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What Would it Mean to Call Rorty a Deliberative

Democrat?

Susan Dieleman
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan,
9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon sk, S7K 9A9 Canada
susan.dieleman@usask.ca

Abstract

My goal in this paper is to determine whether there exists good reason to apply to
Rorty the label “deliberative democrat.” There are elements of Rorty’s work that count
both for and against applying this label, which I investigate here. I conclude that, if we
can conceive of a deliberative democracy that is not informed by a social epistemology
that relies on Reason; if we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that has a wider
view of reason and of reasons than is traditionally understood, then we can think of
Rorty as a deliberativist; perhaps as a virtue deliberativist with an expansive idea of
what counts a reason and what counts as a virtue.

Keywords

deliberative democracy – irony – normal and abnormal discourse – public reason –

“conversation-stoppers”

1 Why Ask the Question?

There are at least two sorts of reasons one could forward in support of the
claim that Richard Rorty could be called a deliberative democrat. The first sort
of reason is a disciplinary sort of reason. This includes the fact that other prag-
matists have been thought of as deliberativists or proto-deliberativists, or their
work has been harnessed for deliberativist ends. Think of Dewey here, and of

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320 Dieleman

Peirce.1 Moreover, many of Rorty’s interlocutors – those he’s praised as well as

criticized – have been deliberativists. Think of Rawls here, and of Habermas.2
So, given the pragmatist tradition in which Rorty is located, and the political
thinkers with whom he engaged, there might be good disciplinary reasons to
think of Rorty as participating in if not the tradition, then certainly the conver-
sation, of deliberative democracy.
This paper is motivated by this former sort of reason; facts about the tradi-
tion in which Rorty worked and the philosophical company he kept suggest
that it might be worth looking into whether there is a solid basis for think-
ing the second sort of reason exists. This second sort of reason includes phil-
osophical or textual reasons. That is, disciplinary facts about Rorty’s work
warrant an investigation into whether there is textual support for claiming a
place amongst deliberativists for Rorty. And so, my goal in this paper is to ex-
plore more carefully whether such textual support exists. In other words, does
Rorty’s work support such a reading? In the first section of this paper, I will
evaluate textual evidence that suggests Rorty can indeed be counted as a de-
liberativist. In the second section, I will evaluate textual evidence that counts
against this reading. I will conclude by attempting to carve out a unique space
for Rorty in this theoretical space.3

2 Yes, He is a Deliberative Democrat

The suggestion that Rorty could be a deliberative democrat will, I imagine,

sound strange to many folks, who think of Rorty as someone who advocates

1 Those who see Dewey as a proto-deliberativist, or who have used Dewey for deliberativist
ends, include Elizabeth Anderson (see, for example, Anderson 2006), James Bohman (see, for
example, Bohman 1999; 2004; 2006), and Jack Knight and James Johnson (see, for example,
Knight and Johnson 1999; 2014). Those who see Peirce as a proto-deliberativist, or who have
used Peirce for deliberativist ends, include Cheryl Misak (see, for example, Misak 2000; 2008;
2009) and Robert B. Talisse (see, for example, Talisse 2008).
2 See, for example, Rorty’s engagement with Rawls’s work in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” (Rorty
2007, pp. 42–55) and “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (Rorty 1991, pp. 175–196). See
also his exchanges with Habermas in Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and
Kołakowski (Niżnik and Sanders, 1996).
3 I am employing a fairly broad and general account of deliberative democracy here, rather
than employing a single version of the theory. That is to say, I am thinking of deliberative
democracy as a model of democracy that involves a process of exchanging reasons with the
aim of reaching decisions about what to do. This is in opposition to aggregative democracy
as a model of democracy that involves aggregating individual preferences with the aim of
reaching decisions about what to do. See the introductory chapter of Gutmann and Thomp-
son (2004) for a helpful overview of the differences between these two models.

