I am kind of angry after completing this book as it completely fails to deliver what was proposed and laid out rather elegantly in the Preface and Introduction. Once in Chapter 1 and onward, the author couches each statement with so many qualifications that it overburdens the narrative, and ultimately turns the reading experience into a burdensome and quite frankly embarrassing affair. I was constantly removed from the stream of the flow by Rondel insistence on reminding the reader that what he is saying has people who disagree…Yeah we know, the type of person who will pay for a book like this has a background in the subject matter already, let’s skip the 25th citation of some stupid shit Ronald Dworkin has said regarding justice and egalitarianism, if I had known I was going to subject myself to this sad and laborious exercise I would have put the money I spent on this book to more productive uses.

The chapter on James is the best, the chapter on Rorty is embarrassing, and the idea that this second rate philosopher has the gall to question Rorty’s use of words is like arguing that Miles Davis should not have used an altered dominant chord in the turnaround on one of his seminal works and should have just stuck to a vanilla V chord, like dude, just stop already this is embarrassing...

Man, I am upset at how much this book missed the mark. I think the amount of money this book cost has amplified my negative reaction, but even if I picked this up for $0.50 at a yard sale I would be upset because of the opportunity cost in reading this book.

The final chapter Rondel fails to deliver on how his method will bring together into synthesis the vertical and horizontal egalitarianism through his three irreducibly and mutually reinforcing ‘variables’ - Institutional (Dewey), Personal (James), and Cultural (Rorty). He oddly spends time showing all the injustices we all already know concerning economic disparities and injustices, the carceral state and its associated injustices that reinforce and propagate racial injustices through our social system institutionally, personally, and culturally which is confusing as anyone coming to this book would have this background, and then ends with the fact that there are no atemporal universal ideals upon which we can hang our hopes on solving these complex problems and we gotta get our hands dirty and do the work and iteratively adjust to the context contingent specifics of the situation - Yeah no kidding, we already know and accept this as anyone who has read the authors used as the scaffolding to build this theory have elegantly written about this necessity over and over again in their voluminous output (In their own unique and beautiful way).

Anyways, I feel for the students who I suspect will be subjected to reading this. Hopefully they will go to the source material, especially Rorty, to make their own judgments and not rely on this second rate analysis.