Defending Rorty

Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue

Liberal democracy needs a clear-eyed, robust defense to deal with the

increasingly complex challenges it faces in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, much of contemporary liberal theory has rejected this
endeavor for fear of appearing culturally hegemonic. Instead, liberal
theorists have sought to gut liberalism of its ethical substance in order
to render it more tolerant of nonliberal ways of life. This theoretical
effort is misguided, however, because successful liberal democracy is an
ethically demanding political regime that requires its citizenry to display
certain virtues and habits of mind. Against the grain of contemporary
theory, philosopher Richard Rorty blends American pragmatism and
romanticism to produce a comprehensive vision of liberal modernity
that features a virtue-based conception of liberal democracy. In doing
so, Rorty defends his pragmatic liberalism against a host of notable
interlocutors, including Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Hilary Putnam,
Richard J. Bernstein, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

William M. Curtis is Associate Professor of Political Science at the

University of Portland, where he teaches political theory, history of
political thought, and constitutional law. His research focuses on liber-
alism, pragmatism, and the normative challenges of modernity. He has
published work on liberal theory, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty.
Defending Rorty
Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue

WILLIAM M. CURTIS
University of Portland
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Defending Rorty : pragmatism and liberal virtue / William M. Curtis, University of Portland.
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isbn 978-1-107-10985-8 (hardback)
1. Rorty, Richard. 2. Virtue. 3. Pragmatism. I. Title.
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For my parents
Contents

Preface page ix
Abbreviations xi

Introduction. Defending California: Richard Rorty’s

Virtue Liberalism 1
1 Rorty’s Pragmatism: The Critique of Philosophy as
Authoritarian 31
2 Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 79
3 Critics: From Left and Right 130
4 Rorty versus Taylor: Ontology, Pluralism, and
Authoritarianism 165
5 Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 214
6 Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 235
Conclusion 259

Selected Bibliography 267

Index 277

vii
Preface

In spite of, or perhaps because of, liberalism’s victorious emergence from the
twentieth century’s epic battle of ideologies, it finds itself the victim of “la
nouvelle trahison des clercs.” Its secular, bourgeois ideals of individual lib-
erty and constitutional democracy continue to be, as always, bashed by the
traditionalist-reactionary Right and the radical Left. What’s new is that even
liberal theorists no longer seem keen to defend it, as if embarrassed by its rela-
tive world-historical success. Over the last three decades, Anglophone political
philosophy has engaged in a veritable contest to theorize liberalism in the most
ethically minimalist terms possible, lest it appear intolerant and hegemonic
toward nonliberal ways of life. I wrote the present work because I think this
theoretical project to gut liberalism of its ethical substance is folly and creates
confusion about what it takes to have a successful liberal society. Liberalism
is an ethically demanding way of understanding and getting around the social
world, which requires citizens who are socialized and educated in an ethically
liberal way. Multiculturalist critics of liberalism see this clearly and rightly
conclude that it is inhospitable to ways of life that neglect or reject the deep
habits of mind and complex virtues that the liberal regime demands. Liberal
theorists who obfuscate these demands do a disservice to both liberalism and
its nonliberal rivals.
Liberalism faces serious challenges around the world today, both in the rel-
atively liberalized parts of it as well as in the not-so-liberal parts. We cannot
afford to take it for granted or misunderstand what it is. We need a clear-eyed,
full-throated defense of liberal modernity that is updated to fit the contempo-
rary liberal’s more ideologically tentative, postmodern sensibilities. For this,
we turn to Richard Rorty. Rorty, with his ingenious combination of American
pragmatism and romanticism, shows us virtue-based liberal politics and cul-
ture that fire the imagination and embolden the liberal heart. They give us the

ix
x Preface

hope and vision that liberals need as we face the challenges of the twenty-first
century.
Depending on one’s perspective, there is lots of credit or blame to go around
to those who have mentored, helped, and inspired me. At the risk of scandal-
izing those who might want to resist being associated with a defense of prag-
matic liberalism or with the ever-controversial Rorty, I must acknowledge my
wonderful political theory teachers at Duke University, including Evan Char-
ney, Romand Coles, Peter Euben, Michael Gillespie, Ruth Grant, and Tom
Spragens. I also would like to thank my home institution, the University of
Portland, and especially my colleagues in the Political Science and History
departments, as well as Andrew Eshleman in Philosophy, for their unwavering
support and friendship. Only slightly less well known than Portland’s foodcarts
and microbreweries is its thriving political theory scene. I owe many thanks to
the regulars of the PDX PT/PP group, including: Don and Tom Balmer, Nick
Buccola, Malcolm Campbell, Chana Cox, John Holzwarth, Curtis Johnson,
Tamara Metz, Alex Sager, Peter Steinberger, Les Swanson, Andrew Valls, and
Alex Zakaras. Two other great friends and scholars on whom I inflicted much
more of this work-in-progress than they deserved are Ari Kohen and Dennis
Rasmussen; without their encouragement and advice, I would have been lost.
Lastly, I thank my beautiful and ever-patient wife, Angelica, of whom I asked
far too much as I completed this work. A primary reason for her burden was
our two young sons, Soren and Alex. My gratitude toward these two guys is
mixed. On the one hand, they certainly slowed the writing process, with their
unceasing and irresistible pleas of “Dada, will you play with me?” On the other
hand, their laughter and love are what keep me going in the first place.
Abbreviations

Works by Rorty
AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century
America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989.
CP Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982.
EHO Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Volume 2.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
PCP Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophical Papers, Volume 4.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979.
PSH Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999.
ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
TP Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Works by Other Authors

PRR Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of
Richard Rorty. Chicago: Open Court, 2010.
RC Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell,
2000.
RR Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, eds., Richard Rorty.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
xi
xii Abbreviations

RRCD Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, eds., Richard Rorty:

Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
R&P Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., ed., Rorty and Pragmatism: The
Philosopher Responds to His Critics. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1995.
Introduction
Defending California: Richard Rorty’s
Virtue Liberalism

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate
conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American
knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when
it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.’s criterion of
100 percent intellectual integrity – you have to be willing to look honestly at
yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or
less continually. This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship.1
– David Foster Wallace
For liberals like Dewey, the good life is a process, a way of living, or interacting
with the world, and of solving problems, that leads to ongoing individual growth
and social transformation. One realizes the end of life, the good life, each and
every day by living with a liberal spirit, showing equal respect to all citizens,
preserving an open mind, practicing tolerance, cultivating a sympathetic interest
in the needs and struggles of others, imagining new possibilities, protecting basic
human rights and freedoms, solving problems with the method of intelligence in
a nonviolent atmosphere pervaded by cooperation. These are primary among the
liberal democratic virtues.2
– Steven C. Rockefeller
Liberalism holds out the promise, or the threat, of making all the world like
California.3
– Stephen Macedo

1 David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown &
Co., 2005), 72.
2 Steven C. Rockefeller, Comment on Charles Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition,” in Multicultur-
alism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 91.
3 Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitution-
alism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 278.

1
2 Defending Rorty

Recently, I attended an academic conference that featured an unusually high

concentration of a certain species of political theorist known as the “radical
democrat.” As the label implies, these scholars attempt to theorize a more
genuinely democratic politics, one that properly addresses the many social
inequalities and ills that afflict contemporary liberal democracies. They look to
powerful thinkers like Laclau and Mouffe, Sheldon Wolin, William Connolly,
and Judith Butler for inspiration. They have also co-opted Hannah Arendt, who
has been all the rage in this province of theory for the last couple of decades, and
seem to be increasingly interested in the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière.
Although they have diverse views about what the practice of radicalized democ-
racy entails, they are united in their excoriation of liberalism.4 They accuse it
of securing the status quo by masking appalling political inequalities beneath
a merely formal veneer of equal rights and liberties.
Thus, when I explained to those at the conference, who were kind enough to
ask, that I was working on a project to recast the philosopher Richard Rorty as
theorist of “virtue liberalism,” I was met with quizzical expressions followed by
questions like, “Why would you want to do that?” and “Why do you want to
‘save’ liberalism?” In response, I reflexively essayed something to the effect that
liberal justice, with its ideals of individual freedom and equality, remains the
best hope for humanity, and so forth. Unconvinced, one interlocutor pressed
further and asked, “Why Rorty?” I heard myself answer, “Because Rorty is the
Thomas Aquinas of liberalism.”
What could I possibly have meant? What does a thirteenth-century Aris-
totelian Catholic theologian have in common with a twentieth-century post-
modern pragmatic liberal? Posed this way, the question must be answered:
“Not much.” But what I was getting at is that St. Thomas still attracts the
attention of intellectuals seven centuries after he wrote because his provocative
synthesis of “Athens and Jerusalem” offers such a rich vision of the human
condition and Good Life. Thomism is the complete package: theology, meta-
physics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, all mutually supporting
one another to form a uniquely comprehensive and compelling way of under-
standing man’s place in the cosmos. Aquinas goes a long way toward achieving
what Wilfrid Sellars calls the goal of philosophy: to understand how “things,”
in the broadest sense of the term, “hang together,” in the broadest sense of the
term.5 Philosophy, on this view, gives us a story and vision by which to live.
My claim is that Rorty successfully supplies a comprehensive story and vision
for liberal modernity. He offers us a large, coherent view of how modern sci-
ence, art, history, religion, democracy, and liberal morality all fit together as

4 It is an amusing challenge to explain to Americans outside of the world of academic political

theory that, even in our post-Marxist age, “liberalism” is considered conservative and retrograde
in various quarters of the academy.
5 Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.,
1963), 1.
Introduction 3

the ingredients of an attractive, progressive, and truly humanistic civilization.

His liberal vision rests on a unique – critics argue “perverse” – mixture of prag-
matism and romanticism.6 It is pragmatic because Rorty, like his forerunners,
James and Dewey, cares only about the practical consequences of holding any
theory or set of ideas; assertions that an idea or theory is “true,” regardless of
its meaning for practice, are superfluous. As he puts it,

Attributions of reality or truth are, on the view I share with James, compliments we
pay to entities or beliefs that have won theirs spurs, paid their way, proved themselves
useful, and therefore been incorporated into accepted social practices. When these
practices are being contested, it is of no use to say that reality or truth is on the side of
one the contestants. For such claims will always be mere table-thumping.7

Rorty’s conception of liberal modernity is romantic because he believes that the

imagination – our ability to redescribe ourselves and the world in novel ways –
is the most important faculty we possess for facing the challenges of the human
condition. This claim should not be confused with the traditional claims of
Romantic thinkers that the imagination is the “essence of human nature” or
that it, as opposed to “rationality,” puts us in touch with the “Truth” or the
“really real.” His claim is rather that society will be more humane, progressive,
and interesting if we take the development of our imaginative capacities to be a
primary goal of liberal culture. Richer, liberally educated imaginations, Rorty
hopes, will both make us better democratic citizens and enhance our private
ethical lives. Such imaginations will enable us to more liberally and creatively
negotiate the astounding ethical pluralism that the ongoing phenomenon of
globalization forces us to confront.
Because he is a pragmatist, Rorty’s ethics and politics are, in contrast to
Thomas’s, insistently antimetaphysical (not to mention anti-theological); he
eschews the traditional Philosophical endeavor to identify necessary entities,
facts, or first principles that “ground” our values and norms. To the contrary,
Rorty argues that the rhetoric of metaphysics is authoritarian precisely because
it presumes to make claims of final and absolute Truth that are meant to
be rationally unassailable. The Western Philosophical tradition’s “Quest for
Certainty,” as John Dewey memorably labels it, clashes with Rorty’s pragmatic
liberalism, which is fallibilistic, experimentalist, and open-ended. Indeed, much
of Rorty’s work is devoted to arguing that liberal politics and progress would
be advanced if we got over our need to believe that liberal values require
indubitable, demonstrable foundations. We should instead understand them
as historically contingent and evolving, but no less worthy of devotion for
being so.