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redescription and irony and metaphors and poetry – not moves made in the
game of giving and accepting reasons. I don’t want to deny that these former
elements are important features of Rorty’s work, but I also think that they
tend to be over-emphasized relative to other features of his work, especially
by Rorty’s critics. Of course, as these are the most anti-philosophical aspects of
his work, it is unsurprising that they have received so much critical attention.
But to begin, I would like to examine the other features of Rorty’s work, those
which provide evidence in support of the claim that Rorty can be thought of
as a deliberativist.
Rorty’s (pragmatist) consideration of argumentation, which can be de-
scribed as encompassing those practices typically understood as deliberation,
makes one of its earliest appearances already in the final chapter of Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature (1979), where he introduces a distinction between ab-
normal and normal discourse.4 Normal discourse, in Rorty’s own words,

is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions

about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering
a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a
good criticism of it (320).5

So, normal discourse is composed of the generally-accepted epistemic norms

that are generally-adhered to in a given culture; it includes only valid moves
within a language game. When someone relies on or invokes one of these
norms, it is assumed that others within that same language game will be able
to understand and act upon what was said. They will, for example, attempt to
ascertain the truth or falsity of an assertion and take it up (or not) as a reason
for belief and/or action. Rorty also regularly refers to normal discourse as com-
mon sense discourse, where “common sense” is “the watchword of those who
unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabu-
lary to which they and those around them are habituated” (Rorty 1989, 74).
Normal or common sense discourse is the final vocabulary that constitutes
or brings together one’s ethnos.6 To be “ethnocentric,” on Rorty’s view, “is to
divide the human race into people to whom one might justify one’s beliefs
and the others. The first group – one’s ethnos – comprises those who share

4 See Dieleman 2010; 2012, where I previously explored the relationship between abnormal and
normal discourse in Rorty’s work.
5 He continues, “Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse
who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside” (320).
6 As an aside, this is, I think, the “dominant discourse” that shows up in the work of critical
social epistemologists like Miranda Fricker. See Fricker 2007; Dieleman 2012.

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enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible” (Rorty 1991, 30).
So, as I read Rorty, argumentation occurs within normal discourse, using ex-
isting epistemic norms as they are determined by a culture. This normal (or
“dominant”) discourse is the common sense final vocabulary in which all indi-
viduals are acculturated, and ultimately against which the ironist rebels. Thus,
Rorty’s idea of argumentation means nothing more than engaging in conversa-
tion designed to persuade, observing those epistemic norms available within
an existing normal discourse. Of course, normal discourses, and the epistemic
norms that constitute them, are historically-specific and contingent: “justi-
fication,” Rorty avers, is “relative to an audience,” and “philosophers should
explicitly and self-consciously confine themselves to justification, to what
Dewey called ‘warranted assertibility’” (1999, 32). In other words, normal dis-
course – our common sense practices of justification and deliberation, which
include epistemic norms regarding what counts as a reason, and what makes
a reason acceptable or unacceptable – is not antecedently given, but rather
determined by a culture. Which epistemic norms comprise normal discourse
at any particular point in history will be determined by pragmatist processes of
cultural politics.7 Controversially, this means that epistemic norms are guided
by politics rather than philosophy. This view leads Rorty to assert that there
is no connection between philosophy and politics to be discovered or forged:
“Philosophy and politics are not that tightly linked” (1999, 23).8 Deliberation
simply involves relying on or invoking those historical and contingent epis-
temic norms that constitute deliberative practice in the here-and-now.
These practices of argumentation or of justification are, Rorty thinks, just
part of what it means to be human – or more specifically, of what it means
to be a language user. Justifying our beliefs and desires to others is an activity
which we cannot help but engage in. In Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), he
offers the following analogy to explain:

[l]anguage-users can no more help justifying their beliefs and desires to

one another than stomachs can help grinding up foodstuffs. The agenda

7 Rorty’s faith in the historical and contingent nature of our justificatory practices is what dis-
tinguishes his pragmatist conception of argumentation from other (neo) pragmatists like
Habermas and Putnam. See Rorty’s “Truth without Correspondence to Reality” in Philosophy
and Social Hope (1999). See also Dieleman (2013).
8 Rorty thinks the attempt to discover or forge such a connection is misguided: “people on the
left keep hoping for a philosophical view which cannot be used by the political right, one
which will lend itself only to good causes. But there never will be such a view; any philosophi-
cal view is a tool which can be used by many different hands” (1999, 23).

