One of the weird things about philosophy (especially of the Continental kind (is how it tends to have some of its most compelling effects when you get away from it for a while, much as I have had to do because of my present political situation in America. And, reading Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, I’m starting to get a more crystallized sense of the implications as concerns Deleuze & Guatarri’s sense of conceptual play for the sake of creating concepts at work in What Is Philosophy.
One of the things that Maclean points to throughout the book as concerns the main player in the history of the right, James McGill Buchanan (not the political foot soldier we all know of in James Buchanan), is how he tended to work with conceptual models and thought experiments while paying little attention to the actual empirical effects of his policies. And we tend to see this at work in most theorists of the FreeMarketFundamentalist right including Rand, Friedman, Nozick, as well as Greenspan.
Now do not get me wrong here: my intention is not to establish a false equivalency between D & G’s understanding of process and that of right-wing FreeMarketFundamentalists; nor is it to engage in the informal fallacy of creating a slippery slope between D & G’s conceptual play and the stealth activities of the right. That would be to succumb to the analytic fantasy of finding some one-size-fits-all solution or what Rorty referred to as some over-riding epistemological system by which we can judge the accuracy of our statements.
My point, rather, is to bring out the difference between what right-wing libertarians are doing and what continentals and pragmatics such as Rorty were doing. Right-wing libertarians, because of their personal investment and self interest in their conceptual schemes, tend not to test their models against reality. They can only be right because they sound right –that is to them at least.
On the left, however, there is always that pragmatic overlap between thinkers like D & G and Rorty that obliges them to test their conceptual schemes against reality in order to see if they fulfill the pragmatic criteria of actually working.