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Pragmatism and `compassionate' political change: Some implications of

Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalist liberalism

Article  in  Philosophy & Social Criticism · June 2002

DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028005665

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Frédéric Volpi

Pragmatism and
‘compassionate’ political
change
Some implications of Richard Rorty’s
anti-foundationalist liberalism

Abstract This paper calls into question Richard Rorty’s recasting of

the traditional justifications of liberal political philosophy in an anti-
foundationalist ironic mould. Rorty suggests not only that his irony is
compatible with the liberal commitments to human flourishing but also that
it can clear up many of the conceptual difficulties that liberal reformers face
today. Two objections are raised against the Rortian approach to politics,
one conceptual, the other practical. Conceptually, because Rorty does not
wish to burden political irony and imagination with a constraining political
theory, his proposal increases the likelihood that two liberal commitments
that he judges essential, the separation of the public and the private, and
the aversion of wilful cruelty, will clash with one another. Practically,
the success of his anti-foundationalist irony among sophisticated liberal
reformers is jeopardized by its potentially negative impact upon the non-
ironic, metaphysically minded political actors who most need to be brought
into the liberal debate.
Key words irony · liberal imagination · political theory · pragmatism ·
social change · Third World

Introduction
Richard Rorty has become the herald of a new brand of pragmatism
that urges contemporary liberals to shed the metaphysical remnants of
the Enlightenment – especially the quest for epistemic certainties – and