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What Would it Mean to Call Rorty a Deliberative Democrat? 323

for our digestive organs is set by the particular foodstuffs being processed,
and the agenda for our justifying activity is provided by the diverse be-
liefs and desires we encounter in our fellow language-users (38).

In other words, justificatory practices are developed because we are social

creatures who seek to solve our problems in a system of coordination and
cooperation. The process of identifying and ordering problems and solving
them involves trying to persuade others to adopt particular beliefs and priori-
ties. This is, of course, a very thin definition of justification, which, in Rorty’s
words, “amounts to little more than that of using non-violent means to change
people’s minds” (Rorty 2000, 20). There is nothing that differentiates a good
justification from a bad one aside from the fact that a good justification will
convince one’s interlocutors. That is, if those reasons that convince you to be-
lieve something are the same reasons that convince others, then they are good
reasons. To identify good from bad justifications or reasons is therefore simply
a “sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s state-
ment by her peers” (Rorty 1998, 50).
These elements – argumentation, normal or common sense discourse, prac-
tices of justification, using persuasion to convince others to adopt particular
beliefs – are the deliberativist elements of Rorty’s philosophy, and I think they
justify at least asking the question of whether it’s worthwhile thinking of Rorty
as a deliberativist. Of course, as we all know, this is not all there is to Rorty’s
philosophy. Indeed, he suggests that, in order to change the existing epistemic
norms – those “agreed-upon conventions” that determine what counts as a
reason and what makes a reason acceptable or unacceptable – one must move
beyond argumentation to redescription and outside normal discourse to ab-
normal discourse. As Bjørn Ramberg helpfully notes, argumentation might
convince someone to adopt a new belief from among the existing set of can-
didate beliefs, but providing new candidate beliefs is the job of redescription
(Ramberg, 2007, “Richard Rorty”). In other words, it is only through abnormal
discourse that the epistemic norms of common sense discourse can be chal-
lenged, reformulated, or created, and the individual who moves beyond argu-
mentation to redescription, thereby contributing to moral and socio-political
progress, is engaged in what Rorty calls “cultural politics.”
Thus, while Rorty criticizes traditional or “epistemology-centered” philoso-
phy for thinking that normal discourse is the only kind of discourse there is, and
that it is the peculiar task of philosophy to identify what that discourse hooks
on to such that it can “demand moral commitment,” this criticism is not an
indictment of normal discourse itself. Rorty’s goal is to help us see all discourse
as historically contingent. This makes room for abnormal discourse – new

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moves that shift the ground of normal discourse – but it neither denies the
existence of nor rids us of the need for – indeed, our utter reliance upon –
normal discourse. As Christopher Voparil notes, Rorty does not reject “the
game of giving and asking for reasons,” but this game does not get played out
in a “finite and structured space” (Voparil 2014, 88).9 The reasons for thinking
Rorty might be a deliberativist are not (necessarily) undermined by his criti-
cisms (and ultimate rejection) of a philosophical tradition that thinks delib-
eration is the only game in town.
The interpretation I’m proposing here – that Rorty can be read as a delibera-
tivist – is shored up by his later explorations of the place of religion in liberal
democracies. In “Religion as Conversation-Stopper” (1999), Rorty avers that
religion ought to be privatized as it is relevant to “the search for private perfec-
tion,” but not “public policy” (170). The problem is that, when brought into the
public sphere, religious reasons act as a “conversation-stoppers.” The position
Rorty forwards here, in response to Stephen L. Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief:
How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (1993), is explicitly
linked to the public reason debates initiated by thinkers like Habermas and
Rawls. On their view, religious reasons are not public reasons because they are
the sort of reasons others “could not reasonably accept.” This is why they are
conversation-stoppers: because non-religious others can neither respond to
such reasons nor incorporate them into their own final vocabularies. Think,
for example, of the non-religious (or other-religious) person who is confronted
with the argument that same-sex marriage should not be legal because it is
a moral abomination in the eyes of the Christian God. This is a reason that
the non-religious (or other-religious) person cannot reasonably accept and has
no way to refute. This isn’t to say that the religious interlocutor doesn’t offer a
reason; only that it is not a public reason. To put it in Rortyan terms, it is not a
reason that one’s peers would let them get away with. This is where Rorty’s con-
tested public-private distinction, and indeed, the public-private distinction of
all those working in this public reason liberalism tradition, enters: you can be
as religious as you like, but your religious beliefs cannot function as reasons
to persuade (non-religious or other-religious) others, and certainly not as the
basis for legitimate and coercive legislative or judicial decisions. As Rorty puts

