Leonard Harris, Richard Rorty, and Communities of Insurrection

This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the nature and role of communities of insurrection and the problem of exclusion from the moral community. My main claim is that while pragmatism surely needs some measure of an insurrectionist ethos to realize its own goals for social change, pragmatist insights can enhance insurrectionism’s aims and methods. I offer a critical examination of Leonard Harris’s and Richard Rorty’s shared programs for expanding and reenvisioning moral communities to include the excluded and empower the devaluated. Both carve out a role for cultivating moral sensibilities to address exclusion from our moral community, recognize the limits of reason and moral argumentation in the face of exclusion and oppression, and call for new forms of rationality. Rorty’s skepticism about appeals to moral argument to remedy injustice and dehumanization, I suggest, softens the opposition of moral suasion and insurrectionism, while pointing to pragmatist commitments in Harris’s own thinking.