6 For an excellent discussion of Rorty’s romanticism, which is too often neglected or summar-
ily dismissed by his philosopher critics, see Russell B. Goodman, “Rorty and Romanticism,”
Philosophical Topics 36 (Spring 2008), 79–95.
7 PCP, 6–7.
4 Defending Rorty

His pragmatic defense of liberalism shifts the burden of proof to liberalism’s

critics by asking: Do you have a better practical alternative? Rorty has little
patience for theorists, like Ronald Beiner, who claim that their “job” is only to
criticize liberalism, not to offer alternatives, as though critique itself does not
stem from implied alternatives.8 Rorty also attempts to make liberalism look
attractive by using historical narrative to persuade his readers that its contingent
development should be understood and celebrated as a story of progress. He
utilizes a pragmatic liberal rhetorical style that is self-consciously fallibilistic
and ironic. As St. Thomas does for late Medieval Christianity, Rorty shows
us how liberal modernity “hangs together,” how its good features are related
to and bolster one another, and how it possesses the conceptual resources to
manage or resolve its inevitable flaws and shortcomings.
The goal of this work is to critically extend Rorty’s intellectual project
in a patently Rortyan way. This means several things. Rorty is famous, or
notorious, for self-consciously “redescribing” the work of his favorite thinkers
in order to enlist them for his own intellectual purposes (with a nod to Harold
Bloom’s Freudian literary theory that writers must imaginatively misread their
predecessors in order to make space for their own original creations). Thus,
Rorty’s readers will expect – perhaps even insist – that any extension of his
project must involve the author’s own fruitful redescriptions of Rorty’s work.
In my case, I read Rorty not primarily as the rogue analytic philosopher who
attacks his own discipline, nor as a postmodern gadfly-cum-literary critic for
whom writing is just ironic play, though I do not dispute that these can be
useful understandings of him as well. Rather, I take Rorty to be most usefully
understood as a proponent of a liberal virtue ethics, whose practical conception
of liberalism resembles those of other liberal virtue theorists, like Stephen
Macedo, Amy Gutmann, Thomas A. Spragens, Eamonn Callan, and (at least
at one time) William A. Galston.9 (Rorty’s virtue emphasis is one more parallel
with the Doctor Angelicus from Aquino, although their respective accounts of
the virtues are, of course, very different.)

8 Ronald Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997),
15.
9 Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitu-
tionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, rev. ed.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999; Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., Civic Liberal-
ism: Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997); William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtue, and Diversity
in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Other “virtue liberals”
include: Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997); Emily R. Gill, Becoming Free: Autonomy and Diversity in the
Liberal Polity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001); Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the
Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Jason A. Scorza,
Strong Liberalism: Habits of Mind for Democratic Citizenship (Lebanon, NH: Tufts University
Press, 2008).
Introduction 5

According to the virtue ethics approach to liberalism, the success of liberal

politics and society depends on citizens possessing the right set of habits or
ethical character traits – as opposed to having a correct theory of politics or
merely the right institutions and procedures – although, somewhat paradoxi-
cally, one of these habits is critical reflectiveness, that is, an ability to theorize,
which can be used to scrutinize the habits themselves. While theory – systematic
reflection on our practices and goals – cannot be avoided by critically reflective
agents, virtue theorists believe that theoretical attempts to render abstract, gen-
eral answers to moral questions tend to be of limited practical use at best and
produce moral myopia and confusion at worst. Morality is too complex and
situational to be effectively reduced to a general method or set of principles.
Virtue ethics instead places its trust in agents who have been educated and
habituated in a certain way to do, as best as possible in an often tragic world,
the right thing. While reflection on moral rules and principles can be useful and
even plays a role in developing virtue, the generalized guidance that rules and
principles provide is of little use unless it is acted upon by virtuous agents who
are attuned to the unique complexities and nuances of any particular moral
choice they face. As Dewey argues, we should not look to moral philosophy
to give us a system of maxims or final moral answers; rather, “philosophy can
proffer only hypotheses, and that these hypotheses are of value only as they
render men’s minds more sensitive to the life about them.”10 Rorty elaborates,
“Like Hegel, Dewey viewed moral principles not as self-evident truths but as
rough summaries of past practices.” Deciding what it is right to do in a partic-
ular situation is the outcome of “an endless process of reweaving our networks
of beliefs and desires. This process is rarely a matter of applying antecedent
criteria.”11
A second way in which this book is Rortyan is that it is constituted mainly
by essays that relate Rorty’s thought to the work of other important thinkers.
This is how Rorty proceeds in his work, constructing enlightening dialogues
between himself and his influential interlocutors. The first two chapters present
my redescription of Rorty’s project and thus provide the background for the
dialogues featured in later chapters. Specifically, Chapter 1 discusses Rorty’s
anti-authoritarian pragmatism about truth and knowledge and shows how it
fits with and supports his conception of liberal politics and culture. Chapter 2
demonstrates that Rorty’s entire intellectual project can best be understood
as promoting a conception of virtue liberalism. The subsequent chapters then
place this “virtue liberal Rorty” in debate with a host of writers, most of whom
have jousted with Rorty in the past. The subjects of these discussions include
everything from epistemology, to politics, to religion and literature, thereby
illustrating the breadth of Rorty’s vision of liberal modernity. As we will see,

10 John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1976–83), vol. 12, 91–92.
11 PCP, 58.
6 Defending Rorty

my “virtue liberal Rorty” is less vulnerable to the many criticisms that these
thinkers have aimed at his work. Chapter 6, however, relates Rorty’s thought
to a new interlocutor: Aldous Huxley.
This is the third way in which this work is Rortyan: it takes Rorty at
his word that in his ideal liberal culture, professional philosophers and the-
orists of the humanities would take on the seemingly less exalted, but more
pragmatic, roles of the “intellectual dilettante,” the “kibitzer,” and the “all-
purpose intellectual.”12 They would use their erudition not to offer theories
of final truth within their respective disciplines, but rather see themselves as
offering historically contingent but nevertheless edifying and useful visions of
“how things hang together.” Rorty suggests that literary critics, for instance,
are more in the habit of regarding their interpretations of literary works with
a proper sense of irony, making them more open to the possibilities of new
interpretations. He contrasts these intellectuals with the traditional Philoso-
pher, who fancies himself to be plumbing the depths of reality (which in this
day and age often means playing handmaiden to natural science) and emerging
with necessary, “redemptive” truth. On Rorty’s account, this latter endeavor
is rhetorically authoritarian and thus threatens liberal freedom and progress. If
literary intellectuals, who are “ready to offer a view on pretty much anything,
in the hope of making it hang together with everything else,” are the vanguard
of Rorty’s “liberal utopia,” then identifying and fleshing out the ethical persona
of these conceptual innovators is key to understanding his political project.13
My claim is that Huxley is an exemplar of the Rortyan literary intellectual, and
that his utopian novel, Island, presents an imaginative version of a Rortyan
liberal society.
My defense of Rorty as a virtue liberal, however, immediately invites at
least two objections. The first is the general charge that that virtue liberalism
itself is an indefensible conception of liberalism. The second is that Rorty is
not plausibly described as a virtue liberal. Indeed, there are critics who go
so far as to claim that Rorty offers no “theory of citizenship,”14 and that
his liberalism is “peculiarly apolitical and uncivic.”15 Such misinterpretations,

12 CP, xxxix–xl, 73; PMN, 317.

13 CP, xxxix.
14 Daniel Conway, “Irony, State and Utopia: Rorty’s ‘We’ and the Problem of Transitional
Praxis,” in RRCD, 81. Conway gives this assessment on the heels of describing what he
takes to be Rorty’s “model of citizenship,” which involves “the following exhortations: read
good books; dream [and have hopes] of a better future; publicly honor liberal ideals; expand
the quest for human [liberal] solidarity; privately pursue projects of self-creation; pragmatize
the metaphysical ideals of utopianism; cherish the unprecedented freedoms secured by liberal
democracy; and don’t be cruel” (80–81). If Conway had added, “get a comprehensive liberal
education” (though perhaps this is implied by “read good books”), he would have a very good
one-sentence description of Rorty’s “theory of citizenship,” so it is a mystery why he claims
that Rorty does not have one.
15 Thomas L. Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992), 58.
Introduction 7

however, get Rorty exactly wrong. Just as Socrates claims in Plato’s Gorgias
that, despite appearances, he engages in politics in his idiosyncratic way, Rorty
is “doing political philosophy” throughout his opus; he is just doing it in an
unconventional way because of the limits and impracticality he identifies in
more traditional ways of philosophizing about politics. I deal with these two
objections in the next two sections, respectively, and conclude with a brief
description of the chapters that comprise the rest of this work.

Why Virtue Liberalism?

Life in the modern liberal polity is uniquely dynamic and cognitively demand-
ing; the history of human association has never seen anything like it. Indeed,
Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of capitalism as a process of “creative
destruction” is aptly applied to liberal culture more generally. We perpetually
face a dizzying array of novel political issues that emerge from the diverse and
protean activities of free individuals. As democratic citizens, we are, at the very
least, nominal participants in the ongoing public debate to determine what
central liberal concepts, such as “freedom,” “equality,” and “justice,” mean
in practice in the midst of highly fluid social circumstances. Liberal democratic
politics requires us to continually reexamine the meanings of our rights and
duties, and the justice of our various public and private projects. As novelist
David Foster Wallace shrewdly observes in the epigraph above, “This kind
of stuff is advanced US citizenship.” It does not come naturally to people.
To the contrary, it takes a lot of socialization and education to develop the
unique capacities necessary to live successfully and justly as a citizen of liberal
democracy.
In light of the challenging nature of life in the liberal polity, virtue liberalism
insists that we understand liberal democracy to be much more than merely the
deliberative political activity that takes place in the “public sphere.” It is more
than an arrangement of democratic institutions combined with a constitutional
framework of laws protecting a set of individual rights. It is more than a theory
of justice or a societal “overlapping consensus” on a (merely) political morality
of equality and freedom. These concepts can be useful for our attempts to
describe and justify liberal democracy, but they are, as it were, only the tip of the
iceberg. Virtue liberalism, by contrast, properly conceives of the commitment
to liberal democracy as constituting, in Dewey’s candid phrase, “a way of life,”
which means that it is something that overwhelms theoretical articulation.16
This is why Macedo’s poetic one-liner about “California” – the promise of the
mythical Golden State as the culmination of Wallace’s “Democratic Spirit” – is
in many ways far more instructive about the nature of liberal democracy than

16 John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1991), vol. 1, 226 (emphasis added).
8 Defending Rorty

are volumes of analytical rights theory or sophisticated models of democratic

deliberation.
Dewey elaborates that liberal democracy “signifies the possession and con-
tinual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining
desire and purpose in all the relations of life.”17 This conception of liberal
democracy means that we can only properly understand politics and justice
if we situate them in a larger, supportive culture, which frames the lives of
citizens who are ethically constituted in a particular way. It means that liberal
society is characterized by a specific ethos; its denizens swim in a normative
sea of liberal values and, of course, even our ongoing, agonistic deliberation
over the meaning of those values is itself a quintessentially liberal practice. If
we remember our Aristotle, there should be nothing shocking about this: we
should hardly be surprised at the contention that liberal democratic regimes,
like all regimes, depend on a certain type of citizen who displays specific virtues
and cultural knowledge that enable her to understand, support, constructively
criticize, and successfully navigate societal institutions and practices.
The liberal virtues are, of course, different from the classical Aristotelian
virtues; the latter describe the ideal character of the aristocratic gentleman of
ancient Athens, not the citizen of a modern liberal democracy. In addition to the
capacity for critical reflection mentioned earlier, a standard list of liberal virtues
typically includes such things as: toleration of pluralism; open-mindedness;
individual autonomy; experimentalism; liberally educated moral imagination;
a capacity for rational deliberation and a willingness to engage in it to resolve
disputes; a practical understanding (phronesis) of equal individual rights; a
respect for democratic processes; an active commitment to liberal justice (i.e., to
the “equality and freedom of all citizens,” the meaning of which is perpetually
debated as the substance of liberal politics); liberal patriotism; political courage;
democratic humility; and the like. Such lists, however, always fall short of fully
or adequately describing the virtuous liberal citizen. Indeed, this is why Rorty
controversially insists that literature is more important than traditional moral
philosophy for cultivating liberal ethics because literary description tends to do
a better job than theoretical description of presenting meaningful and useful
ethical insights. One obvious reason for this is that superbly depicted characters
and scenarios in works of literature capture ethical complexity and nuance in
a way that analytical reduction to lists of moral principles or qualities cannot.
Rorty’s goal is to update and further articulate this Deweyan conception
of liberal democratic politics and culture.18 Although Rorty’s project is much