9 Voparil writes, “Rorty understands that ‘None of us take all audiences seriously; we reject
requests for justification from some audiences as a waste of time’ – this is the point of having
such norms [of warranted assertibility]. Yet he wants us to take seriously the possibility that
the category of ‘people whose requests for justification we are entitled to reject’ (rc 27n24)
may also include, were it engaged, opportunities for edifying abnormal discourse and alter-
native descriptions that we cannot afford to ignore” (Voparil 2014, 93).

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What Would it Mean to Call Rorty a Deliberative Democrat? 325

it, “the epistemology suitable for such a democracy is one in which the only
test of a political proposal is its ability to gain assent from people who retain
radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human life, about the
path to private perfection” (1999, 173).10
I highlight these elements of Rorty’s political views to show that there are
reasons to think of Rorty as a deliberative democrat. His views on “political
discussion” and “fruitful conversation” certainly have the ring of deliberativism
about them, and his suggestion that there are various routes to private per-
fection, none of which serve as a suitable basis for political decision-making,
further strengthen the idea that Rorty would support a deliberative model of
democracy. Yet there are also reasons to hesitate in applying the label “delib-
erative democrat” to Rorty; one such prominent reason is his redescription,
or what might be better described as his deflation, of reason and rationality.
Rorty’s deflation of reason shows up in three ways that I want to briefly high-
light here in order to demonstrate why we should not be too quick in applying
the label “deliberative democrat” to his political vision. These are his emphasis
on irony, on sentiment, and on the virtues.

3 No, He isn’t a Deliberative Democrat

If one thinks that reason and rationality are central to the deliberativist po-
sition, then it becomes much more difficult to apply the label “deliberative
­democrat” to Rorty. While he endorses “reasons,” as I have shown above,
it is safe to say that Rorty is less enamoured of Reason. This means the so-
cial epistemological position that operates in the background of his political
views does not fit squarely within the traditional deliberativist framework,
where practices of reason-giving map onto a (largely unarticulated) social
epistemological position that assumes that good reasons are persuasive, and

10 I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that, in 2003, we see Rorty back away from his strong
stance regarding religion in the public sphere. In this later paper, Rorty agrees with crit-
ics that he was too adamant in refusing religious reasons in public spaces, and develops
a more modest stance: “I should have simply said that citizens of a democracy should
try to put off invoking conversation-stoppers as long as possible. We should do our best
to keep the conversation going without citing unarguable first principles, either philo-
sophical or religious. If we are sometimes driven to such citation, we should see ourselves
as having failed, not as having triumphed” (Rorty 2003, 148–149). Note, however, that he
doesn’t disagree with his earlier self about conversation-stoppers, only that (1) things
other than religion can be conversation-stoppers, and (2) religious reasons as reasons are
still conversation-stoppers.

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(in some cases) that good reasons are all that should be persuasive, owing to
something like the fact of our cognitive capacities. Or, to be more explicit:
Rorty’s vision of cultural politics abandons the ideal of Reason that many de-
liberative democrats seem to take to be part and parcel of deliberation. For
this reason, one might not want to be too quick in applying the label to Rorty.

