Missing: The vision thing. - Review - book review

Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Eugene McCarraher

The futility of pragmatism as a basis for social hope lay, in other words, in its inability to do what Rorty himself concedes only religion does: hold "reality and justice in a single vision." A religious and specifically Christian appeal to social hope grounds its demands in metaphysics: that is, in a belief that creation is good because a God who is love has crafted an "ontology of peace," as John Milbank has put it so well, wherein love is not an ideal but the most lucid and penetrating realism.

And that is why the vigor and generosity of Rorty's social hope witnesses against much of the Christian social imagination of our time: mush about "compassion" and "social justice," proposals to "mitigate" the brutalities of the market. We who know that our faith is the hope and not the conscience of a world in the grip of mammon should be scandalized by this degeneration. We must reclaim our own history of hope, compose our own account of possibility, and declare that our dreams comport with the moral and metaphysical architecture of creation. Redemption is the grandest, most realistic, and most political hope of all.

Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University and American history at the University of Delaware. His book, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, has just been published by Cornell University Press.

RELATED ARTICLE: Books discussed in this essay

The Real American Dream
A Meditation on Hope
by Andrew Delbanco
Harvard University Press,
$19.95, 143 pp.

Philosophy and Social Hope
by Richard Rorty
Penguin, $13.95, 288 pp.
Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in

Twentieth-Century America
by Richard Rorty

Harvard University Press,
$12.95, 176 pp.

The Future of American Progressivism
by Roberto Mangebeira Unger and Cornel West
Beacon Press, $12, 93 pp.