Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher offers two books in one: an intellectual biography and a treatise in the sociology of ideas. The first is a well-written and well-researched biography of America's most prominent late twentieth-century philosopher, Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Gross begins with nuanced portraits of Rorty's parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush (daughter of Social Gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch), both left-wing anticommunist writers and fringe members of the New York intellectual set. Gross demonstrates that Rorty did not begin, as is sometimes supposed, as a hard-nosed analytic philosopher. At the age of fifteen, Rorty attended the University of Chicago, where he completed his high-school degree, earned undergraduate and master's degrees, and absorbed the ethos of an institution known for its emphasis on humanistic general education as opposed to research specialization. Rorty's master's thesis in metaphysics set him sharply apart from the growing dominance of logical positivism within the philosophy profession. Rorty earned his Ph.D. at Yale, a bastion of philosophical eclecticism that resisted the dominance of analytic philosophy, of which logical positivism was a crucial component. Only upon graduating from Yale did Rorty find himself drawn to the prevailing philosophical mode, which helped earn him a position at Princeton, a stronghold of analytic philosophy. But by the 1970s, Rorty again became increasingly critical of the narrowness of professional philosophy, attacking it in his pivotal 1979 work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which combined unorthodox readings of analytic philosophy with influences from pragmatism and continental philosophy. Gross's account ends in 1982 with Rorty leaving Princeton (and the philosophical profession) for a humanities professorship at the University of Virginia.

Gross offers a finely honed intellectual biography that will appeal to anyone interested in American philosophy or twentieth-century intellectual history. But Richard Rorty is most provocative for its author's effort to use Rorty's biography as a case study for what he calls the “new sociology of ideas.” Gross's main interest lies not in Rorty's “idiosyncratic and entirely contingent biographical experiences but the operation of more general social mechanisms and processes that shaped and structured his intellectual life and career” (234). Gross argues that the academic world has rules of its own; intellectuals make decisions in order to maximize their prestige within that system, even if they are not always conscious of that fact. Using this approach, Gross strives to make sense of key events in Rorty's career. While Rorty's parents were neither politically powerful nor financially well-off, they passed their intellectual capital to their son and used their many connections to help advance his early career. Rorty's decision to reconcile himself to analytic philosophy was a vital strategy for obtaining a position at an elite philosophy department. At the same time, Rorty's break from analytic philosophy was possible only because he had already earned himself considerable academic prestige. Defining his approach against that of other recent sociologists of ideas such as Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, Gross stresses that intellectual decisions are often motivated by nonstrategic motives. He gives considerable explanatory weight to a thinker's “self-concept,” defined as narratives that thinkers create to explain their past intellectual trajectory. He argues that Rorty's self-concept as “leftist intellectual patriot” helps explain why he broke with analytic philosophy for failing to address real-world questions.

What should historians make of Gross's broader sociological claims? His provocative arguments demonstrate well the need for intellectual historians and sociologists of ideas to converse with one another. Gross proves that sociological accounts of ideas need not be reductive. Yet it is unlikely that intellectual biographers will find the notion that a thinker's “self-concept” influences his or her intellectual development to be a new revelation. What will most challenge historians is the extent to which Gross emphasizes the ways in which thinkers are motivated by strategic considerations. Gross's theory explains much about individual choices but not enough about why particular ideas are adopted at particular times. Even if we agree with Gross that Rorty adopted and then broke with the analytic philosophical tradition for the reasons Gross details, this avoids the most important question: why was analytic philosophy dominant in the first place? Gross has a good answer to this question, one that focusses on the new rigour of the postwar academy undergoing a second wave of professionalization. But this explanation relies on the work of intellectual historians, and cannot be derived from Gross's sociological theory. In this sense, for all of its interesting insights into the nature of academic life, the new sociology of ideas may be something of a misnomer. Nevertheless, Richard Rorty is well worth reading for its stimulating theoretical arguments as well as for its excellent narrative of the early years of a great American philosopher.