The Role of Irony in Cultural Politics

Rorty’s cultural politics parts ways with Reason in the first instance owing to
his introduction of the figure of the (liberal) ironist in Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity (1989), who abandons normal, common sense discourse for abnor-
mal, ironic discourse. It is the (liberal) ironist who provides the redescriptions
or new metaphors that engage the wheels of cultural politics. Rorty sees met-
aphors as changing from live metaphors – without a place in the dominant
language game and therefore absent any identifiable meaning within normal
discourse – to dead metaphors, which become literal as they find a place in the
common sense vocabulary of a society. The process occurs as follows:

If it [a metaphor] is savored rather than spat out, the sentence may

be repeated, caught up, bandied about. Then it will gradually require
a habitual use, a familiar place in the language game. It will thereby
have ceased to be a metaphor – or, if you like, it will have become
what most sentences of our language are, a dead metaphor. It will be
just one more, literally true or literally false, sentence of the language.
1989, 18

He suggests that new metaphors are the creations of an individual – variously

referred to as the edifying philosopher, the (strong) poet, the prophet, or, most
commonly, as the (liberal) ironist – who searches for a better account of her-
self and her society than the common sense discourse provides. In order for
such a project to seem possible, the individual must believe redescription is
the most appropriate means for achieving this new final vocabulary. Thus,
Rorty’s ironist is a person who fulfills the following three conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she
currently uses…; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present
vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar
as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vo-
cabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power
not herself.
1989, 73

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When an ironist finds that her final vocabulary contains too many anomalies
and she feels it no longer tells the story as she wants it to be told, she will start
looking to reweave that vocabulary. For example, if she finds that an aspect
of her experience is described in a way that does not match up with the type
of life story she wants to create for herself, she will search for and create new
ways to recount that experience, to herself and to others. And, because there
are no criteria against which that final vocabulary can be measured, no criteria
which indicate how that final vocabulary should be changed or in what direc-
tion it should move, Rorty suggests “All we can do is work with the final vo-
cabulary we have, while keeping our ears open for hints about how it might be
expanded or revised” (1989, 197). Thus, the ironist will turn to literature, which
becomes the raw material out of which a new final vocabulary will be woven.
She will take it upon herself to explore narratives and poetry and ethnogra-
phies to find other vocabularies that will help her create her own. When faced
with doubts about her final vocabulary, Rorty’s ironist turns to literature in the
hope of finding some hints as to how she could better tell the story about her-
self and her culture.
For some commentators, the inclusion of irony is troubling specifically be-
cause it threatens the deliberative capacities of a community. For example,
Melvin Rogers worries about what he calls “Rorty’s Straussianism” in a 2004
paper where he suggests that Rorty makes irony into a public virtue, thereby
subordinating democracy to ironism. Rogers writes, Rorty “replace[s] belief in
sincere and authentic speech with inauthentic and insincere rhetoric” (2004,
96). In so doing, he “undermines the community’s attempt to create mean-
ing through deliberative interactions that capture and elucidate our collective
world” (97). While I don’t fully agree with Rogers’s criticisms here, I do think
he’s right to point out that irony poses a risk to deliberation and the epistemic
norms it relies upon. However, that is the entire point. Irony plays a pivotal role
in “breaking the crust” of normal or common sense discourse, and therefore
of our deliberativist conventions. This risk is integral to Rorty’s cultural poli-
tics, where an expansion of our final vocabularies prompts moral and socio-
political progress.

The Role of Sentiment in Cultural Politics

Alongside Rorty’s emphasis on irony is a similar emphasis on sentiment in his
vision of cultural politics. As noted above, redescriptions are for Rorty the stuff
of moral and socio-political progress. These redescriptions, which he suggests
are more typically found in narratives and poetry and ethnographies than in
philosophical tomes, provide novel candidates for belief by educating the sen-
timents. These sorts of texts redescribe the world in ways that encourage us

