Gross misses because he doesn't see Rorty working within a wider tradition. Rorty, the most prominent American philosopher of the end of the 20th century, was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, author of Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) -- the prominent social gospel pastor/theologian. As I read Gross's treatment of Rorty I thought of Stanley Hauerwas's argument in A Better Hope that Rauschenbusch's program placed the mission of the church in a mediating position for Rauschenbusch's hope to build the kingdom of God -- the United States and liberal democracy as that which defines "social justice" as a Christian concern. The object of Christian ethics for Rauschenbusch is the United States as American exceptionalism overtakes the church as the end of the witness of the church.

Rauschenbusch's influence remains strong through the social gospel (mediated through the Niebuhr's in mainline American Protestantism and bifurcated in evangelicalism in the on-going controversy between "left-wing" and "right-wing" political action evangelicalism). Connecting Rauschenbusch with Rorty becomes more interesting than Gross indicates (to be fair to Gross, this is not a focus of his treatment) for I think that one sees, over time, the sociological implications of the "social gospel movement" as it moves across generations. While Rauschenbusch used the church and the Christian tradition as a means to legitimate his political agenda within and for the United States, his daughter, Rorty's mother, Winifred, de-churched her "spiritually-based" social/political concerns to move within a cultural productions network for the elite of the American society -- a leftist, American nationalistic artistic/literary program. As Gross shows, Richard's parents, "the Rortys had developed a comprehensive and well-integrated worldview that brought together leftists politics, anti-Communism, and a social ecological perspective, and they actively communicated this worldview to Richard (p. 304).

Rorty abstracted the political program for the United States from its "spirituality-based" presence into an atheistic nationalistic American pragmaticism. Gross shows how basic to Rorty the tradition into which his parents embedded him grew "with the increasing salience to him of the self-concept 'leftist American patriot,' an identity whose original meaning for him was bound up with anti-Communism but that soon came to stand opposed to the identity of cosmopolitan mulitculturalist" (p. 320): "'An unpatriotic left has never achieved anything,' Rorty asserted, suggesting that only patriotism, loosely defined in terms of national pride, is capable of mobilizing mass support for leftist goals" (p. 321).

Several concluding reflections. First, Rorty's career is not intelligible outside of the particularity of the Protestant tradition that produced him -- secularization is Christian accomplishment that is comes from within Christians own positions across time. Second, the social gospel, with its liberal Christological and ecclesiological commitments that separate it from the faith once delivered to the saints, does not provide a sufficiently thorough account of God and all things related to God to sustain itself across time. It always remains parasitic on the church committed to the faith once delivered to the saints, to produce the human and cultural capital to engage people in its social program. Over time, this social program either connects to something embedded within the mainstream of the culture (American exceptionalism) or it dies.

For evangelicals of the right and the left, the story of the sociological genealogy of Richard Rorty stands as an important lesson. One cannot abstract the social witness of the church in its concern for the poor and the de-humanization within the economic systems of the world from a commitment to the Jesus Christ, fully divine, fully human in one person so that Mary is the mother of God and participation in the life of the church through repentance and faith and hope in life eternal. To collapse the supernatural into categories of nature ends in a nihilism of the endless repetition of the new and improved.