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 28 no 5 • pp. 537–557

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Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
to confront social change with the best values and practices that they
now have, imagination and compassion. His propositions are quite star-
tling, as he simultaneously advocates a ‘revolution’ in philosophy and
a pragmatic approach to social and political reform.1 If one accepts the
analytical arguments that Rorty musters against traditional philo-
sophical approaches, there are, from the perspective of political theory,
several serious difficulties with his anti-foundationalist version of
liberalism. Rorty commonly fends off the criticisms of (empirically
minded) political theorists by insisting that his own efforts, as a public
philosopher, are limited to highlighting the fact that many contemporary
political problems of liberalism are akin to Don Quixote’s Giants. He
argues that he only wishes to remove some of the conceptual obstacles
that hinder progressive social reformers and that, ‘at worst, the ideal
towards which I [Rorty] hope the culture of the democracies may evolve
. . . has no relevance to the question of what is to be done here and
now’.2 In this paper, my main disagreement with Rorty concerns this
supposed unidirectional political causality, and his suggestion that the
removal of metaphysical pseudo-problems can help social reformers but
cannot harm social reforms. I suggest that without a more systematic
understanding of the relationship between (his) ethical narrative and
political practice, Rorty cannot genuinely offer to perform the kind of
therapeutic endeavour that, in his view, permits the keeping of ‘social
hope’ alive.3
The tension between Rorty’s ethical premises and the political impli-
cations of his liberal irony result partly from his endorsement of Judith
Shklar’s proposition that ‘liberals are the people who think that cruelty
is the worst thing we do’ and partly from his insistence that, in matters
of good governance, ‘J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote
themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private
lives alone and preventing suffering’ is ‘pretty much the last word’.4 The
first argument is an ethical judgement about the internal coherence of
the idea of liberalism; the second describes a functional-normative
relationship between liberalism and a wider system of wants, needs and
rights. In the first section, I highlight the difficulties that Rorty’s anti-
foundationalist liberal irony creates for a Millian separation of the
public and the private that contains a strong ‘no cruelty’ clause. In the
second part, I investigate how liberal-ironic rhetoric and practice,
detached from political theory, might fare in a social world inhabited
by non-ironic institutions and (mildly) Machiavellian agents. Finally, I
inquire, from Rortian ethical premises, how the didactic role played by
liberal irony might possibly be reinforced in the contemporary political
context.
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Volpi: Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change
Liberal irony, cruelty and individuality
From Rorty’s perspective, being a liberal is a purely contingent feature
of an agent, the outcome of a unique, peculiar sequence of historical
events. Liberals are what ‘we’ happen to be here in the rich Western
democracies, today, and what other people (mostly in the Third World)
are not. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty defines an ironist
as someone who has radical doubts about the vocabulary he or she uses
to describe the world, who realizes that these doubts cannot be under-
written by arguments phrased in this vocabulary and who also recog-
nizes that no vocabulary is closer to reality than another.5 He suggests
that a liberal ironist is simply someone who recognizes the philosophical
and political implications of this state of affairs and who pragmatically
decides, first, not to invoke metaphysical arguments to justify himself
or herself and, second, to endorse (liberal) ethnocentrism because there
is (as yet) no serious political alternative to it. (This does not imply that
liberal ironists can afford to be complacent about their own cultural
heritage, but it means that any reaching out for – less fortunate – others
has to start from the liberal environment in which they happen to live.)
In this respect, Rorty is a ‘revolutionary’ philosopher because, having
assessed that there is no metaphysically strong liberal essence ‘out there’,
he does not take the Sartrean route to advocating a philosophy of noth-
ingness but urges people to drop philosophizing altogether, especially
for public purposes. He does not believe that there is some deep human
nature or reality that (old-style) philosophers can know about, and/or
that they can instruct the rest of us how to go about living our lives any
better than other kinds of (ironic) social reformers or poets. Rorty
argues that there is little point in pursuing the line of arguments that he
dubs the Plato–Kant logocentric lineage because, so far, it has never
yielded any significant results. On this issue, he sides against this philo-
sophical tradition not because of the nature of the epistemic claims
made, but because he doubts the causal efficacy of these ‘appeals to
moral knowledge’.6
In politics, this lack of reference to a ‘deep’ (or deeper) truth is what
differentiates the liberal ironists from the social reformers who preceded
them.7 The liberal ironists’ approach to social and political change is
different from the traditional endeavours of political philosophy because
it does not aim at uniting the public and private dimensions of life into
a coherent theoretical whole. ‘We should stop trying to combine self-
creation and politics’, Rorty argues, because self-creation and social
responsibility can be ‘combined in a life but not synthesized in a
theory’.8 He suggests that, publicly, one can be a good liberal and
democrat because in the present historical circumstances this is the best
working social consensus available, but that privately one is free to
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
explore as much of one’s potentialities as one wishes. Against those
who fear that a lack of theoretical/philosophical foundations would
add to social instability, Rorty argues that the glue that holds liberal
society and liberal institutions together is a shared way of doing things,
a Wittgensteinian ‘form of life’, not a coherent theory of liberalism. He
does not offhandedly dismiss political theorizing and philosophizing,
but reduces them to playing a subsidiary role. He sees ‘the point of
formulating such summarizing generalizations as increasing the pre-