17 Ibid. Daniel Savage’s book, John Dewey’s Liberalism: Individual, Community, and Self-
Development (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), convincingly makes the
case that Dewey is best understood as a “virtue liberal.” Obviously, the epigraph from Steven
Rockefeller supports this as well.
18 Dewey scholars roundly criticize Rorty for his alleged misinterpretations of Dewey; defending
him against such charges is beyond the scope of this work. For an argument that the liberties
Introduction 9

more wide-ranging than those of the liberal virtue theorists listed in the pre-
vious section, his 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. The
qualities of this character are especially cultivated through sentimental liberal
education, which not only teaches the intellectually promiscuous substance of
the liberal arts but also instills liberal virtues, such as open-mindedness, criti-
cal thinking, and, more controversially, an ironic fallibilism toward one’s own
beliefs. Thus, Christopher Voparil is especially perceptive when he identifies
Rorty’s opus as a type of Bildungsroman: a genre of literature that presents and
endorses a model of ethical self-development and individuality.19 Reading his
work shows us how to approach our biggest questions, which give rise to the
liberal arts and sciences (and most especially to philosophical thought), with a
proper, pragmatic sense of irony. This suits us well to live flourishing and just
lives in a liberal society.
Unfortunately, however, virtue liberalism, along with all other conceptions
of liberalism that are deemed to be ethically robust or “thick,” has fallen out
of favor with contemporary liberal theorists.20 The reason for this is the recent
theoretical preoccupation with the “challenge of pluralism,” which, accord-
ing to one commentator, is the “the most trenchant critique of liberalism we
possess.”21 This challenge stems from the increasing recognition “that there
are a number of equally reasonable yet mutually incompatible philosophical,
moral, and religious doctrines, each of which promotes its own distinctive
vision of value, truth, obligation, human nature, and the good life.”22 The
pluralist thesis involves more than the obvious empirical claim that different

Rorty takes with Dewey are actually very much in the spirit of Deweyan pragmatism, see
Daniel Conway, “Of Depth and Loss: The Peritropaic Legacy of Dewey’s Pragmatism,” in
Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 221–48.
19 Christopher Voparil, “On the Idea of Philosophy as Bildungsroman: Rorty and His Critics,”
Contemporary Pragmatism 2 (June 2005), 115–33.
20 Indeed, two prominent virtue liberals – Stephen Macedo and William Galston – in later work
appear to back away from the robust versions of virtue liberalism they formulated in ear-
lier works (see Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural
Democracy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000]; William A. Galston, Liberal
Pluralism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Galston, in particular, now rejects
“autonomy” as a liberal value because there are ways of life that reject individual autonomy
that liberal society must tolerate if it is to live up to its commitment to tolerate pluralism.
21 Loren E. Lomasky, “‘Liberal Obituary?’ Review of Liberalisms, by John Gray,’ Ethics 102
(October 1991), 154. For a general account of how the challenge of pluralism became central
to liberal theory in the late twentieth century, see Ruth Abbey, “Liberalism, Pluralism, Mul-
ticulturalism: Contemporary Debates,” in Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since
1880, ed. Mark Bevir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154–78.
22 Robert B. Talisse, “Two-Faced Liberalism: John Gray’s Pluralist Politics and the Reinstate-
ment of Enlightenment Liberalism,” Critical Review 14, 4 (2000), 443. The term “pluralism”
10 Defending Rorty

persons and groups live by different and often incompatible ethical doctrines.
It also contains the normative claim that many of these incompatible doc-
trines are “equally reasonable” and therefore deserve toleration, equal respect,
and perhaps even special political recognition from any genuinely liberal
society.23
In light of this thesis, the problem for an ethically substantive conception of
liberalism is readily apparent: there will be many ways of life that are incompat-
ible with it, and that it therefore cannot tolerate or accommodate. Indeed, the
more liberalism ethically demands of citizens, the less pluralism it can accom-
modate. In the specific case of virtue liberalism, the pluralist challenge amounts
to the claim that there are many ostensibly legitimate cultures, religions, and
ethical doctrines that reject the liberal virtues that proponents of virtue liberal-
ism insist must be inculcated for good citizenship and justice. As Macedo points
out, ways of life that, for example, emphasize “[q]uiet obedience, deference,
unquestioned devotion, and humility,” as well as ones marked by “stronger
forms of community” entailing “deeper, unquestioning, untroubled forms of
allegiance (to family, church, clan, or class),” cannot be easily reconciled with
the liberal virtues.24 Because of this, pluralists accuse virtue liberalism of being
intolerant and therefore oppressive of “reasonable” ways of life that are incom-
patible with it. This is ironic, of course: liberalism has long rested its moral
legitimacy on its unique ability to tolerate and peacefully accommodate a wide
diversity of ways to pursue the Good Life. Now it finds itself the target of the
very criticism that it has traditionally leveled at illiberal political ideologies.
Nevertheless, over the last three decades, liberal theorists have concluded that
ethical pluralism is a greater philosophical problem for liberalism than was
previously thought, and that liberal theory must be creatively reformulated to
deal with it.
The pluralist critique applies not only to virtue liberalism, which wears its
ethics on its sleeve, but even to the influential Kantian, proceduralist liberal
theories developed by philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and
Bruce Ackerman.25 Indeed, any contemporary theories that can be character-
ized as resembling the classic “Enlightenment theories of liberalism” have come
under suspicion. This category of theories, broadly construed, includes those of
Locke, Kant, Mill, and other thinkers who argue that human reason uniquely
justifies liberal ethics and politics. This confident Enlightenment conception of

is often modified by adjectives like “cultural,” “value,” or “ethical,” and I use these terms
interchangeably.
23 “Pluralism” is, of course, related to or even broadly synonymous with concepts like “multicul-
turalism,” “identity politics,” and “the politics of recognition.”
24 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 278–79.
25 Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed.
Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 114–34; Bruce Ackerman,
Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
Introduction 11

rationality “stresses its universality, that properly applied it yields that same
result for everyone, and that human reason thus tends to converge on the truth
in morals and politics as well as in science.”26 Because such rationality is sup-
posed to be possessed by all normal, adult human beings, proceduralist liberals
typically argue that liberal rights and political procedures that are based on it
are thereby neutral between different, legitimate conceptions of the Good Life,
and thus should be acceptable to all people (or at least to all who are properly
using their rational faculties). (Virtue liberalism, by contrast, does not bother
claiming any sort of neutrality, but rather boldly announces its ethical biases,
which is why many liberal theorists shy away from it – more on this in what
follows.)
Over the last century, however, the Enlightenment idea of universal human
reason has fallen on hard times.27 Through increased exposure to and conflict
with other ways of life, in conjunction with the growing prevalence of post-
modern doubts about Western civilization, Western intellectuals have come to
appreciate more deeply the cultural and ethical pluralism of our world. The
very idea of a universal rationality that justifies and leads us ineluctably to a
particular set of ethical and political practices – Western liberal democracy –
has come to seem naı̈ve, myopic, and, worst of all, dangerously ethnocentric.
Indeed, contemporary intellectuals routinely blame Enlightenment ideas for
many of the worst ills of the modern world, including: European colonial-
ism, the ravages of global capitalism, environmental devastation, the demise
of authentic communal life, antireligious bigotry, racism, sexism, and even the
Holocaust. In the face of renewed traditionalist critiques of liberalism from the
Right and postmodernist/postcolonialist critiques from the Left (and communi-
tarian critiques from both), many liberal intellectuals have lost confidence that
traditional liberal morality constitutes the uniquely legitimate basis for a just
political order. Indeed, many have even come to doubt that foundational tenet
of secular modernity: that natural science gives us the unbiased, true description
of reality.28 As Rorty observes, “Contemporary intellectuals have given up the
Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed
to something ahistorical, something common to all humans beings qua human.
Anthropologists and historians of science have blurred the distinction between
innate rationality and the products of acculturation.”29 Hence, obituaries for

26 Gerald Gaus, Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 5.

27 For a summary of contemporary critiques of Enlightenment thought and a spirited defense of it
on pragmatic grounds, see Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
28 Gaus, Contemporary Theories, 6–14. Gaus identifies three primary sources of the contempo-
rary challenge to the Enlightenment Project: social science, philosophy of science, and value-
pluralism.
29 ORT, 176.
12 Defending Rorty

the “Enlightenment Project” to rationally justify universal moral norms have

become commonplace over the last few decades.30
It has subsequently become de rigueur for contemporary liberal theorists
to denounce as culturally hegemonic all Enlightenment-style invocations of
universal reason to justify liberalism. Macedo observes that there seems to
be nothing “more damning in the realm of political theory these days than
the charge that a system of ideas ‘excludes’ or ‘marginalizes’ some group or
perspective, or that it effectively ‘silences’ certain ‘voices.’”31 In light of this, a
primary goal of much of the liberal theory produced in recent decades has been
to mute, or at least rework, the ethical substance of liberalism in order to render
it more properly accommodating of pluralism in our post-Enlightenment era.
On the one hand, this theoretical effort appears to be a logical continuation
of liberal evolution, since toleration of pluralism has always been a central goal
of liberalism; having its provenance in an early modern Europe traumatized
by religious warfare, liberal toleration is what enables individuals and groups
to live out their unique and multifarious life projects freely and peacefully
without interfering with each other. On the other hand, this heightened focus
on pluralism has resulted in a lot of new confusion about just what liberalism
stands for. After all, as Macedo challenges, “if liberalism stands for mere
toleration or an indiscriminate spirit of accommodation, then it stands for
everything, and it takes a stand for nothing.”32 Of course, liberal theorists
are not moral relativists (and Rorty joins Hume in asserting that no one is a
moral relativist in practice). To the contrary, they can and must take a stand on
which practices can be tolerated as legitimate exercises of “freedom” and which
ones will not be tolerated because they violate rights. But in light of the post-
Enlightenment challenge of pluralism, there seems to be no standard that we can
invoke that will enable us to make such judgments in an unbiased way that will
be acceptable to all “reasonable” people. Robert Talisse captures this “paradox
of liberalism”: “Liberal theorists are faced with a dilemma: Either provide a
robust normative account of the legitimacy of liberal democracy and thereby
frustrate social pluralism, or accommodate social pluralism and abandon the
aspiration for a cogent account of the legitimacy of [liberal] democracy.”33
In response to this dilemma, theorists have attempted to theorize an ethi-
cally “thin” liberalism that will be more acceptable to – because it demands
less from – a wider range of ethical views. The two most prominent attempts to

