When the American philosopher Richard Rorty arrived to deliver a lecture in Tehran on a summer night in 2004, he was surprised to discover that he could not get into the room. Some 2,000 enthusiastic Iranians, many of them students, had crammed into the venue’s 200-seat auditorium to hear his talk on philosophy and democracy: sitting in the aisles, blocking the stairwell, and standing on the street outside. Organizers hastily set up TV monitors in the hallways to broadcast the talk for the overflow crowd. Shy despite his fame, Rorty said later the whole experience made him feel like a rock star.
Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the most important and influential thinkers of the past century. In recent years, the work of the wide-ranging philosopher, public intellectual, cultural critic, and Nation contributor has enjoyed a Trump-fueled revival. It is not hard to see why. His plainspoken, unwavering optimism that pragmatic liberalism can make our lives a little better is reassuring amid a global rise of demagoguery, graft, and “illiberal democracy.”
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