dictability, and thus the power and efficiency, of our institutions, thereby
heightening the shared moral identity that brings us together in a moral
community’.9 Although a practice-oriented political theory and philos-
ophy are a means of reinforcing the good thinking and good practices
that are already present in liberal institutional frameworks, Rorty makes
it clear that a more crucial part is played by the poets and the ironists
who supply practically minded politicians and theorists with new leads
for better ways of thinking and acting. He emphasizes the role played
by people like the novelists and journalists in creating a sense of com-
munity and in helping to tackle prejudices, because he judges that, in
contemporary liberal societies at least, the political domain is trans-
parent enough and open enough to public scrutiny for their brand of
liberal irony to work effectively.10 In these circumstances, Rorty does
not grant a specific function to political theory and makes no distinc-
tion between what we ought to do collectively and what political theory
ought to teach us to do.
This division of labour between the liberal ironists and their more
pedestrian political counterparts is one very problematic feature of
Rorty’s postmodern liberalism. Because he presents this demarcation as
a consequence of the separateness of the public and the private, he does
not seek to provide a systematic account of how the two groups of
actors may interact with one another. This nonchalance invites criticisms
from Thomas McCarthy who points out that, in the end, Rorty is ‘left
with his poets on the one side and his engineers on the other’, with
nothing to mediate between them.11 Rorty defends his position by
pointing out that a non-theoretical sense of community and feelings of
solidarity are sufficient to ensure that poets and political actors do not
systematically talk past each other (or are alienated from the general
public).12 But there is an important difference between noticing the con-
tingent feelings of solidarity that occasionally permit poets and engi-
neers to be in unison and advocating the kind of poeticized liberal
society that Rorty proposes. It is tautological to remark that the view
that liberalism is contingent cannot be actively promoted without losing
this specifically contingent character. What Rorty wishes to promote
(and, perhaps, to enforce) is a liberal order in which the politicians must
listen carefully to poets – or, at the very least, an order in which poets
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Volpi: Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change
have a decent chance of being heard. Rorty does not stress the role of
the poet over that of the politician simply because, in contemporary
Western liberal societies, the latter is a rather dull and sluggish reformer
in whom it would be simply too disheartening to confide all our hopes.13
Instead, he suggests that liberal-ironic poets and reformers deserve a
special place in this order because they produce more useful redescrip-
tions of the world. (As Nancy Fraser rightly remarks, this proposition
is tightly connected to the fact that ‘vocabulary shifts are for Rorty the
motor of history, the chief vehicles of intellectual and moral progress’.)14
In Rorty’s scheme, therefore, an anti-foundationalist, liberal-ironic
culture is not simply justified pragmatically by the suggestion that it is
the best model of social organization (or reform) that we have in the
present circumstances. Instead, it is secured by a rather romantic notion
of the individual and of progress that refers back to a peculiar valua-
tion system and hierarchy of values.
In practice, the forceful positioning of liberal ironists at the juncture
between contemporary liberal institutions and the (better) societies of
tomorrow is done with scant regard for the issue of cruelty or political
capabilities, and endangers the Millian framework that Rorty hopes to
retain. Rorty’s ironic conception of a Millian ‘individuality’ as the
driving force of liberalism is shaped by his own ‘romantic’ and ‘post-
modern’ inclinations. His insistence that we should incorporate the
insights of ‘strong poets’ like Nietzsche and Heidegger (or Foucault and
Derrida) in an improved postmodern liberalism, on condition that we
disregard their metaphysically phrased claims over the public domain,
may be warranted on philosophical grounds but it is (at best) fickle on
a political basis.15 On the political front, Rorty attempts to diffuse the
challenge to liberal values mounted by Nietzsche and Heidegger by
insisting that such ‘strong poets’ can learn to keep their quest for ‘sub-
limity’ within the boundaries of the private domain. ‘This request for
privatization’, he argues, ‘amounts to the request that they resolve an
impending dilemma by subordinating sublimity to the desire to avoid
cruelty and pain.’16 For Rorty, this proviso permits would-be liberal
ironists to be like Nietzsche in private and like J. S. Mill in public; to
have nothing to do with suffering in private and to be compassionate
in public.17 But by presenting the public/private antinomies from a
philosophical perspective, Rorty obscures the fact that this divide is not
so tangible in everyday life.18 The problem is not to show that one can
combine felicitously Nietzschean and Millian perspectives in a single
world-view. (Indeed, if agents fully understood Nietzschean and Millian
views, then, perhaps, they would introspectively or discursively be able
to know what is the proper way to act in any given situation.) The real
difficulty is that most agents, most of the time, have very limited insights
into Nietzsche’s or Mill’s (or anybody else’s) philosophical and political
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
views, and they are unable to know precisely which practical distinc-
tions they must draw with regard to the public and private. In the end,
Rorty’s suggestion that we ‘resolve an impending dilemma by subordi-
nating sublimity to the desire to avoid cruelty’ is quite unhelpful – we
would gladly do so if only we knew precisely where sublimity ended
and cruelty started. This is just the kind of practical problems that Mill
wanted to resolve with his systemic account of politics and morality.19
Because Rorty does not wish to ground his argument on a strict set
of Millian guidelines (or on Nietzschean Ubermensch), he is reduced to
suggesting that, in practice, the proper measure of public interference
and amount of privacy required roughly correspond to that obtained in
contemporary Western liberal societies. Because of his reliance on
current institutional arrangements, Rorty is forced to hypostasize the
(contingent) values of contemporary liberalism and to project the
current standards backward and forwards in order to read history and