30 See, e.g., John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
Age (London: Routledge, 1995), and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
31 Stephen Macedo, “Review of Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflict,
by Donald Moon,” Political Theory 23 (May 1995), 389.
32 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 258.
33 Robert Talisse, Democracy After Pluralism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 9. I take the phrase “paradox of liberalism” from Jean Hampton, “Should
Political Philosophy Be Done Without Metaphysics?” Ethics 99 (July 1989), 803.
Introduction 13

minimize the ethical impact of liberalism go under the titles of “modus vivendi
liberalism” and “political liberalism.” Modus vivendi liberalism, as the name
implies, seeks merely peaceful and respectful political coexistence between dif-
ferent groups who live by incompatible ethical doctrines.34 By striving to be
ethically unpresumptuous and unambitious, it appears to maximize room for
a wider array of ethical pluralism.
Although it starts from an imperative to respect pluralism, combined with a
laudably humble and realistic ethical anti-perfectionism, modus vivendi liberal-
ism quickly reveals its flaws, and does so because of its contradictory theoretical
impulse to be a liberalism that is not liberal. The modus vivendi vision is of
a multicultural society in which diverse groups are permitted to live accord-
ing to their unique worldviews without interference from the state or other
groups. The liberal state ideally plays a fairly passive role as peacekeeper. In its
quest to be morally nonjudgmental, however, modus vivendi liberalism permits
groups to engage in internal practices that liberals typically find oppressive and
unjust. Chandran Kukathas, for example, is admirably frank when he admits
that “it is possible that under a [modus vivendi regime] some associations will
condone or uphold practices which are harmful to children – and to others in
those groups who are weak or vulnerable.”35 Kukathas, of course, does not
celebrate this, but rather believes that groups with oppressive practices will be
shamed and socially pressured into abandoning them by other groups since, in
his “tolerationist” view, it is inappropriate for the liberal state to interfere with
such practices. It is easy, however, to see why many liberals might not share
Kukathas’s faith in this solution, given the recalcitrance of some groups.
This raises the question: Is mere social peace between groups supposed
to amount to “justice,” or does modus vivendi liberalism require that we
give up on liberal justice because it entails a substantive vision of individual
freedom, equality, and dignity that illegitimately (“unjustly?”) discriminates
against certain forms of pluralism? If the latter, should we? After all, isn’t
the point of being a liberal to be a believer in equal human rights that put
restrictions on how groups can treat their members, regardless of whether they
are doing so in the name of “culture” or “tradition?” That is a lot for liberals
to give up in the name of “toleration of pluralism.”
Moreover, how do we determine what counts as a “group,” “culture,” “way
of life,” or other collective entity, which modus vivendi liberals invariably
invoke as their primary unit of political analysis (so as not to foist an ethic

34 See, e.g., Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984); Patrick Neal,
Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Chandran
Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stuart Hamp-
shire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); John Gray The
Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000); David McCabe, Modus Vivendi
Liberalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
35 Kukathas, Liberal Archipelago, 147.
14 Defending Rorty

of liberal individualism on the many collective entities that reject it)?36 This
question must be answered, since the aim of modus vivendi liberalism is to
respect the practices of diverse “groups.” Yet modus vivendi theorists fail to
address it adequately, typically waving it away with an unsatisfactory “you
know a cultural group when you see one.” John Gray, for example, concedes
without much discussion that “[w]hat counts as a way of life may not always
be decidable.”37 How, then, would we know if a modus vivendi is properly
tolerating pluralism?
Indeed, even if we could define the boundaries between different ways of life
to ensure that they mutually respect, or at least agree not to interfere with, one
another, history demonstrates that the “good fences make good neighbors”
approach of modus vivendi liberalism is not sustainable over time.38 Modus
vivendi liberals seem to believe that a “live and let live” ethic between different
“tribes” is a natural default, which is why a thicker, “hegemonic” liberal moral-
ity is not needed to ensure peace and noninterference. Historically, however,
the evidence for this is decidedly weak (by contrast, the discovery that relatively
liberalized communities do not fight wars against one another could be the most
important political revelation in human history).39 Furthermore, intercultural
interaction, both within and across state borders, is likely to intensify and
become more complex as globalization and technological development con-
tinue apace, and therefore an ever-thickening set of normative practices must
be developed in order for this interaction to remain peaceful and not result
in counterproductive political strife. If such normative practices, which are by
definition ethically homogenizing because they are shared, are not developed,
it is difficult to see how internecine “clashes of civilizations” are to be avoided.
Only ethically liberalized citizens are likely, for example, to adopt Thomas
Jefferson’s latitudinarian view that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to
say that there are twenty Gods or no God”40 ; without such liberalization,
Rousseau’s problematic view – “It is impossible to live in peace with people
one believes to be damned” – is unfortunately pervasive and destructive of

36 For a discussion of how difficult – if not practically impossible – it is to answer this question, see
Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). The problem, of course, is that the “boundaries” of any
cultural group are always contested by persons and subgroups who themselves identify with the
group. In reality, as opposed to in theory, who gets included or excluded as authentic members
of any group is always up for debate to one degree or another.
37 Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 11.
38 John Rawls highlights the intermittent religious wars of post-Reformation Europe to show that
modus vivendi arrangements that are not based on a shared morality are unstable. Only with
the development of liberal societies is lasting peace (hopefully) achieved (Political Liberalism,
148).
39 See, e.g., Michael W, Doyle, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2011).
40 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, in The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, ed. A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh (Washington, DC, 1905), vol. 2, 221.
Introduction 15

politics.41 Hence, even at first blush, modus vivendi liberalism flirts both with
permitting oppressive practices within groups in the name of toleration, and
also with political fragmentation and potentially dangerous conflict between
groups (however defined) because it aims to preserve, rather than transform
and reconcile, their very different, incompatible ways of life.
Notice also that modus vivendi liberalism typically slips the term “respect-
ful” in as a modifier to describe the tolerant relations between the different
parties. Modus vivendi liberalism does not allow for just any type of peaceful
coexistence, for this would condone a peace secured through the domination
of weaker groups by stronger ones. Modus vivendi liberalism insists that there
are normative rules – not backed by mere force – that bind the behavior of the
parties toward one another.42 But the application of these rules, which deter-
mine the legitimate interactions between the pluralistic parties, is something
that must be perpetually negotiated in the face of changing circumstances. In
other words, the parties to the modus vivendi order must possess the qualities
and ethical wherewithal to engage in civil political deliberation with each other
to “respectfully” resolve disagreements over the terms of the modus vivendi.
At this point, the modus vivendi, if it is to remain successfully “respectful”
over time, necessitates the development of a much more ethically substantive
form of liberal politics and practices. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the ethically barebones modus vivendi liberalism is simply a minimalist the-
oretical abstraction that obscures the normatively thick practices and habits
the parties must develop to ensure that their interaction remains peaceful and
productive. Modus vivendi liberalism’s attempt to remain ethically “thin” and
“low impact” does not work in practice.43
Despite its theoretical sophistication, “political liberalism” faces a simi-
lar problem.44 Heralded as an impressively novel approach to conceptual-
izing liberalism, political liberalism attempts to split the difference between

41 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. A. Ritter and
J.C. Bondanella (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1988), 172.
42 See, e.g., Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 107–09.
43 Richard Dagger reaches a similar conclusion in his review of David McCabe’s recent book,
Modus Vivendi Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Dagger observes that although
McCabe purports to offer a “thin” liberalism that accommodates greater pluralism, he also
requires citizens to be committed to “moral equality” and a “common political system,” which
are ethical demands that are “too strong for McCabe’s modest liberalism to qualify as a modus
vivendi. To this objection McCabe could well respond that what he has in mind is not merely a
modus vivendi but a liberal modus vivendi. Such a response, however, raises further problems.
To begin with, is the idea of a liberal modus vivendi even coherent?” (Richard Dagger, “Review
of Modus Vivendi Liberalism: Theory and Practice, by David McCabe,” Social Theory and
Practice 38, 2 [April 2012], 380–81). Exactly.
44 Prominent theories of political liberalism include: John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996); Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Donald Moon, Constructing Community: Moral Plural-
ism and Tragic Conflicts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
16 Defending Rorty

substantively ethical liberalism and the ostensibly thin modus vivendi version.
It does this by distinguishing between a liberal political morality, which governs
political activity, and comprehensive ethical doctrines, by which citizens live
their private, nonpolitical lives. The key idea is that acceptance of a “merely
political” liberal morality does not ethically demand much of citizens, and
hence does not imperialistically require them to change their diverse, perhaps
nonliberal, private ethical commitments. John Rawls describes this political
morality as “freestanding” because it is not grounded in any particular com-
prehensive ethical doctrine, but is rather culled from values that are implicit in
the democratic public culture that most citizens already accept as legitimate.45
It is crucial that the political morality not be based on any particular com-
prehensive doctrine because this would disrespect the freedom and equality of
citizens who subscribe to other comprehensive doctrines. In other words, insist-
ing that citizens accept a comprehensive liberal ethical doctrine – like those of
Kant or Mill – fails to justly accommodate pluralism. Political liberalism avoids
this by suggesting that all “reasonable” citizens will be able to form an “over-
lapping consensus” on a freestanding liberal conception of justice for society,
even as they continue to disagree profoundly about what constitutes a Good
Life. We can thus picture political liberal society as a Venn diagram, with many
ovals representing reasonable ethical doctrines that are incompatible in many
or most respects, but which nevertheless all overlap on the values that make
up the political conception of liberal justice.
Rawls claims that this freestanding theory of politics accommodates wide
ethical pluralism because it “deliberately stays on the surface, philosophi-
cally speaking,”46 and leaves “untouched all kinds of doctrines – religious,
metaphysical, and moral,” by which citizens live their lives.47 Thus, while lib-
eral citizens must accept one another as free and equal (i.e., must be liberal)
when they participate in democratic politics, their private associations, such
as churches, clubs, and families, can remain hierarchical and ethically nonlib-
eral. John Tomasi concludes: “If the political face of liberalism can indeed be
detached from any particular comprehensive view of moral life, then political
liberalism may prove to be more accommodating than even the most capacious
variant of ethical liberalism.”48
The problem with this approach is that, as Macedo recognized long ago,
the commitment to liberalism cannot be separated from ethics in this way, and
that political liberalism therefore borders on disingenuousness:
Liberal political principles do not “stay on the surface”, and their consequences cannot
be confined to a particular sphere of our lives. Politics is the final recourse for people who

45 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 8, 13–14.

46 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs
14 (Summer 1985), 246.
47 Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” in Political Liberalism, 375.
48 John Tomasi, Beyond Liberal Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8.
Introduction 17

cannot agree. People who disagree about religious beliefs or other commitments must
regard common political principles as regulative of all their interactions with others.
Liberalism requires, therefore, not merely an overlapping consensus but a consensus
that practically overrides all competing values.49

It is in Rawls’s liberal, democratically deliberative public sphere, after all,

that the line between what will be tolerated and what won’t be is continually
determined; comprehensive doctrines with their associated practices are thereby
judged and approved, or disapproved, by liberal “political” morality. Macedo
hammers home the point that in order for liberal political values to be accepted,
citizens’ comprehensive views must be “importantly liberalized,” and “liberal
values must be internalized by citizens.”50
Indeed, even Rawls acknowledges that, “In order to fulfill their political
role, citizens are viewed as having the intellectual and moral powers appropri-
ate to that role, such as the capacity for a sense of political justice given by
a liberal conception and a capacity to form, follow, and revise their individ-
ual doctrines of the good, and capable also of the political virtues necessary
for them to cooperate in maintaining a just political society.”51 In various
places in the text of Political Liberalism, Rawls informs us that the “political
virtues” include: reasonableness, a sense of fairness, toleration, civility, a spirit
of compromise, mutual respect, willingness to listen to other views, and politi-
cal moderation.52 Suddenly, political liberalism does not look so ethically “low
impact” now. Nevertheless, Rawls insists that because we are only required to
exhibit these virtues in the public sphere, they need not deeply affect our private
lives.
Yet, as Rob Reich notes, Rawls says next to nothing about how these req-
uisite political virtues are developed and sustained.53 Indeed, Amy Gutmann
convincingly argues that a fairly comprehensive liberal education and socializa-
tion are necessary for the development of Rawlsian political virtues.54 It is no
coincidence that this is the same process that produces ethically, not just polit-
ically, liberal persons. If this is correct, then it seems that political liberalism,
like its modus vivendi cousin, theoretically obscures its ethical impact while
failing in practice to live up to its aspiration to accommodate more plural-
ism. After all, it is just such liberal education and socialization that nonliberal
groups, many of which Rawls ostensibly imagines he can accommodate, typi-
cally reject as antithetical to their way of life. Macedo’s analysis of the ethical
demands of liberal politics seems much more plausible, and other critics have

49 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 53.

