Rorty's neo-pragmatism

[M]y own version of pragmatism... makes no pretence of being faithful to the thoughts of either James or Dewey (much less Peirce, whom I barely mention). Rather, it offers my own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements of Jamesian and Deweyan themes. My choice of themes, and my ways of rephrasing them, result from my conviction that James's and Dewey's main accomplishments were negative, in that they explain how to slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic tradition. Each of the three essays, therefore, has a title of the form '— without —', where the first blank is filled by something we want to keep and the second something which James and Dewey enabled us, if not exactly to throw away, at least to understand in a radically un-Platonic way. The title 'Hope in Place of Knowledge' is a way of suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind's most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are – to penetrate behind appearance to reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate appearance–reality distinction and with metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which pragmatism shows us how to do without. I want to demote the quest for knowledge from the status of end-in-itself to that of one more means towards greater human happiness. 

My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future. Under favourable circumstances, our use of this capacity culminates in utopian political projects such as Plato's ideal state, Christian attempts to realize the kingdom of God here on earth, and Marx's vision of the victory of the proletariat. These projects aim at improving our institutions in such a way that our descendants will be still better able to trust and cooperate, and will be more decent people than we ourselves have managed to be. In our century, the most plausible project of this sort has been the one to which Dewey devoted his political efforts: the creation of a social democracy; that is, a classless, casteless, egalitarian society. I interpret James and Dewey as giving us advice on how, by getting rid of the old dualisms, we can make this project as central to our intellectual lives as it is to our political lives.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope

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Rorty on democracy, in Achieving Our Country... Dewey on democracy...