to make prognoses. In the contemporary context, when he tries to recon-
cile a new political standard like feminism with pragmatism, he points
out that since there is no ‘deep reality that lies unrecognised beneath
superficial appearances’, pragmatists have to ‘identify most of the
wrongness of past male oppression with its suppression of past poten-
tiality rather than with its injustice to past actuality’.20 In this case,
oppression does not refer to the wrongdoing to which (we judge) other
persons have been subjected, but to the contrast between what these
persons were turned into and what (we know) they could have been
turned into, had they not been oppressed. In this case, of course, we
know that this was a waste of potential because, from our present situ-
ation, we can now say that both women and society as a whole are
better off with the current levels of personal development than with
previous ones. But Rorty does not tell us whether these standards are
now valuable because they are part of female identities or whether they
are valuable only in so far as they happen to reduce cruelty. If tomorrow
a polity visibly manages to achieve an even greater reduction of cruelty
without gender equality, would not the ‘liberal Rorty’ be at odds with
the ‘ironic Rorty’? (In this particular debate, Rorty makes no (ironic)
attempt to present the adversaries of feminism as unrecognized liberal
ironists working for the greater good. This last hypothesis, though not
very realistic, would nonetheless chime better with his commitment to
placing cruelty first than with his own attempt to make gender equality
a prerequisite for social progress.)21
Rorty’s attachment to a certain romantic idea of what a decent
human being should be pervades his depiction of the better liberal
society of tomorrow, which he contrasts to the dystopias described in
Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s classic novels. ‘The Deltas and
Epsilons of Huxley’s Brave New World and the proles of Orwell’s 1984’,
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Volpi: Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change
Rorty argues, ‘were persons only in the sense in which fertilized human
ova or human infants are persons – in the sense, namely, that they are
capable of being made into persons.’22 But, one may ask, whence these
persons that the characters of Huxley’s and Orwell’s novels fail to
match? As in the case of the suppressed potentialities of women, the
case of these proto-humans capable of being made into decent human
beings is comprehensible only through the comparison that can be made
with today’s life achievements. Rorty’s analysis of past inequities, like
his criticism of would-be utopian societies, is based upon a conception
of human development which stresses contemporary liberal views of
self-fulfilment over the issue of political possibility. When he castigates
the characters of Brave New World for being underdeveloped human
beings, he downplays the fact that they live in a society in which cruelty
has nearly completely disappeared.23 Although Huxley’s blissfully
stupid Deltas and Epsilons are far less cruel and far less subject to cruelty
than probably any imaginable living human being today, they fail to be
the ‘persons’ that we know they could be. It is this lack of ‘self-fulfil-
ment’ that is particularly worrying for Rorty. He dismisses Brave New
World not because it fails to be socially or economically viable but
because it lacks the kind of social actors that he most favours, the liberal
ironists.24 If one were to argue that Rorty can only celebrate the emanci-
pation of women, workers, the poor, etc., on condition that he indicates
that this emancipation does not induce a larger social and political
commotion and further cruelty, Rorty would probably answer that we
can never know for sure and put a bright gloss on the issue of political
openness (as shown by his endorsement of Roberto Unger’s radical
democracy and celebration of political plasticity).25 But it is a very
peculiar type of political plasticity that Rorty is in fact advocating.
Although he is not ready to let prudence – or, in his view, complacency
– prevail, the scope of the reforms that liberal ironists can advocate to
alleviate human misery is nonetheless very restricted by what he presents
as the contemporary standards of ‘decency’.
Rorty’s notion of political plasticity is propelled by a romantic con-
ception of the individual. His insistence that we ‘transcend our accul-
turation’ and become virtuous autonomous agents (in the Millian sense)
rather than uninspiring social dopes working towards a closer fit
between our social circumstances and our aspirations, is based on meta-
ethical views which are relatively severed from his political pragmatism.
When Rorty suggests that the ‘good life’ is the living of one’s life as an
autonomous and empowered agent and not an endorsement of the more
fatalistic brands of Stoicism – or, for Mill, Calvinism – he is not guided
by a down-to-earth analysis of actual social and political practices. He
is not saying that the former appears more promising (and popular)
today and, therefore, that we should pragmatically concentrate our
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
efforts on this type of achievement. Rather he is stating ex cathedra that
self-affirmation and change are better than quietism and rationaliz-
ation.26 Furthermore, Rorty prescribes that the ‘right’ type of changes
are those that permit to obtain (among other goods) the kind of ‘good
life’ experienced today by the more well-off segments of Western liberal
democracies. In this respect at least, Rorty’s non-foundationalist, non-
metaphysical version of liberalism places on political practice strong
ethical constraints that do not derive directly from a concern with
avoiding cruelty. (In fact, these ethical preferences are Rorty’s alterna-
tive to Mill’s programmatic utilization of the ‘principle of Utility’.) To
ward off the more extreme Benthamite views on social ‘happiness’,
Rorty presents the ‘liberal ironist’ not as a good didactic device to cope
with contemporary problems and nudge rich Western democracies on a
bolder course of action, but as an intrinsic good, as the heroic figure of
modernity. Because Rorty’s decision is taken from philosophical
premises, however, it says little about the social and political conse-
quences of this choice. Indeed it may well be that starting from political
premises the status of the liberal ironist is in fact less glorious, or that
there is even a case for having too much of a good thing. From this
perspective, the problem with liberal ironists is not their internal modus
operandi but the systemic effects that this motley crowd may have on
a polity.