50 Ibid., 55.
51 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlvi–xlvii.
52 Ibid., 122, 157, 163, 194, 217, 224, 247.
53 Rob Reich, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 44.
54 Amy Gutmann, “Civic Education and Social Diversity” Ethics 105 (April 1995), 557–79.
18 Defending Rorty

accused Rawls’s theory of requiring citizens who are not ethically liberal to
be ethically schizophrenic: they must turn on their liberalism one moment (in
politics) and can turn it off the next (in private).55 Not only is it questionable
whether this is psychologically possible, but as Eamonn Callan argues, it is also
difficult to square with personal integrity.56
Nonliberal thinkers, and religious intellectuals in particular, corroborate
Macedo’s damning charge against political liberalism that the distinction on
which it depends – between the political conception of morality and comprehen-
sive ethical doctrines – is false.57 Christian intellectual and critic of liberalism,
Nicholas Wolterstorff, for example, accuses political liberalism of being a lib-
eral Trojan Horse: political liberals are surreptitious about the arduous ethical
commitments that are practically entailed by their theory.58 This suspicious
reaction is, of course, a problem for political liberalism, since its whole raison
d’être is to extend an olive branch and make liberalism more acceptable to
citizens, like Wolterstorff, who live by nonliberal comprehensive doctrines.
Both modus vivendi liberalism and political liberalism fail on their own
terms: in order for their respective political arrangements to be successful and
sustainable, they require citizens to develop an extensive set of ethical traits that
have a deep impact on our private conceptions of the Good. These minimalist
theories of liberalism seem to assume that the sort of critical (liberal) toleration
of pluralism that they demand of citizens is a natural, transcultural default
for human beings. This is what allegedly makes this ethical requirement of
minimalist liberalism so widely acceptable. But this assumption is flawed; in
practice, liberal toleration requires a very specific and historically rare ethical
outlook. If Rawlsians, in particular, were to do the anthropology, they would
likely learn that there are many more pertinent comprehensive doctrines that
fail to meet political liberalism’s bar of “reasonableness” than perhaps they
had imagined. One hint that Rawlsian “reasonableness” is not as broadly
possessed as Rawls’s rhetoric would lead us to believe is revealed in his famous
“abortion footnote.” In it, Rawls tells us that “any reasonable balance of
these three values [respect for human life, ordered reproduction of political
society, and the equality of women] will give a woman a duly qualified right

55 Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), 197; Meira Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 17; Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal
Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31.
56 Callan, Creating Citizens, 31.
57 See, e.g., Paul J. Weithman, ed., Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (Notre Dame, IN:
Notre Dame University Press, 1997); Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (NewYork:
Basic Books, 1993); Michael J. Perry, Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
58 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking
and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons,” in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, ed.
Weithman, 176–77.
Introduction 19

to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first semester.”59 As
commentators are quick to point out, Rawls’s theory apparently holds a great
many of his fellow citizens – all who are “pro-life” – to be unreasonable, and
thus cannot accommodate their comprehensive doctrines. When push comes
to shove, the ethical “thinness” that both political liberal and modus vivendi
liberal theories attempt to achieve is necessarily a mirage.
Liberal theorists would do better to scrap these efforts to theorize an ethically
thin liberalism and to fess up to their ethical commitments (as virtue liberals
do). Every politics presumes an ethics that will be experienced as oppressive
by those who live ways of life that are ethically incompatible with it; the only
way to ensure that the political community’s pluralism properly supports one’s
preferred politics (liberalism, in our case) is to plan for it. Macedo rightly
admonishes the minimalist approach to liberalism:
In the quest for reasonable consensus amidst diversity, liberals have a tendency to
minimize the broad and deep implications of liberal politics. Reticence in spelling out
the controversial implications of liberalism could lead to the embrace of a liberal false
consciousness. Beginning from a desire to respect reasonable persons, public justification
could become liberal hoodwinking, and “political” liberalism could come to rest on a
noble fib.60

The misconception of the ethical requirements of liberalism can have dire real-
world consequences, as the West tries to encourage the developing world to
adopt liberal democratic government. If we obfuscate or fail to understand the
ethical character that citizens must possess in order for liberal democracy to
work, then we might make the mistake of imagining that liberal democracy is
simply a matter of having a set of procedures and institutions, for example,
elections and a written constitution. While most of us recognize that, for exam-
ple, merely holding free elections is not sufficient to qualify a regime as liberal
democratic, the deeper sociological and cultural bases of liberal democracy are
less well understood. Minimalist liberal theory exacerbates our ignorance by
denying that these bases exist, or should exist.
Eric MacGilvray concurs with this judgment, observing that in contem-
porary liberal theory, the “tyranny of [ethical] minimalism has . . . tended to
stifle creative thinking about the substantive challenges that we face.”61 These
challenges are real and are arguably growing, as Fouad Ajami recognizes in
a timely article in the New York Times.62 Ajami, originally a preeminent lib-
eral critic of Samuel Huntington’s famous “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, now
concedes that this thesis is more compelling than ever, and joins Huntington’s
concern about whether liberal democracies have “the will and coherence” to

59 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 243, n. 32.

60 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 45.
61 Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004), 24.
62 Fouad Ajami, “The Clash,” New York Times, online edition, January 6, 2008.
20 Defending Rorty

meet the challenges nonliberal cultures present to them. Similarly, New York
Times columnist David Brooks worries about liberalism’s ability to defend
itself, both ideologically and militarily, in the face of what Walter Russell
Mead calls the “return of geopolitics.” Brooks observes that “[t]he liberal plu-
ralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing,” and while “people will
die for Mother Russia and Allah,” people do not appear to have that sort
of attachment to liberal pluralism.63 We need liberal theory that is ethically
robust enough to bolster liberalism’s “will and coherence,” and inspire peo-
ple to defend it against its enemies. Rorty’s virtue liberalism fits the bill by
insisting on the ebullient romantic potential of the liberal way of life while, of
course, avoiding unreflective political enthusiasm or jingoism, as any liberalism
must.
Ironically, if one listens closely enough, one can detect in minimalist lib-
eral theory echoes of the traditional Enlightenment premise that human reason
naturally tends toward liberal morality. Minimalist liberals actually double
down on the Enlightenment Project in the sense that they still want philos-
ophy to deliver a “neutral” or “impartial” set of principles or procedures
to which all intelligent, “reasonable” people will agree.64 In order to ren-
der these principles and procedures more acceptable to a greater range of
pluralism, they have resorted to making their theories ever more abstract,
thereby obscuring what they mean for practice. They thus continue to make
the error that G.E.M. Anscombe famously identified in her classic 1958 article,
“Modern Moral Philosophy,” which resurrected interest in virtue ethics among
moral philosophers.65 Her Wittgensteinian critique of the abstract, procedural-
ist forms of modern moral philosophy (deontology and utilitarianism) argues
that a coherent, meaningful ethics must incorporate a substantive notion of
human flourishing; there is simply no way to avoid it. After all, what else could
justify any particular set of principles and rules? Furthermore, principles and
rules do not apply themselves. They only have meaning, and can therefore
only govern action coherently, when they are applied in historical, communal
context by agents who possess the relevant dispositions and knowledge (both
explicit and tacit) that come with sharing what Wittgenstein calls a “form of

63 David Brooks, “Saving the System,” New York Times, April 29, 2014, A23.
64 Indeed, John Gray accuses Rawls’s political liberalism of being a species of Enlightenment
liberalism, and we might wonder whether Rawls has simply replaced the Enlightenment-tainted
term “rationality” with the softer sounding “reasonableness,” without really changing the
practical effect of his commitment to liberalism (Two Faces, 137). Yet Gray’s modus vivendi
liberalism also relies on universally identified and accepted “minimal standards of decency and
legitimacy” that rule out practices that engender “universal evils” (109). Gray insists that these
minimal standards do not amount to a full-fledged liberal morality. Again, my argument is
that convergence on an ethically thick set of practices between parties to a modus vivendi is
inevitable if it is to remain “decent and legitimate” over time. If one is a liberal, then one must
insist that this thick set of practices be liberal.
65 G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, 124 (1958), 1–19.
Introduction 21

life.”66 Kant’s well-known suggestion that even a race of devils can achieve a
just society if the right procedures and institutions are put into place is, on this
account, incorrect.67 Procedures ultimately depend on the virtue of the agents
who participate in them, agents who are themselves formed by the thick ethical
traditions in which they find themselves. As Chantal Mouffe wisely observes,
“Procedures always involve substantial ethical commitments. For that reason
they cannot work properly if they are not supported by a specific form of
ethos.”68 Thus, discussion of virtue, liberal community, and the liberal ethos
cannot be avoided by resorting to proceduralism or abstract principles.
Unfortunately, much contemporary liberal theory seeks to avoid these sub-
stantive topics so as not appear intolerant, and therefore oppressive, impe-
rialistic, and ethnocentric. This is why ethically robust theories of liberalism
make today’s liberal theorists squirm. This is why Robert Frost’s famous quip
that a liberal is someone who cannot take his own side in an argument seems
increasingly apt when applied to these theorists. If one can keep the ethical
substance of one’s theory fuzzy, then one can more easily achieve the goal of
appearing theoretically capacious and generously accommodating of pluralism.
This rhetorical move, however, comes at the price of rendering theory indeter-
minate, and thus less useful for helping us face practical challenges – the very
point of theorizing in the first place.

Richard Rorty: Virtue Liberalism Theorist?

