After the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, there were many who thought of Richard Rorty's statement that “the nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for.”1 Goodson explores the meaning of Rorty's prediction, leading to a greater discussion of the nature of predictions and the role of hope in predictive claims. The conclusion of the book offers a critique of Rorty's philosophy of hope.
The book is divided into three parts. After an introduction in which Goodson discusses Rorty's father as a fellow predictor, Goodson spends the first part of the book reading and explicating Rorty's predictions. He begins with Rorty's Achieving Our Country in the first chapter, but the text moves away from Rorty's critique of the academic left and instead becomes a discussion of the impact of McCarthyism on the academy. He highlights the...