Of benevolent institutions and virtuous princes

By placing cruelty first, Judith Shklar hoped to deprive politicians and
political theorists of an easy recourse to Machiavellian arguments about
‘necessity’ to justify pretty much any act of policing.27 However, she
recognized that a strong advocacy of the avoidance of cruelty could lead
to a generalized political scepticism and that, as her inspirational hero
Montaigne illustrated, it could become a rule for doing as little as
possible. By following Shklar’s lead on cruelty, and yet wishing to
remain within the logic of pragmatism, Rorty must be able to recognize
the potentially dire political consequences of any single course of action
and still be able (and willing) to act. Treading a narrow path between
scepticism and voluntarism, Rorty tries to use liberal irony to ward off
the more unpalatable aspects of Machiavellianism. (And in doing so, he
moves closer to Albert Camus’s ‘absurdist’ position than to Mon-
taigne’s.)28 Because liberal ironism is Janus-faced, its public liberal side
can ensure that no cruel policies are knowingly and willingly imple-
mented, while its private ironic side makes sure that complacency will
not prevail. As indicated earlier, Rorty’s reliance on the separateness of
the public and the private to support this position is less felicitous than
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Volpi: Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change
he would have us believe – principally because of the frailty and ignor-
ance of most people, most of the time. Simply wanting to act like a good
liberal ironist does little to make one’s interventions in the public sphere
the effective, yet reasonable, deeds that Rorty has in mind. Used without
due caution, liberal irony as an inspiration for reform may not only fail
to be effective but can also constitute a hindrance to overcoming existing
cruelty, or even generate greater misery. In short, Rorty’s commendable
champion, the liberal ironist, easily succumbs to the same criticisms that
Machiavelli levelled at the good Christian ruler or the Cicero-like
humanist. (Of course, the issue of intentionality plays a part here, but
it cannot be argued that intentionally and unintentionally created misery
– i.e. cruelty and harm – are significantly different if one systematically
chooses not to investigate the likely consequences of one’s actions.)
Because the avoidance of cruelty is an overwhelming concern, prudence
would dictate that one makes good use of the little one knows about
political, social or economic organization before handing-over one’s fate
to Fortuna. (And Shklar herself recognized that ‘putting cruelty first’
was not a sufficient basis for political liberalism unless it was supple-
mented by Kantian arguments or Utilitarian calculations.)29 Yet, because
Rorty insists on retaining the intellectual and socio-economic standards
existing in contemporary liberal democracies – by which he implies the
more well-off segments of these polities – he does not dwell very long
on the prudential estimates that indicate that the vast majority of the
population on the planet will not reach such standards any time soon.30
Rorty’s quasi-deontological approach to this issue of standards of living
ensures that he does not go into a painstaking analysis of which parts
of the liberal (ironic) discourse best interact with which aspects of
political causality. Rorty tends to believe that the construction of inspir-
ing narratives (which encourage the powers-that-be to be more liberal,
and the liberals to be bolder) constitutes a distinct political good that
comes in handy whenever the circumstances are propitious for social
reform. However, his very unwillingness to consider whether this inspi-
rational mood may in fact have a negative impact does not facilitate the
task of the social reformers who will invariably face such practical
dilemmas. His approach suggests that if something goes wrong all the
blame must be theirs, as liberal irony itself cannot be the cause of failure.
Rorty’s sharper utilization of liberal irony as a tool for reform is
set out in his rebuke of contemporary ‘radical’ left-wing arguments for
political change. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty criticizes the
‘cultural Left’ in the United States for its over-hasty conclusion that the
nation-state is obsolete and for its constant (and pointless) depicting
of national politics in negative terms. Since there are no social and
political by-products of ‘we human beings’ that can rival those of ‘we
Americans’, he argues, a nationalistic brand of ethnocentrism must now
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
be used for all practical purposes. Since there is no escaping the fact
that, outside the academia, ‘Americans still want to feel patriotic’, to
shrug off universalistic claims does not correspond to a choice of philo-
sophical perspective but, as far as it is a choice at all, it corresponds to
a pragmatic political attitude.31 What leftist reformers and radicals
ought to be doing, Rorty suggests, is to ‘construct inspiring images of
the country’; for it is only by so acting that they can ‘form alliances with
people outside the academy’. For Rorty, such national and nationalistic
alliances are the only means to have an ‘effect on the laws of the United
States’. Likewise in the international arena, vis-à-vis the grander issue
of human rights, he insists that since people are not compelled by strict
moral ‘laws’ (or by an unbending political and economic causality), the
assertion of a human rights culture can only emerge from a slow process
of ‘sentimental education’ that sets up new standards of compassion.
Like everyone else, Rorty admits, he is uncomfortable with the idea that
if ‘we hand our hopes for moral progress over to sentiment, we are in
fact handing them over to condescension’; but he insists that it is point-
less to dismiss this idea out of mere resentment.32 (As we shall see, later,
the dismissal of the issue of resentment as a problem for moral philos-
ophy and not for strategic political thinking is problematic.) Here too,
leftist social and political actors are encouraged to give up the idea of
a ‘total revolution’ in practices and values brought about by a power
beyond human control.33 They must accept the fact that the mechan-
isms that can empower liberalism are not as grand as earlier revol-
utionary schemes claimed they were and that, in practice, reformers will
be ‘relying on those who have the power to change things’.34 On these
practical issues, Rorty’s pretence not to offer practical political prin-
ciples is stretched to the limit, and what he (undoubtedly) intends as a
straightforward advocacy of a pragmatic, hands-on approach to liberal-
ism, is virtually indistinguishable from the advocacy of a Machiavellian
manipulation by ‘enlightened’ ironists of the ‘unenlightened’ segments
of the population that happen to hold quaint (and perhaps dangerous)
beliefs like patriotism. In this context, his political judgement is clearly
organized according to rules that he fails to make fully explicit. He may
argue that there are no strict political laws – and that Fortuna is enticed
more by kindness than by manliness – but he still relies on recognizably
Machiavellian principles to go about reorganizing social order.35
Rorty does not turn to civic republicanism to explain the dynamics
of social change but simply suggests that (good) existing liberal insti-
tutions can sustain the current pace of reforms. He suggests that
although liberal ironists and other social reformers, as individuals, may
not have the necessary heroic capabilities or vision to use their power
for good only, as a (liberal, open, compassionate) community ‘we’ may
be able to progress by accretion toward a better liberal society.36 Rorty
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Volpi: Pragmatism and ‘compassionate’ political change
does not believe that specific political skills have to be nurtured by indi-
viduals and rewarded by society. Instead, he suggests that we need only
cultivate an inclusive and compassionate intersubjective agreement that
favours a convergence of sentiments in the community – and political
issues can take care of themselves. ‘I see no better political rhetoric avail-
able’, Rorty declares, ‘than the kind that pretends that “we” have a
virtue even when we do not have it yet. That sort of pretence and
rhetoric is just how new and better “we’s” get constructed.’37 But he
does not dwell long on the fact that because such virtue has no solid
ontological or epistemic foundations, what ultimately separates delusion
from empowerment is only the better judgement of those who think they
are already virtuous. In this scheme, the role played by institutions is
predicated upon a sharp division between political intuition and
political realization. Nancy Fraser rightly remarks that, ‘for Rorty, as
theory becomes the production ex nihilo of new metaphors, politics
must be merely their literalization; politics must be application only,
never invention’.38 In fact, having made this partitioning, Rorty does
not see any particular problems in relying fully upon (enlightened) state
planners to tackle, for example, the problem of the North–South divide.
In this case, he flatly drops his attempt to ‘poeticize’ politics and points
out that
. . . the only thing we know of which might help are top-down techno-
bureaucratic initiatives like the cruel Chinese only-one-child-per-family
policy. . . . If there is an happy solution to the dilemma created by the need
of very poor Brazilians to find work and the need of the rest of us for the
oxygen produced by the Amazonian rain forest, it is going to be the result
of some as yet unimagined bureaucratic-technological initiative, not a
revolution in ‘values’.39