Future intellectual historians will probably remark that the late twentieth cen-
tury’s rush among liberal theorists to empty liberalism of its ethical content
was a predictable reaction to America’s triumphalist close to her century. The
“end of history” was reached and our ideological foes were proved wrong.
Liberal theorists could afford to manufacture decadent theories that assume
the liberal “reasonableness” of just about all worldviews. Although bashing
the liberal tradition is a hallowed habit of the liberal tradition, many liberal
theorists now take it to an extreme, even to the point of eschewing the liberal
label. Rorty, thankfully, resists this trend.
His strategy in the teeth of the pluralist dilemma is to advise us to give
up the traditional philosophical quest for neutral foundations for liberalism
and to boldly admit that liberalism is indeed “ethnocentric”: an idiosyncratic,
parochial cultural development of Enlightenment Europe, and no less defen-
sible for being that. For Rorty, the liberal way of life is an ethically thick,
historically contingent set of practices, and we have just lucked out, so far as
we can tell, that the Enlightenment bequeathed it to us. When asked why he is

66 See, e.g., John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62, 3 (1979), 331–50.
67 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans S. Reiss, trans. H. B.
Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 112–13.
68 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 69.
22 Defending Rorty

morally committed to this bizarre fluke of history called “liberal democracy,”

Rorty issues the Churchillian reply: while liberal democracy certainly has its
flaws, when one compares it to all the other systems that have been tried, it
clearly comes out the best in practice in terms of peace, humaneness, cultural
innovation, and material prosperity.69 This is, of course, an explicitly antithe-
oretical reply, because there is no final theoretical, non-questioning-begging
justification for liberalism.
Unlike Enlightenment liberals, Rorty thus has no use for appeals to univer-
sal human reason or rationality; what counts as “rational” for any particular
community is just the historically contingent, but currently most widely jus-
tified, set of criteria to which members of the community refer in the face of
disputes. On Rorty’s account, we justify liberal politics and culture by making
“one feature of our culture look good by citing still another, or comparing
our culture invidiously with others by reference to our own standards.”70 We
also tell plausible Whiggish historical narratives to show modern liberalism’s
progressive development.71 In Rorty’s view, “Social and political philosophy
usually has been, and always ought to be, parasitic on such narratives” because
the most effective social criticism always refers “to a story about what had
happened and what we might reasonably hope could happen in the future.”72
As good humanities teachers stress to their students, the best, most nuanced
critique of tradition emerges from a deep comprehension and appreciation
of it.
But does his pragmatic disavowal of the traditional, Enlightenment-style
attempt to justify liberalism philosophically make him a virtue liberal? Indeed,
Rorty never refers to himself as a virtue theorist, and hanging this label on
him invites two obvious objections. The first is that, not only does he endorse
Rawls’s political liberalism; he even refers to his own conception of liberalism
as “minimalist!”73 Fortunately, these inconveniences are not as damning to
my thesis as they first appear (as, indeed, they should not be if we take to
heart Rorty’s teaching about the potential of pragmatic, ironic redescription!).
I discuss Rorty’s relationship to Rawls in Chapter 2 and explain why, notwith-
standing his professed allegiance to political liberalism, he staunchly remains a
virtue liberal. Here it suffices to say that Rorty does not share with Rawls the
(misguided) aim of minimizing the ethical impact of the commitment to liberal
politics. Indeed, Rorty’s adoption of the minimalist label is also unproblematic
for my claim that he is a virtue liberal, because he applies the term to the

69 ORT, 29; PSH, 273.

70 CIS, 57.
71 PSH, 231.
72 Ibid., 231–32.
73 See, Richard Rorty, “In Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” in Debating Democracy’s Discon-
tent: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy, ed. Anita L. Allen and Milton
C. Regan, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117–25.
Introduction 23

purported philosophical or metaphysical foundations that theorists attempt to

identify as a basis for liberal morality, not to the ethical substance of liber-
alism. His pragmatic conception of liberalism minimizes or does away with
such alleged foundations. He does not, however, think that liberal practices
and procedures must be ethically “minimalist,” as modus vivendi and political
liberals do; to the contrary, he them takes to be “thick” and shot through with
ethical content. As he does in other areas of his thought, Rorty here follows his
philosophical hero, John Dewey: liberal democracy is a “way of life” that is
incompatible with other ways of life that do not share its ethical commitments.
Moreover, in spite of the fact that Rorty misleadingly refers to himself
as both a “minimalist” and a Rawlsian political liberal, his work contains
an abundance of lines that support a virtue liberal reading – for example,
“Whereas the liberal metaphysician thinks that the good liberal knows certain
crucial propositions to be true, the liberal ironist [Rorty’s position] thinks
the good liberal has a certain kind of know-how.”74 Another typical, virtue-
oriented passage:

We can just say that you get more reflective people, people better suited for the responsi-
bilities of self-government, whenever you provide more education, security, and leisure.
This is not a philosophical point, but just the empirical observation that people who
enjoy more of these three goods are better able to consider alternative scenarios for their
personal futures, and for the futures of their societies. They are more patient, tolerant,
and imaginative, and so are better citizens of a democracy.75

My argument is that passages like this best capture the meaning of Rorty’s
liberalism.
Nevertheless, there remains the second objection, which is the fact that,
unlike the liberal virtue theorists mentioned earlier, Rorty does not systemat-
ically list and analyze a set of liberal virtues that democratic citizens should
possess. Instead, all we get from Rorty is occasional, casual mentions of desir-
able liberal character traits, for example: “Producing generations of nice, tol-
erant, well-off, secure, other-respecting students of this sort [who are earnestly
concerned to be morally inclusive] in all parts of the world is just what is
needed – indeed, all that is needed – to achieve an Enlightenment utopia.”76
Rorty’s failure to be systematic, however, should not blind us to the fact that
his conception of liberalism crucially relies on a set of virtues that are implied
throughout his discussions of liberalism; such occasional, casual passages thus
lie at the very heart of Rorty’s vision of liberal modernity. Moreover, key to this
vision is one character trait that he does explicitly examine and endorse: prag-
matic liberal irony, which we will examine more closely in Chapter 2. It is also
clear that, for Rorty, the cultivation of irony occurs through comprehensive

74 CIS, 93.
75 Rorty, “In Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” 119.
76 TP, 179.
24 Defending Rorty

liberal education. Therefore, liberal education, and the virtues and knowledge
it instills, are essential to Rorty’s liberalism.
Rorty’s pragmatic emphasis on the practical upshot of ideas puts his whole
project directly in the service of liberal ethics and politics; further, it is his
pragmatic “atheoreticism,” to use Kai Nielsen’s term, that makes him best
understood as virtue liberal. Because he is primarily concerned with the char-
acter of liberal citizens, Rorty does not theorize liberal democratic politics
in the conventional way. He does not specify and defend a schedule of lib-
eral rights; he does not theorize democratic deliberation; he does not offer a
detailed description of ideal political procedures or institutions. He recognizes,
of course, that rights and democratic institutions are needful for a successful
liberal society. He just does not think that traditional philosophy, whether in
the form of a search for metaphysical first principles or the analysis of con-
cepts, can achieve its goal of identifying the necessary, rationally irrefutable
foundations of liberalism. Liberalism is best defended by its experimental suc-
cess relative to other political systems. This is why Rorty begins his discussion
of liberalism in media res, to use a favorite pragmatist tag: starting from his
admittedly advantaged location in the economically developed, politically sta-
ble, liberal democratic United States, he assumes that the citizens of his and
similarly situated countries already have a scheme of liberal rights and more
or less functional democratic political institutions in place. The challenge is
to improve them, and our ability to make progress depends on the character,
knowledge, and talents of the citizenry. Hence, Rorty offers a vision of an ideal
liberal society whose inhabitants have embraced his pragmatism and its asso-
ciated habits of mind. Such historically situated, ethically socialized beings are
the “foundation” of Rorty’s philosophically anti-foundationalist liberalism. He
suggests that a society that contains such people, along with the liberal demo-
cratic institutions they would demand, will be better and more humanely able
to solve the problems it faces, and will be a more interesting and exciting place
to live. Construing Rorty’s project as ultimately an exhortation to cultivate the
liberal virtues renders his work more pertinent to liberal politics and culture. It
also makes his understanding of liberalism more defensible against his legion
critics, many of whom chastise Rorty for failing to offer a theory of liberalism
at all.
Thus, the starting point for my engagement with Rorty’s opus is his con-
ception of “liberal utopia.” The phrase itself, as Rorty well recognizes, is an
oxymoron. A utopian society, as it is usually imagined, presents a perfect,
unchanging, political and cultural ideal: citizens of utopia have finally got the
sociopolitical order right! Central to liberalism, however, is the suspicion that
utopian blueprints of ultimate political harmony are unrealistic and inevitably
oppressive. Therefore, liberals eschew such detailed blueprints, especially ones
that are imposed from the top down, and insist that societal power should
be dispersed, and that society’s patterns must be open-ended and subject to
perpetual negotiation among liberal citizens.
Introduction 25

Fortunately, Rorty has no intention of challenging – and instead actu-

ally embraces – this historically hard-won liberal political wisdom. He fully
endorses the sentiments of Isaiah Berlin expressed in a celebrated passage of
“Two Concepts of Liberty”:

Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the
very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven
is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our
primitive past. “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions,” said an admirable
writer of our time, “and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized
man from a barbarian.” To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable
metaphysical need of a deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.77

Berlin’s gist here is at the core of Rorty’s project.78 In contrast to a picture of

political perfection, the “pragmatist utopia is thus not one in which human
nature has been unshackled, but one in which everybody has had a chance to
suggest ways in which we might cobble together a world (or Galactic) society,
and in which all such suggestions have been thrashed out in free and open
encounters.”79
Rorty’s use of the term “utopia” is one of his patented rhetorical flourishes,
to be sure, but with a point: it serves to emphasize the paramount capacity of
moral imagination, motivated by social hope, that good liberal citizens must
bring to the democratic public sphere. As he pragmatically does with other
metaphysically fraught terms, he deflates “utopia,” rendering it a reasonable,
if still optimistic, tool: “The only way we can criticize current social rules is by
reference to utopian notions which proceed by taking elements in the tradition
and showing how unfulfilled they are.”80 Likewise, he reconceptualizes the
philosophical gold standard of Enlightenment thought – “rationality” – from
a method of thought or a fixed set of criteria into “a set of moral virtues:
tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen,
reliance on persuasion rather than force. There are the virtues which members
of a civilized society must possess if the society is to endure.”81 Rorty is best
understood as a virtue liberal because he is a pragmatist: his primary concern
is with what practical habits and character traits are needed to produce his
liberal utopia.

77 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 172. The
“admirable writer” whom Berlin quotes but does not cite is economist Joseph A. Schumpeter.
Schumpeter’s quotation can be found in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed.
(New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 243.
78 For Rorty’s appropriation of Berlin, see CIS, 45–54.
79 ORT, 213.
80 Wayne Hudson and Wim van Reijen, “From Philosophy to Postphilosophy,” Interview with
Richard Rorty, in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with
Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 25.
81 ORT, 37.
26 Defending Rorty

Conclusion
“Why Rorty?” My attendance at the conference I mentioned at the begin-
ning of this Introduction did exactly what it should do: made me think harder
about my ideas and positions. The great German idealist, Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, once observed that, “What sort of philosophy one chooses depends,
therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a
dead piece of furniture that we accept or reject as we wish; it is rather a
thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.”82 In this vein he
anticipated, most famously, both William James and Nietzsche: James insists
that one’s “temperament,” rather than the strength of argument, determines
one’s philosophy,83 and Nietzsche intimates that, “Gradually it has become
clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the per-
sonal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious
memoir.”84
If these observations are true – and I think there is something to them –
then my attraction to Rorty as a philosophical beacon finds me somewhat
unsettled. After all, as Richard Rumana painstakingly documented back in
2002, responses to Rorty’s work, which number in the thousands, have been
overwhelmingly negative.85 John Horton concurs, writing that Rorty has been
the convenient “whipping boy” of his legion critics:
Conservatives demonize him as a threat to civilization as we know it; Marxists and
other political radicals deplore what they see as his complacent and uncritical defense
of American capitalism; postmodernists disdain his shallowness compared with the
arcane profundities of their European gurus; analytical philosophers shake their heads
sadly at a good man gone to the bad; and the leading liberal theorists for the most
part studiedly ignore him. Moreover, the intensity of the hostility which has often been
directed towards him is unusual in contemporary philosophy.86

82 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 [1794/95]), 16.
83 William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1981), 8.
84 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 13.
85 Richard Rumana, Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature (New
York: Rodopi, 2002), ix. Fortunately, I do find myself in good company, even if we are few in
number. I have learned much from the more positive – and more fair, from my perspective –
but not uncritical assessments of scholars like Alan Malachowski, Christopher Voparil, and
Michael Bacon. See Alan Malachowski, Richard Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002); Christopher J. Voparil, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Lanham, MD: Row-
man & Littlefield Publishers, 2006); Michael Bacon, Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political
Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
86 John Horton, “Irony and Commitment: An Irreconcilable Dualism of Modernity,” in RRCD,
15.
Introduction 27

