Rorty, Wittgenstein, and Postmodernism: Neopragmatism and the Politics of the Ethnos
David Hollinger ( 1995) in his recent Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculuralism argues for a rooted cosmopolitanism -- a position associated with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that rejects the discourse of multiculturalism based on the psychological concept of identity in favor of the more social and performative notion of affiliation. 1 Affiliation is seen to be based upon a modest choke-maximizing principle in contrast to the prescription that accompanies the discourse of multiculturalism and so-called communities of descent. A postethnic perspective emphasizes the question of U.S. nationality by focusing upon the civic character of the U.S. nation-state. Hollinger ( 1995) in developing his position traces the shift from species to ethnos -- from a universalism (and ethnocentrism) characterizing the species-centered discourse typified by the work of Alfred Kinsey and others, to a new sense of historical particularity typified in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The former argued for universalism by erasing human (sexual) differences and biologizing essences, the latter demonstrated the impossibility of escaping ethnocentrism by emphasizing the "contingent, temporally, and socially situated character of our beliefs and values, of our institutions and practices" (p. 60). If Kuhn's work drew our attention to the way that scientific truths were dependent upon a set of historically specific practices that comprised a community, then it became "more plausible to view the Bill of Rights as just another tribal code" (p. 61). Kuhn's historicism gelled with the work of other influential scholars: Clifford Geertz emphasized local knowledge, Michael Walzer had accented membership of community in
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