‘Maybe technology and centralised planning will not work’, he con-

cludes, ‘but they are all we have got.’
Rorty’s confidence in an old political trope like central planning is
in sharp contrast to the scepticism with which he views the use of old
metaphysical devices in political philosophy. ‘If our aim is tolerance and
the open society’, Hilary Putnam, a fellow pragmatist suggests, ‘would
it not be better to argue for these directly, rather than hope that these
will come as a by-product of a change in our metaphysical picture?’40
Rorty repeatedly says that this will not do and that there is no way we
can approach these better forms of social organization using old
metaphysical vehicles. Yet, at the same time, he is strikingly forgiving
vis-à-vis the political techne that is supposed to prop up his own anti-
foundationalist brand of liberalism.41 Rorty appears to endorse the view
that technology is value-neutral. He appears to believe that the worst
that can happen with technology and bureaucracy is diffusion of the
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
‘petty functionary’ mentality described by Max Weber, but that this has
no serious political implications for the liberal ethos. Rorty is quick to
dismiss arguments based on Foucault’s genealogy of power – especially
those pointing to the coercive potential of new modes of social organiz-
ation – on the grounds that they leave no room whatsoever for non-
coercive political mechanisms or for open debates.42 He does not take
seriously into account what in a Foucauldian system is a positive aspect
of ‘bio-power’ – and, in his own scheme, one aspect of imagination –
namely, that individuals redefine and reconstruct power at each step in
function of the type of authority that they encounter.43 In the present
case, the very top-down techno-bureaucratic policies that Rorty wishes
to have foisted upon agents cannot fail to teach them specific political
practices, namely top-down techno-bureaucratic practices, for both
public and private purposes.44 Unavoidably, these agents will have to
learn to deal with these methods before they have a chance to reflect on
the virtues of liberalism and irony.
Rorty makes much of the liberals’ hope that an increase in
autonomy would (smoothly) translate into a decrease in cruelty – i.e.
that given a chance people will be ‘good’. The gist of his argument in
support of human rights is that ‘bad people’ are simply ‘not as lucky
in the circumstances of their upbringings as we were’.45 Although Rorty
points out that the type of ‘sentimental education’ which is a central
feature of our liberal order, works ‘only on people who can relax long
enough to listen’, his own proposal does little to explore this practical
issue of timing.46 It says nothing about that crucial moment of political
reform when people may be newly empowered but have not yet begun
to listen to, or to understand, liberal irony. Rorty insists on providing
material security first, but he has no contingency plan for the time
when central planning and technology provide security, but when the
‘compassionate’ aspect of social life has not been reassessed. A clear
historical illustration of the type of ironic mishap that can happen in
this context is the decolonization processes of the 1950s and 1960s.
As ‘liberal’ Western powers more or less reluctantly handed over their
techno-bureaucratic system of governance to indigenous actors, this
process did indeed, at first, empower long-oppressed indigenous
people worldwide. Yet, it quickly became apparent that the new
powers-that-be were often more likely to hinder the development of
liberal-democracy than to help it. And it is not altogether surprising
that Third World decolonization movements should turn nasty towards
their own people. The top-down techno-bureaucratic techniques that
the colonial power had used served them well, for a long time, and the
new indigenous leadership that had learnt to use them saw no particu-
larly pressing reason to abandon these proven methods of autocratic
governance. (Unless, that is, they were themselves cornered by people
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using the same techniques more effectively.) In practice, the ‘cruel’
Chinese policies, that Rorty considered reluctantly, could be engineered
equally well by evil Orwellian characters or by well-meaning Rortian
ironists. However, my guess is that they are generally just the unimagi-
native offsprings of the very top-down techno-bureaucratic policies that
preceded them. If Rorty must employ these techniques to promote his
new liberal order, he ought to provide agents with the means of achiev-
ing some measure of what Nietzsche describes as active forgetting – and
in this case, it cannot be a forgetting of a philosophical kind only.47