Rorty’s old friend and critic, Richard J. Bernstein, remarked in 2006 that
he was “still amazed to discover how much venom Rorty brings out in his
opponents.”87
Thus, taking on the task of defending Rorty is not only an uphill intellectual
battle but perhaps even comes at the risk of outing myself as someone of
bizarre temperament! Nevertheless, I must confess that the reason Rorty has
a draw for me is that his work embodies the right balance of the paradoxes
of human experience. His brand of pragmatism beautifully – if, of course, not
entirely harmoniously – combines: an Oakeshottian gratitude for the present
with a Nietzschean compulsion to overcome it; a deep, learned appreciation
of Western civilization with a sharp understanding that it is contingent and
parochial; a pessimism about human cruelty with an unflagging hope for a
utopian future in which “love is pretty much the only law”88 ; an appreciation
that tragedy is inevitable, but a belief that progress is possible (or, on a further
variation that Rorty cribs from Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism
of the will”). Rorty’s pragmatism features a theoretical modesty that both
tempers the would-be revolutionary’s hubristic fervor to remake the world,
but also suffers no cultural sacred cows that would be immune to critique and
ironic redescription. It is a liberalism that pragmatically balances cultural and
economic egalitarianism with the individual’s need (felt by some, at least) to
creatively construct one’s own unique identity and life. As we will see, Bernstein
criticizes Rorty’s liberalism for being merely inspirational, suggesting that it is
therefore superficial. But Bernstein wrongly dismisses the value of inspiration,
for it is exactly in search of such inspirational meaning that we ultimately
turn to the humanities, which enable us to better understand and create our
individual and communal identities, and help us know what our dreams can
and should be and how to set about achieving them. Because Rorty brilliantly
shows us how liberal modernity hangs together, his work is indeed inspiring in
the best sense of the humanities.
After describing Rorty’s pragmatism in Chapter 1, and his virtue liberalism
in Chapter 2, I proceed in Chapter 3 to discuss critiques of Rorty’s liberal-
ism launched from political thinkers on the Right, like Jean Bethke Elshtain,
and the Left, like Bernstein and Nancy Fraser. As Rorty himself notes, those
on the Right attack his thought for being dangerously frivolous, while those
on the Left chastise him for his merely conventional social democratic politics.
Conservatives blanche at his subversion of traditional notions of Knowledge
and Truth, while radicals fume that he does not carry this subversiveness over

87 Richard J. Bernstein, “Response to Nancy K. Frankenberry,” in The Pragmatic Century: Con-

versations with Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney and Warren G. Frisina (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2006), 100–01.
88 Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 40.
28 Defending Rorty

to the realm of politics. Rorty’s response to the former is that their belief in
absolute answers stifles the liberal imagination; his response to the latter is
that liberal egalitarianism is the most effective way to address social injustice,
and that “radical” political theorizing tends to be impractical and impertinent.
Rorty insists that the most plausible path to a “just society” is to continue to
creatively participate in and deepen our society’s liberal political project. He
offers us a compelling alternative to the conservatives’ fear of innovation and
progress, on the one hand, and to the radicals’ disdain for the bourgeoisie and
impatience with liberalism, on the other.
In Chapter 4, I analyze and extend one of contemporary philosophy’s most
interesting dialogues, one that began more than three decades ago between
Rorty and his world-renowned Canadian counterpart, philosopher Charles
Taylor. In Taylor, we have an equally learned thinker who has very different
philosophical instincts from Rorty, and who thus presents a deep challenge to
Rorty’s vision. Writing this chapter was – not to parody an important Taylo-
rian concept – “epiphanic” for me. There are few contemporary philosophers
whose intellectual interests are as wide-ranging as Rorty’s and Taylor’s, and
they each in their own work knowledgeably discuss and creatively relate an
astounding array of philosophical and literary figures, many of them in com-
mon (indeed, the sheer erudition of Rorty’s and Taylor’s respective writings
is why they are so exhilarating to peruse). What is enlightening, and perhaps
unsurprising given the depth and consistency of both men’s views, is that
their interpretive disagreements about these figures reflect the more fundamen-
tal differences between their philosophies. Contrasting, for example, Rorty’s
Gadamer with Taylor’s Gadamer exposes these differences; not only do we
gain new, and sometimes conflicting, insights into Gadamer’s thought, but
we also gain a deeper understanding of Rorty’s and Taylor’s philosophical
projects in relation to one another. Indeed, one could write a fascinating book
composed of chapters each comparing and contrasting Rorty’s and Taylor’s
separate takes on a different seminal thinker, for example, Aristotle, Heideg-
ger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Davidson, McDowell, Brandom, Foucault, James,
Rawls, and so on. As I argue in Chapter 4, the real difference between Rorty
and Taylor is that Taylor, despite his concessions to the historical contingency
of politics and culture, remains attracted to an essentialist view of human
experience. For Rorty, this means Taylor suffers from a failure of imagination
about human possibility, and thereby gives philosophical ammunition to the
authoritarian impulse to rule out potential liberal ethical experimentation. This
“sin of essentialism” is, of course, precisely what Rorty’s pragmatism aims to
eradicate.
Chapter 5 discusses Rorty’s evolving view of religion and its relation to lib-
eral politics. Initially in his work, Rorty expressed a deep suspicion of religious
belief because of its acceptance of a nonhuman, supernatural authority. He
insisted that such beliefs are incompatible with pragmatic liberalism, which
requires that the only moral authority we should recognize is the evolving,
deliberative consensus of liberal citizens. Later in his career, however, after
Introduction 29

debates with interlocutors such as Jeffrey Stout, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and

Gianni Vattimo, Rorty appears to modify and soften his position on religion.
He comes to claim that he is primarily “anticlerical” rather than anti-religion,
which means that he is critical not so much of religious belief, but rather of
religious institutions that aspire to wield authority over believers and urge them
to take illiberal political positions. Even more intriguing, some commentators
noticed that Rorty began using religious language in his descriptions of his
hopes for American democracy. As we shall see, however, there remains a
tension in Rorty’s thinking on this score, and claims that Rorty makes a pro-
religion “turn” are exaggerated. Rorty’s commitment to deep humanism keeps
him suspicious of all belief in nonhuman authorities. His endorsement of the
spiritual artistic tradition of the American Sublime as a romantic inspiration
for our liberal democratic future does not contravene his anti-authoritarian
suspicions of traditional religion.
Chapter 6 explores similarities in the thought of Aldous Huxley with Rorty’s
pragmatic liberalism. Although he is known primarily as a novelist, Huxley
published hundreds of essays in intellectual magazines and in the popular press
on a variety of topics of cultural concern. I argue that Huxley’s thought shares
much in common with American pragmatism, and that his social criticism –
regardless of whether Rorty would agree with his specific positions and con-
cerns – is of the sort that a Rortyan ironic intellectual would produce. Huxley’s
critical activity is, of course, also prominent in his fiction, where his peerless
satirical skills are amply on display. While Brave New World provides a keen
example of a novel that teems with ethical and political ideas that challenge the
liberal mind, this chapter instead focuses on one of Huxley’s less well-known
works: his novel, Island. In Island, Huxley depicts his conception of a just
society. I argue that, since Huxley is a pragmatic liberal akin to Rorty, Island
presents an imaginative rendering of a Rortyan liberal utopia. Giving Huxley’s
novel a Rortyan interpretation provides readers with new insights about both
Island and pragmatic liberal possibility.
Rorty and Huxley are both thinkers who, in Lionel Trilling’s words, “recall
liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which
implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Cultivating and improving
the “liberal imagination,” as an embodiment of the liberal virtues, is essential
for liberal culture and politics. I conclude with a discussion of what the latter
assertion means for our society. If a citizenry that possesses the liberal virtues
is a precondition for the never-ending political project of creating a just liberal
regime, then our society must rededicate itself to providing liberal education to
our citizens. Formal education is not the only, and perhaps for some people not
even the most effective, means of instilling the liberal virtues. It is, nevertheless,
an indispensible component of, in Callan’s phrase, “creating citizens.”
The goal, of course, is not to turn everyone into a Rorty or Huxley, which
is not possible even if it were desirable. The cultural and political criticism
they produce provides us with an impressive exhibition of the liberal virtues,
including above all a pragmatic, ironic fallibilism about their own positions
30 Defending Rorty

and their openness to keeping the conversation going. While all citizens must
possess the latter virtues, we need not all be professional intellectuals (I discuss
Rorty’s distinction between intellectuals and nonintellectuals in liberal utopia in
Chapter 2). Moreover, we must be pragmatic about how we attempt to cultivate
the liberal virtues among the citizenry. Sending the National Guard into Amish
country to haul their children into the classroom, for example, is unlikely to
have happy results for anyone. But the point is that liberals need to be clear
about where it is that they stand: they must recognize that groups that subscribe
to practices that are incompatible with the cultivation and maintenance of the
liberal virtues cannot in principle be tolerated by the liberal polity. If society
must rededicate itself to liberal education, liberal theorists must rededicate
themselves to substantive and effective liberal values.
1

Rorty’s Pragmatism
The Critique of Philosophy as Authoritarian

Pascal’s formula about our knowing too little to be dogmatists and too much
to be skeptics perfectly describes our human condition as we really experi-
ence it, although men have powerful temptations to obscure it and often find
it intolerable.1
– Allan Bloom
What I find attractive in pragmatism is not a systematic theory in the usual
sense at all. It is rather a certain group of theses. . . . Cursorily summarized, those
theses are (1) antiscepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification
just as much as belief (Peirce drew a famous distinction between “real” and
“philosophical” doubt); (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a
metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need
revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antisceptical is perhaps the basic
insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental
dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain
sense, practice is primary in philosophy.2
– Hilary Putnam
A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once and for all upon a lot of invet-
erate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction
and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. . . . [Pragmatism]
means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and
the pretence of finality in truth.3
– William James

1 Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 18.
2 Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994), 152.
3 William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981),
28.

