Something to Steer by

Richard Rorty

  • John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism by Alan Ryan
    Norton, 414 pp, $30.00, May 1995, ISBN 0 393 03773 8

Early in this century, people who read Lytton Strachey, and liked to think of themselves as modern, prided themselves on lacking a sense of Sin. Nowadays people who read Michel Foucault, and who use the term ‘Post Modern’ with a straight face, pride themselves on not believing in Truth. Strachey and Foucault, the Moderns and the Post-Moderns, share a distaste for romance, for utopian social hope. When the grand old capitalised words go, they suspect, so do grand, stirring visions of the human future.

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[*] Alan Ryan’s book will be published in Britain by Norton in the autumn.