Redescription and realpolitik

Having invoked a host of very specific ethical arguments, the stance on
political liberalization that Rorty ultimately adopts in Philosophy and
Social Hope appears disingenuous. He defends his position on liberal
irony negatively, by insisting that his views do nothing to ‘weaken our
intellectual and moral fibre’ and that ‘the triumph of democratic ideals’
would not have been any more likely ‘had we philosophical pluralists
kept our mouth shut’. Changes in philosophical outlook, he insists, have
‘nothing to do’ with the very concrete reasons that prevent the rapid
realization of democratic ideals. He points out that main causes of
misery such as ‘the ratio of population to resources’, ‘the power which
modern technology has put in the hands of kleptocrats’ and ‘the provin-
cial intransigence of national governments’ are not the result of changes
in philosophical outlook.48 Yet, Rorty’s defence is strikingly at odds with
his prior depiction of the sophisticated Western intellectual and social
standards as non-negotiable social goods, his insistence that our hopes
for reform in the Third World can only be pinned on technology, and
his suggestion that Western social reformers should form alliances with
the very people who ‘still want to feel patriotic’. It is true that all the
predicaments mentioned do not require an anti-foundationalist brand
of pragmatism and liberal irony to exist, but this is no reason to feel
unconcerned by the prospect of adding to the troubles. It will not do to
say, with Rorty, that although the chances of achieving this democratic
utopia are ‘pretty dim’, this is no ‘reason to change our political goal’,
that ‘there is no more worthy project at hand’, or that ‘we have nothing
better to do with our lives’.49 This may be true for a very small number
of ‘we’s’ but it is probably far from being acceptable for the vast
majority of the people on the planet – and they are the ones who most
need to be engaged in the current liberal-ironic debate.
It is not in keeping the right balance between liberalism and irony
among the small circles of well-educated, relatively sensitive, rich and
powerful Westerners that Rorty’s proposal fails most decisively, but in
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
identifying the political difficulties that the promotion of this outlook
creates for reforming the people who are not so close to being liberal
ironists. Although concrete political changes are one of Rorty’s over-
arching concerns, his account does not provide very encouraging leads
on how to foist compassionate liberalism onto those who do not already
experience this form of life. This has little to do with whether or not
we can dispense with the metaphysical backings that Rorty wants to get
rid of, and more to do with the practical difficulties of announcing the
death of metaphysically grounded politics.50 The difficulty is that
although we may know that there are no gods or transcendental
morality and, therefore, no quick and easy way of ensuring that ‘the
last will be first’, the non-ironist and (often) non-liberal ‘unenlightened’
masses still believe not only that there can be such radical transform-
ations but also that there should be such decisive changes. We may know
that these inequalities are, as Rorty puts it, ‘neither the Will of God nor
the necessary price for economic efficiency’, but many of our (less for-
tunate?) fellow human beings do not.51 And the odds are that simply
telling them how contingent the situation is will not help very much. If
anything, it might just encourage them to stop looking in the direction
of liberal irony for an answer and to start listening to (old) revolution-
ary siren songs. It may well be that, as Rorty puts it, we ought to ‘raise
our children to find it intolerable that we FAZ-readers who sit behind
desks and punch keyboards are paid ten times as much as people who
get their hands dirty cleaning our toilets, and a hundred times as much
as those who fabricate our keyboards in the Third World’.52 But it is
less clear how we could – or even whether we should – teach this to
these less fortunate individuals in the Third World. Unless Rorty is
proposing the kind of grand schemes which he urges the left to abandon,
he must deal with the fact that, for the time being, some human beings
are likely to earn a tenth or a hundredth of what others earn, better
than by simply pointing out to the poorer party that this is intolerable.
On these issues, Rorty’s claim that removing conceptual obstacles
helps to create a sphere of more creative and compassionate communi-
cation inflates to the point where it acquires an ethereal quality and
becomes context-free. Then, the ‘no cruelty’ clause subsides, as no
serious attempt is made to analyse the likely political impact of these
redescriptions that produce ‘better’ selves by ‘pretending that it is
already there’. Rorty’s strategy to stay well clear of the tedious problem
of ‘ideological delusion’ leads him to dismiss the less metaphysically
charged issue of crowd management. He is fully aware that power can
distort communication but he is confident that we are now set on a
course where the distinction between ‘we’ the powerful and ‘we’ the
powerless is becoming more and more ‘usefully obscured’.53 (By which
he means, of course, that the former are being made more aware of the
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latter, and not that the powerless are being made less aware of the
powerful.) At this point, Rorty merges too quickly the issue of the philo-
sophical foundations of political doctrines with the issue of the social
and psychological justification of power. It may well be, as he points
out, that ‘when one thinks of the fate of democracy and of socialism as
largely a matter of who shoots whom first or whose agents co-opt which
revolution first, one’s sense of importance of the theorists in politics
diminishes’.54 Yet, until the sophisticated political ironists who have
adopted Rorty’s perspective have had the last word – or at least a decent
hearing – it may be didactically and politically unwise to lay down one’s
philosophical weapons, no matter how flawed they may be.55 From the
simple fact that we know that God is dead, we cannot assume that we
have therefore the political and cognitive tools to undermine the effec-
tiveness of Christian, Islamic or Jewish fundamentalists. (If anything the
rumour of the death of God elsewhere has galvanized their political
ardour, rhetoric and, so it seems, efficacy.)
Rorty does not seek to indicate whether, in order to produce the
political goods that he wants, liberal irony has to be fully sensitive to
its political surroundings. If the eradication of cruelty (within a Millian
framework) is the overarching aim, might it not be better for liberal
ironists to advocate, like good Machiavellian agents, a discreet form of
irony which targets specifically the people who are supposed to act in
each particular context? The possibility, desirability and rationale of a
discreet policy for liberal irony remains in doubt because it is unclear
what the audience of the liberal ironist is supposed to be. For although
Rorty argues that in his ideal liberal society ‘only the intellectuals would
be ironists’, it must be the case that the masses understand enough of
irony to identify these people as intellectuals and to accept their views
as worthy of being heard.56 On this issue, the problem that Rorty faces
is similar to the predicament that confronted earlier pragmatist philoso-
phers: the conditions under which the public at large is able to grasp
meaningfully the relationship between political and philosophical (or
ethical) insights. In this respect, Rorty’s arguments add little to the
debate between a pragmatist like John Dewey and a ‘realist’ like Walter
Lippmann, who already considered the decline of public discourse and
the rise of mass entertainment as the emerging challenge for liberalism
in the 1920s.57 Although Rorty considers Lippmann’s ‘political exper-
tise’ a necessary supplement to Dewey’s ‘participative democracy’, he
does not explain how this expertise ought to interact with liberal irony
in his own account. Now, like then, pragmatic arguments are on a
slippery slope with some form of civic republicanism at the end of it.
Today, when Rorty urges the American left to ‘forget Baudrillard’s
account of America as Disneyland’ and to ‘start proposing changes in
the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people’, he simply nudges
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
Baudrillard’s challenge that people may in fact understand better and
prefer a ‘hyperreality’ with clear stereotypes to a ‘reality’ painted with
shades of grey.58 (And for Rorty, the difficulty is that Baudrillard
develops his social analysis from premises very similar to his own, but
instead of celebrating a virtuous American liberalism he is happy to
present popular apathy and consumerism as a tangible and valuable
realization of an American utopia in which pushpin is poetry.)
In practice, the problem remains that liberal irony, sensitive litera-
ture and informed journalism are just some of the many, equally
(un)real, equally (in)consequential forms of entertainment that are
offered to a wanton public. Rorty is clearly uncomfortable with the fact
that, in the past, strategies of deception have been commonly used by
would-be reformers when they realized that they did not have the
resources to satisfy the needs and wants of their followers, and/or their
subjects. He knows also that unlike the schemes of these earlier ‘revol-
utionaries’ that could be shown – and were shown – to be failing in
delivering the goods, his own brand of liberalism, free from the
metaphysical structures that used to constrain previous political
philosophies, has a tremendous potential for producing ‘deceptive’
redescriptions. Between a Rortian utopia and an Orwellian dystopia,
there is only a small (though dramatic) step to take; one favoured by a
relaxation of the vigilance of the liberal ironists. To ward off the spectre
of 1984, Rorty chooses to foist upon liberal irony and postmodern
bourgeois liberalism his own views about which standards of the ‘good
life’ we ought to retain, thereby ushering his plan for reform on a
particular ‘good’ trajectory. However, because he does not wish to
provide (or cannot think of) any (provisional) criteria for assessing
political efficacy and practicability, his concern with avoiding the earlier
mistakes of the left contrives to make his proposal only suitable to ward
off the egoistic drives of small groups of rich, educated liberals. At the
same time, it unnecessarily complicates the task of those who wish to
promote liberalism beyond these privileged circles. Rorty is caught
between advocating a view based upon a responsibility to act and one
based upon a responsibility to listen; and on balance, he leans toward
the latter.59 By dissociating the liberal ironist ‘language game’ from the
‘form of life’ that it is supposed to celebrate, by dissociating political
poiesis from political techne, he insulates the former from the latter and
reconstructs an Augustinian tale of two cities. (And who can possibly
argue against a heroic liberal irony in the name of the necessities of
life?) In this context, and since Rorty has rather high standards of what
a decent human agent (and polity) ought to be, it is unavoidable that
a great many people are bound to spend their life as the downcast
under-labourers of necessity and never see the light of liberal irony. To
them, he has very little practical advice to offer, save ‘try harder’. (And
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this makes his suggestions appear to be just another sophisticated
rendition of the American dream.) Perhaps, liberal irony is not as diffi-
cult to put to good use as I make it sound after all. But in order to
explore its actual potential – i.e. its potential for practical reforms – it
would help if Rorty chose as the starting-point of his philosophical revi-
sionism a more down-to-earth social context and some more stubbornly
all too human political actors.