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to imaginatively identify with “others” who are not like “us,” and to consider
adopting descriptions that require us to understand and interact with our
worlds in new ways. Thus, as Voparil rightly points out, Rortyan redescriptions
serve, as one of their primary ends, the goal of solidarity.11 The term “gender”
serves as an excellent example of what Voparil is highlighting in Rorty’s cultur-
al politics. Think of how gender was introduced and taken up during so-called
second-wave feminism to describe the social expectations attached to biologi-
cal sex, and think of how, just a few decades later, the concept has been rede-
scribed in order to capture a wider range of sexed and gendered experiences,
with the goal of creating a new vocabulary, novel candidates for belief, and
greater solidarity. Such projects are more or other than an outgrowth of ratio-
nal interrogations into the possibility of gendered embodiment; they involve
the imaginative production of radically new ways of describing the world, al-
ternative ways of seeing and being in the world, of enlarging the community
with whom we feel solidarity.12
Rorty’s cultural politics gives a more prominent role to sentiment than it
does to reason; however, moral and socio-political progress is based on senti-
ment rather than reason only because Rorty thinks there doesn’t exist a rel-
evant distinction to begin with. This is the lesson to be learned from his paper
“Justice as a Larger Loyalty” (2007). In that paper, Rorty aims to undermine the
idea that justice derives from reason and loyalty from sentiment. He does so
by showing there is no real difference between them. Rorty deflates the con-
cept of “rationality” so that it simply indicates the use of words rather than
blows to persuade someone. This pragmatic account involves a change from
understanding rationality as a faculty or method to understanding rational-
ity as a set of moral virtues, specifically “tolerance, respect for the opinions of
those around one, willingness to listen, [and] reliance on persuasion rather
than force” (Rorty 1991a, 37). Thus, rationality in the sense that Rorty intends
it simply captures those ideals that he thinks a democratic society ought to
embody. Rorty suggests that this new, deflated version of rationality is simply a
characteristic of successful communication.
This deflation of rationality, he argues, serves to undermine the tradi-
tional distinction between reason and sentimentality so that the traditional

11 The worry Voparil goes on to express is that Rorty, by abandoning representations and
having all and only visions or redescriptions or narratives or final vocabularies, loses criti-
cal purchase: “Rorty’s approach never attempts to close the gap between imagined possi-
bilities and actual affairs” (2004, 233). Therefore, the “critical and transformative potential
of his political project” is limited (234).
12 See Dieleman 2017.

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distinction between justice, which is based on reason, and loyalty, which is

based on feeling, is also undermined. Therefore, instead of (thin) principles
of justice being rationally determined, and (thick) relationships of affection
ushering forth from our sentimental selves, how we interact is determined by
sentiment which, in a better world, is trained to be virtuous. Thus, the tradi-
tional distinction between justice and loyalty is redescribed as a distinction
between loyalty to larger and smaller groups.13 When conflicts arise, we should
avoid understanding them as we traditionally have done as a conflict be-
tween rational principles of justice and sentimental attachments to the
groups to which we belong, but rather as a conflict between our various group
memberships.14

The Role of the Virtues in Cultural Politics

As noted in the previous section, Rorty thinks reason should be understood as
a set of virtues rather than a faculty or method. In his recent book, Defending
Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue (2015), William M. Curtis makes a con-
vincing case for seeing virtues as not just a feature of, but central to Rorty’s
cultural politics. Indeed, Curtis places Rorty alongside other liberal virtue the-
orists, for whom “the success of liberal politics and society depends on citizens
possessing the right set of habits or ethical character traits” (2015, 5). While
the demise of Enlightenment reason as politically foundational has led most
political theorists to articulate an ethically thin version of liberalism – think
of modus vivendi liberalism or political liberalism here (Curtis 2015, 12–19) –
thinkers like Rorty have abandoned both Enlightenment reason and the pre-
tension to an ethically thin liberalism. By abandoning both, Rorty is left with
little alternative but to embrace ethnocentrism. However, Rorty’s ethnocen-
trism is not a bland, self-congratulatory form of ethnocentrism. Rather, it is an
ethnocentrism that recognizes that denizens of liberal democracies are lucky
to have inherited the best ideals of the Enlightenment, such as freedom, jus-
tice, and equality, while also at the same time to have inherited its problematic
limitations, including a reliance on Human Nature, Science, or Reason, that

13 Since sentiment is the basis for loyalty, he agrees with Walzer that we move from thick
conceptions to thin, and with Baier that trust is the foundation of all group allegiances.
Siding with Baier and Walzer over Rawls and Habermas, Rorty concludes that morality
and justice have the same basis – sentiment. See Rorty 2007.
14 This is not to suggest that Rorty aims to be rid of the term “justice” altogether. His ultimate
goal is the distinction in the sources of justice and loyalty. Thus, we can still speak of
things being just and unjust; such things will generally involve the largest group we can
imagine ourselves being part of.

