Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

In reading and thinking about Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019), I am reminded of a line from Richard Rorty’s review of a very different kind of book, Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). Rest assured I don’t have a photographic memory of every review-essay published in the 1980s by The London Review of Books ; I just happen to have read this one a couple of times, mainly because it’s Rorty and he’s never dull. Besides, if you can get through a thunderously difficult (and Germanic) tome such as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , washing it down with a bit of Rorty doesn’t hurt. Anyway, the line in question was Rorty’s belief that Blumenberg’s treatise (which I’ll avoid a summary of for mental health reasons) championed those ‘whose highest hopes are still those of Mill’. Rorty for one was adamant that however large or small a group there was that regarded Mill as their hero, this group needed a shelf of books tha