Department of Politics, University of Bristol, UK

PSC

Notes
1 For an alternative exposition of contemporary pragmatism see Hilary
Putnam, Words and Life, ed. J. Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994); Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed.
J. Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
2 Richard Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists: a Reply to Bernstein’, Political Theory
15(4) (1987): 564–80 (572). See also Richard J. Bernstein, ‘One Step
Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philo-
sophy’, Political Theory 15(4): 538–63.
3 See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth, Mx:
Penguin Books, 1999); Richard Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’,
Constellations 6(2) (1999): 216–21.
4 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xv, 63. Shklar’s definition of cruelty
is: ‘deliberate and persistent infliction of physical and secondarily emotional
pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve
some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter’. Judith N. Shklar, ‘The
Liberalism of Fear’, in N. L. Rosenblum (ed.) Liberalism and the Moral Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 29.
5 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 73.
6 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 172.
7 Rorty’s advocacy of a commonsensical and ‘deflationary’ conception of
‘truth’ is much indebted to Davidson. See Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Rela-
tivism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991). See also Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
8 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 120.
9 Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 171.
10 For Rorty this is the case because, in his view, the distinction between the
powerful and the powerless has become ‘usefully obscured’ in liberal societies.
See Richard Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philo-
sophers: a Reply to Lynn Baker’, Virginia Law Review 78(3) (1992): 719–27.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
11 Thomas McCarthy, ‘Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s
New Pragmatism’, Critical Inquiry 16(2) (1990): 355–70 (366).
12 Richard Rorty, ‘Truth and Freedom: a Reply to Thomas McCarthy’, Critical
Inquiry 16(3) (1990): 633–43.
13 See Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’.
14 Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contem-
porary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 95.
15 For critiques of the voluntaristic drive in this scheme see Sheldon Wolin,
‘Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism’, Social Research 57(1)
(1990): 5–30; Thomas McCarthy, ‘Ironist Theory as a Vocation: a Response
to Rorty’s Reply’, Critical Inquiry 16(3) (1990): 644–55.
16 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 197.
17 ibid., p. 85.
18 As Geuss points out, the distinctions made between public and private in
different philosophical traditions do not cut ‘reality’ at the same junctures
and the implications that can be drawn from each do not obey a single
overall logic. See Raymond Geuss, ‘Shamelessness, Spirituality, and the
Common Good’, paper presented at the conference on Asian and Western
Conceptions of Public and Private, King’s College, Cambridge, 13–15
September 1999.
19 Mill clearly recognized that although the proposal to limit governmental
intervention in people’s private lives ‘is not likely to be contested in general
terms, the practical question – how to make the fitting adjustment between
individual independence and social control – is a subject on which nearly
everything remains to be done’. John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’ and Other
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 9. From a realpolitik
perspective, it must be noted that even if this division can be conceptualized,
its implementation is an altogether more difficult matter. See John Dunn,
‘Public and Private: Normative Map and Political and Social Battleground’,
paper presented at the conference on Asian and Western Conceptions of
Public and Private, King’s College, Cambridge, 13–15 September 1999.
20 Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 220.
21 Gander points to a similar problem in Rorty’s selective use of the ‘no
cruelty’ clause in his comparison between a liberal utopia and St Ignatius
Loyola’s ideal Christian order (which Rorty presents as the world of a
madman). See Eric M. Gander, The Last Conceptual Revolution: A Critique
of Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy (Albany: State of New York
University Press, 1999), pp. 69–78.
22 Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 220.
23 In Brave New World, when one of the few unhappy characters of the novel,
the Savage, raises the issue of the fate of the arts, sciences, liberty, love and
passion, he is told by the World Controller that ‘actual happiness always
looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery’.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970),
p. 180.
24 In Huxley’s novel, the World Controller describes the typical subject of this
new society as a ‘happy, hard-working, good-consuming citizen’ and points
out that, evidently, ‘if you choose some other standard than ours, then
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perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you’ve got to stick to one set
of postulates.’ ibid., pp. 194–5.
25 See Richard Rorty, ‘Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National
Future’, in R. W. Lovin and M. J. Perry (eds) Critique and Construction: A
Symposium on Roberto Unger’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 29–45. See also Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics:
A Work in Constructive Social Theory, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
26 Although Rorty endorses Mill’s suggestion that ‘it is only the cultivation of
individuality which produces or can produce well-developed human
beings’, he makes very little of Mill’s other remark that, for general political
purposes, ‘it may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades’ – i.e.
better to err on the side of self-denial than to be profligate. Mill, ‘On
Liberty’, pp. 69–70.
27 Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1984).
28 It must be remarked, however, that Camus’s champion was the ‘rebel’, not
the conscientious civil servant or the sensitive liberal reformer. See Albert
Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. A. Bower (New York:
Random House, 1956).
29 Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’. See also the criticism of both Shklar’s and
Rorty’s utilization of the ‘no cruelty’ argument in Gander’s The Last Concep-
tual Revolution.
30 Rorty is aware that the social, economic and political standards of rich
Western democracies are precarious in the face of that same plasticity, and
this makes him waver on which conclusions to draw from an analysis of
plasticity. In the end, Rorty does not provide any guidelines – even
provisional ones – that may help to determine which political attitude is
appropriate under which circumstances, and what may shift the balance.
Compare the rather upbeat assessment in Richard Rorty’s ‘Love and
Money’, Common Knowledge 1(1) (1992): 12–16, with the more downcast
judgement he gives in ‘Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic
Triage’, Diogenes 173(44) (1996): 5–15.
31 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-
Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
pp. 98–9.
32 Rorty argues that ‘to rely on the suggestions of sentiment rather than on
the commands of reason is to think of powerful people gradually ceasing
to oppress others, or to countenance the oppression of others, out of mere
niceness rather than out of obedience to the moral law’. Rorty, Truth and
Progress, p. 181.
33 Richard Rorty, ‘The Overphilosophication of Politics’, Constellations 7(1)
(2000). See also Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philo-
sophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
34 For him, they are people ‘like the rich New England abolitionists or rich
bleeding hearts like Robert Owen and Friedrich Engels’. Rorty, Truth and
Progress, p. 181.
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (5)
35 ‘In the ideal liberal society’, Rorty says, ‘the intellectuals would still be
ironists, although nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however,
be commonsensically nominalists and historicists. So they would see them-
selves as contingent through and through, without feeling any particular
doubts about the contingencies they happened to be’ (Rorty, Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87). In realpolitik terms, this distinction between
the ironists and the non-ironists parallels the one that Machiavelli made
between i grandi (who know what politics is about) and il popolo (who
know enough to perform their duty as instructed by their masters). See
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. H. C. Mansfield and
N. Tarcov (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996).
36 Rorty may find solace in Unger’s assessment that the agents of change in
the Third World are ‘petty-bourgeois functionaries’, but Unger himself does
not provide a very satisfactory answer to this problem. His social project
relies heavily upon the prowess of the ‘good functionary’ (or ‘good legis-
lator’), and he does not fully explain how his champion manages to retain
so much probity. See the critical assessment of Unger’s project in John
Dunn’s ‘Unger’s Politics and the Appraisal of Political Possibility’, in Lovin
and Perry (eds) Critique and Construction.
37 Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philosophers’,
p. 726.
38 Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 104.
39 Rorty, ‘Love and Money’, pp. 15–16.
40 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, p. 25.
41 Allan Johnson points out that on this issue, there are quite a few affinities
between Rorty’s views and those of early American utopian socialists like
Edward Bellamy – and that this is not entirely to Rorty’s advantage. Allan
Johnson, ‘The Affinities of Richard Rorty and Edward Bellamy’, Radical
Philosophy 91 (September–October 1998): 33–6.
42 See Rorty, Truth and Progress, particularly Chapter 12; and compare,
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
43 See particularly Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An
Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Power/
Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
44 This difficulty is well brought out in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State:
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
45 Rorty argues that they are not irrational agents but that they are deprived
of security and of sympathy, the twin conditions for a proper moral
education. They act as they do, he points out, ‘because they live in a world
in which it would be just too risky – indeed, would often be insanely
dangerous – to let one’s sense of moral community stretch beyond one’s
family, clan, or tribe’. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 178.
46 ibid., p. 180. This problem adds up to the persistent difficulties created by
such an issue as racism in the West, where ‘relaxed’ people have repeatedly
considered the matter and repeatedly decided in favour of strategies of
exclusion.
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47 Forgetfulness, one of Nietzsche’s tools to explain the development of
morality, is evidently a double-edged sword from a political as well as
an ethical perspective. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of
Morality, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
48 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 277.
49 ibid., p. xiv.
50 See Frédéric Volpi, ‘Language, Practices and the Formation of a Trans-
national Liberal-Democratic Ethos’, Global Society 16(1) (2002).
51 Rorty, ‘Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes’, p. 218.
52 ibid., p. 217.
53 Rorty, ‘What Can You Expect from Anti-foundationalist Philosophers’,
p. 726.
54 Rorty, ‘Thugs and Theorists’, p. 569.
55 Lynn Baker pointed out that, on pragmatic grounds, relatively powerless
social reformers would do well to back up their arguments with some form
of appeal to ‘Truth’ to convince their audience. See Lynn A. Baker, ‘Just Do
It: Pragmatism and Progressive Social Change’, Virginia Law Review 78(3)
(1992): 697–718.
56 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
57 See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press,
1927); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1925). See also Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Is the Revival of Pragmatism Practical, or
What Are the Consequences of Pragmatism’, Constellations 6(4) (1999):
561–87.
58 Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 99. See also Jean Baudrillard, America,
trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988).
59 See Bryan S. Turner, ‘Forgetfulness and Frailty: Otherness and Rights in
Contemporary Social Theory’, in C. Rojek and B. S. Turner, The Politics of
Jean-François Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory (London: Routledge,
1998), pp. 25–42.

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