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can stand in the way of the progress that non-foundational cultural politics
makes possible.
Thus, Rorty’s work should be read as “fundamentally recommending and
attempting to cultivate a certain sort of ethical character that will be ideal for
liberal democratic citizenship and simultaneously produce an intellectual
class whose conceptual innovations are essential for civilizational progress”
(Curtis 2015, 9). According to Rorty, the way to produce this ethical character
is through a system of sentimental education. I quote Rorty at length here to
illustrate how he brings irony, sentiment, and the virtues together in his vision
of cultural politics:

Producing generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other-respecting

students…in all parts of the world is just what is needed – indeed, all that
is needed – to achieve an Enlightenment utopia. The more youngsters
like this we can raise, the stronger and more global our human rights cul-
ture will become. But it is not a good idea to encourage these students to
label ‘irrational’ the intolerant people they have trouble tolerating… [This
epithet] suggests that we good people know something these bad people
do not know and that it is probably their own silly fault that they do not
know it. All they had to do, after all, was to think a little harder, be a little
more self-conscious, a little more rational.
1998, 179–180

Students who are educated in this way will have the virtues required to be both
open to and capable of ironic redescriptions intended to enlarge the scope
of the moral community and thereby achieve moral and socio-political
progress.
Of course, a prominent place for the virtues can be found in the work of
many deliberative democrats, including those who would also consider
themselves to be pragmatists.15 Thus, focusing on the role virtues play in
Rorty’s work is not necessarily evidence against the claim that Rorty could be
considered a deliberative democrat. However, other thinkers who focus on the
“deliberative virtues” more often than not sneak into those virtues social epis-
temological assumptions that Rorty would rather do without, including, most
importantly, the assumption that deliberation is the only, or at least the best,
political game in town.16

15 See, for example Aikin and Clanton 2010; Misak 2009.

16 I suspect that Rorty would also be opposed to their assumption that virtuous deliberators
are guided by the end-goal of discovering Truth, but this is a topic for another paper.

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What Would it Mean to Call Rorty a Deliberative Democrat? 331

4 Conclusions

The tension I’ve outlined here, between the deliberativist and non-deliberativist
impulses in Rorty, is a familiar one, though it typically goes by other names.
One careful critic – Nancy Fraser – has identified it as a tension between Ro-
manticism and technocracy. She suggests that the Romantic impulse and the
pragmatic impulse battle it out in Rorty’s writings, and “neither impulse seems
able decisively to win” (Fraser 1990, 304). As Fraser notes, the way Rorty re-
solves this tension is to introduce his public-private distinction. This is what
she calls his partition position: “the idea is that two things that cannot be fused
into one may none the less coexist side by side, if clear and sharp boundar-
ies are drawn between them” (1990, 311). If Rorty’s partition position were to
be successful, this means that something resembling the Rawlsian partition
between public reasons (the right) and private reasons (the good) would be
a viable stand-in for Rorty’s position, and we could perhaps get away with
calling Rorty a deliberative democrat after all. However, Rorty’s introduction
of the concept of cultural politics ultimately pokes holes in this partition,
such that the attempt to keep culture and politics in their own spheres (the
private and public, respectively) no longer makes sense even on Rorty’s own
account.
Given what I’ve said so far, about the ways in which we can read Rorty
as a deliberativist, and reasons for why we might hesitate to do so, where
are we left? Should we read Rorty as a deliberativist and, if so, what kind?
I want to conclude by suggesting the following: If Reason is required for de-
liberative democracy, then Rorty is not a deliberativist, for there is more to
cultural politics than merely giving and accepting reasons in accordance with
a social epistemological picture in which Reason figures centrally. However, if
we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that is not informed by a social
epistemology that relies on Reason; if we can conceive of a deliberative de-
mocracy that has a wider view of reason and of reasons than is traditionally
understood, then we can think of Rorty as a deliberativist; perhaps as a virtue
deliberativist with an expansive idea of what counts a reason and what counts
as a virtue.

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