31
32 Defending Rorty

The goal of Rorty’s intellectual project is to articulate and recommend a par-

ticular ideal of liberal culture and politics. At the heart of this ideal is the
attempt to balance the alleviation of societal cruelty with the cultivation of a
romantic ethic of free and creative individuality. What I highlight in this work
is the way in which this social ideal presumes a set of liberal virtues, which are
especially cultivated through liberal education. Nevertheless, despite being the
ultimate point of his philosophy, Rorty’s ambitious social goal is not appar-
ent in many of his academic writings. This is because the bulk of them deal
with the politically remote, highly technical trends in epistemology, philoso-
phy of mind, and philosophy of language in contemporary analytic philosophy.
Still, the fundamentally normative orientation of Rorty’s project should not be
surprising. Rorty famously identifies himself with the American pragmatist tra-
dition, which insists that the import of ideas is their practical consequences.
For pragmatists, the question that must be asked of any concept or theory is:
What does it mean for practice? Or, What consequences result from accepting
it? Because it calls on us to normatively evaluate these consequences, pragma-
tism examines all philosophies and theories in terms of ethics and politics. As
Dewey puts it,
When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy
has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions, that it sprung
from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible
contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future philosophy is to clarify
men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day.4

Pragmatists insist that there are no neutral, ahistorical, or value-free starting

points from which to begin theorizing; theories are always motivated by and
assume certain concerns and values, which might be morally controversial
and politically disputed in any particular cultural arena. Hence, the ideal of a
“value-free science” is nonsensical; if science appears to be neutral or value-
free, it is merely because there is a contingent consensus on the values and
purposes that constitute the relevant context of inquiry. Pragmatism reminds
us, however, that those values and purposes could be different, and thus that
our conception of what counts as inquiry and knowledge could be different.
In Rorty’s view, pragmatism does this especially by highlighting the historical
contingency of our methods of inquiry and norms of justification. (As we will
see, it is exactly this sort of flexibility about inquiry and its fruits that chums
the water for Rorty’s critics.)
Pragmatism therefore reverses modern epistemology’s view of how we must
proceed to understand reality and our knowledge of it. Modern epistemol-
ogy assumes that we must identify what counts as knowledge – “justified true

4 John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed., Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1976–83), vol. 12, 94. Rorty expresses his approval of this passage in
CIS, 58.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 33

belief,” the “facts” – prior to and apart from considerations of “value.”5 On

its account, if one proceeds according to preconceived “values,” then one’s
findings will be biased and not universal. After all, “facts” are the same for
everyone, whereas “values” are pluralistic, or so assumes the reigning concep-
tion of epistemology, which styles itself as the handmaiden to that modern
paradigm of knowledge: natural science. As the epigraph from Hilary Putnam
suggests, however, pragmatism puts the lie to this view by challenging the
modern fact/value distinction.6 For pragmatists, no theory “simply describes
the facts” because the activity of “describing facts” is inevitably a reflection of
our goals and values. Rorty elaborates, “We cannot stop prescribing, and just
describe, because the describing counts as describing only if rule-governed, only
if conducted by people who talk about each other in the vocabulary of agency
[and thus hold each other to norms].”7 Tellingly, truth claims are normative
assertions: If a proposition is true, then it should be believed.
Another way to put this is that pragmatism insists that, whether they know
it or fess up to it, all theorists have an “agenda”: They pursue their accurate
descriptions of reality from the basis of a value-laden set of assumptions that
are often left unarticulated. This does not imply that theorists are therefore
surreptitious in the construction of their theories; after all, if all theorists have
an agenda, then it is not a criticism to merely point it out. Rather, it is just
helpful to keep this in mind as we attempt to critically assess the meaning
and usefulness of any theory. Rorty urges us to acknowledge that our values
help determine our theoretical descriptions by issuing his classic slogans that
clearly reveal his own values: “Democracy must be prior to Philosophy,”8
and “if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself.”9 In light of
Rorty’s commitment to pragmatism, we must remember that even his most
apparently nonnormative philosophical writings, which on the surface seem to
have limited pertinence to moral and political concerns, are part of, and are
driven by, his ethical vision. As a pragmatist, he is, above all else, a political
and moral philosopher.
Despite this, many of Rorty’s critics still fail to recognize or address the
normative goals that suffuse his work, which has led to misunderstandings
of his positions. Part of the reason for this is the comprehensive, multifar-
ious nature of Rorty’s writings, which address a host of concerns ranging
across philosophy and its history (and, indeed, across the rest of the human-
ities) that are generally not the bailiwick of political philosophers. A helpful

5 Famously, the scientism of the twentieth-century logical positivists leads them to claim that
normative propositions do not qualify as knowledge.
6 See, Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
7 Richard Rorty, “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” in RC, 370.
8 ORT, 175–96.
9 CIS, 89.
34 Defending Rorty

way to break down and better grasp his project is to see it as advancing two
related thrusts: (1) a critical, “therapeutic” subproject, and (2) a constructive,
explicitly normative, utopian subproject. The critical subproject consists of
Rorty’s controversial and global critique of traditional Philosophy (with a cap-
ital “P”) as a discipline that seeks to identify necessary truths. Rorty traces this
conception of Philosophy back to its roots in Platonism and Aristotelian meta-
physical essentialism, although the contemporary version of this tradition that
Rorty especially targets is “representationalism”: the epistemological theory
that we achieve knowledge when our minds or language accurately represent
the world. Although the distinctly modern representationalist effort begins with
Descartes, its sin is similar to Platonism’s: it is a species of “foundationalism”
because it seeks to identify unassailable foundations, or “privileged represen-
tations,” from which all other genuine knowledge can be inferred. Representa-
tionalism is thus “essentialist” because it assumes that accurate representation
of a thing captures its necessary essence, which renders the representation
“true.” For Rorty, this anti-pragmatist, absolutist conception of knowledge is
an enemy idea that goes by many names throughout his opus, including: essen-
tialism, Platonism, metaphysics, ontology, foundationalism, “the Myth of the
Given,” “privileged representations,” “the contextless context,” Philosophy,
Being, Truth, and so on. One gets the picture, although “essentialism,” with
its echoes of necessity and incorrigibility, is perhaps the most felicitous term
by which to designate the target of Rorty’s pragmatic attack. Indeed, in a 2002
interview, Rorty confirms:

I think anti-essentialism is the heart of the matter. In a culture, either religious or

scientistic, that says, “Yes, but this is appearance, what we want is reality,” or “This
is accident, what we want is essence,” you get a kind of authoritarian sadomasochism:
the wish to subordinate oneself to something larger. I think of pragmatism, either
when applied to democratic practice in politics, or when applied to literary criticism, as
precisely debunking the appearance-reality, essence-accident distinctions. Pragmatists
say, “Look, there isn’t any authority that we can appeal to settle the quarrels between
us. We’re going to have to deal with them ourselves.” That’s the kind of change in
self-description which could in the end make a difference.10

This nicely presents Rorty’s objection to the essentialist “Quest for Certainty”
of traditional Philosophy: it is authoritarian, and thus antiliberal. After all, once
Philosophy has reached its goal of identifying what Rorty calls, in yet another,
more recent phrasing, “redemptive truth” – “a set of beliefs which would end,
once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves” – then
there is no point in challenging it or discussing it further; one would have to be

10 Edward Ragg, “Worlds or Words Apart? The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Stud-
ies,” Interview with Richard Rorty, in Take Care of Freedom, ed. Mendieta, 143.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 35

either irrational, wicked, or both to do so.11 J. Judd Owen fairly summarizes

Rorty’s pragmatic reaction to this traditional philosophical aspiration:
At best, philosophy’s speculations about the “true world” have been a harmless and
useless distraction. But at their worst, they encourage or accompany or manifest a spirit
of absolutism that lends itself easily to intolerance and even cruelty, the opposition
to which almost entirely defines liberalism (good politics and morals). Philosophy best
serves democracy today by the relentless critique of the very possibility of universal
knowledge. Today, epistemology and metaphysics are antidemocratic.12

Ronald Kuipers remarks that Rorty has an “allergic reaction” to Philosophy’s

traditional “ambition of transcendence,” and wants “to defend the intertwined
values of responsibility and openness to novel possibility” against it.13 The
problem with the ambition of transcendence is that it both seeks a nonhuman
source of authority that can override our moral responsibilities to each other,
and also issues absolutist claims that shut down inquiry (and blocking the path
of inquiry is, of course, a cardinal sin for pragmatists).
In contrast to traditional Philosophy’s dreams of necessary Truth, pragma-
tism takes the position that we should not conceive of inquiry or philosophy as
having final ends or certain answers as goals. The point of properly pragmatic,
or “edifying,” philosophy is “to perform the social function which Dewey called
‘breaking the crust of convention,’ preventing man from deluding himself with
the notion that he knows himself, or anything else, except under optional
descriptions.”14 The essentialist belief in redemptive truth, by contrast, risks
suppressing the sort of ethical pluralism and experimentalism that liberalism is
ideally supposed to protect. Essentialist metaphysical rhetoric tends to harden
into what Harold Bloom calls “cant”: “what people usually say without think-
ing, the standard thing to say, what one normally says.”15 Cant, of course, is
what the ethically lazy and, as Orwell reminds us, the authoritarian-minded
substitute for the arduous and subtle task of moral reflection.
Not only is the traditional Philosophical endeavor dangerous to liberalism
if it is perceived to have successfully identified redemptive truth but also if it
is perceived to be a failure, leaving its seekers disillusioned so that they might
fall into skepticism (“no beliefs are justified”), nihilism (“no ethical beliefs are
justified”), and relativism (“since no beliefs are justified, they are all of equal
worth”). While human psychology arguably makes it difficult to truly live by

11 PCP, 90.
12 J. Judd Owen, Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001), 45.
13 Ronald Kuipers, Richard Rorty (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 123.
14 PMN, 379.
15 Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The
Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 399.
36 Defending Rorty

any of these three “isms,” they may still produce an ethical malaise or perversity
that undermines our commitment to liberal morality.
Thus, from Rorty’s pragmatic liberal vantage point, the Philosophical tradi-
tion from Plato to Thomas Nagel and John McDowell, if taken non-ironically,
potentially threatens liberal progress. This is why Rorty’s critical subproject
involves relentlessly hunting down and exposing places in his interlocutors’
arguments where they claim to identify necessary, authoritative criteria by
which we must judge our knowledge and actions, and which are meant to
apply regardless of context and without reference to specific purposes. This
is why Rorty dons the mantle of pragmatism, which on his account is anti-
representationalist and anti-essentialist, and therefore anti-authoritarian.16 “If
one takes the core of pragmatism to be its attempt to replace the notion of true
belief as representations of ‘the nature of things’ and instead to think of them
as successful rules for action, then it becomes easy to recommend an experi-
mental, fallibilist attitude, but hard to isolate a ‘method’ that will embody this
attitude.”17
Rorty’s pragmatism does not, however, make the Philosophical counterclaim
that there are no absolute, necessary truths. He wants to avoid falling into the
self-referential trap of claiming that it is true that there are no such truths.
Rorty’s position is rather that liberal politics and culture will be more successful
if we drop the traditional, absolutist language of metaphysics. Instead, we
should adopt a vocabulary that keeps us ironically aware of the contingency
of our beliefs: despite their obvious “rightness” to us, our possession of them
is a non-necessary product of history; they could have been otherwise and
might be in the future. This includes recognizing even the contingency of our
commitment to liberalism. This is not relativism, though critics perpetually
accuse Rorty of espousing it. It is rather an endorsement of what might be
called a “fallibilist balance,” or what Albrecht Wellmer calls a “fallibilistic
consciousness,”18 that we should adopt toward our beliefs: we remain actively
committed to them even though we are fully conscious that we hold them
provisionally because they may yet prove to be wrong, that is, not useful
for practice, all things considered. Rorty expresses this subtle balance as the
“fundamental premise” of his book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “a
belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among
people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than
contingent historical circumstance.”19 Successfully maintaining this fallibilist
balance in practice, and thus knowing when to be stalwart in our commitments

16 Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie,

1 (January 1999), 7–20.
17 ORT, 66.
18 Albrecht Wellmer, “Truth, Contingency, and Modernity,” Modern Philology 90 (May 1993),
S116.
19 CIS, 189.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 37

and when, alternatively, to give them up because we realize that they are
problematic after all, is a matter of having a particular sort of ethical character.
That is, it is a matter of virtue and practical know-how, of being sensitive to
context and possessing refined, educated dispositions. The difficulty of this
crucial virtue of fallibilism is the basis for much of the criticism of Rorty’s
conception of liberalism, not least because of the name with which he christens
it: irony.
What is to be gained by adopting this attitude of ironic, apparent “double-
think?” Nothing less than “liberal utopia.” Advocating his pragmatic con-
ception of liberal culture is Rorty’s constructive subproject, which is, as Bjorn
Ramberg puts it, “an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like,
once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in
which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in
Rorty’s view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted.”20 Because
it eschews metaphysical justifications for its politics and culture, liberal utopia
will be a “literary culture” that prizes free creativity, as opposed to a Philo-
sophical culture that seeks apodictic truth. It is a culture that embraces its
own contingency as freedom, and ceases to search for an authority that stands
beyond the liberal community, telling us what to do. Rorty emphasizes that
this is what the proper working through of Enlightenment secular humanism
amounts to:
For in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one in which no trace of divinity
remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self. Such a culture
would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human
beings should be responsible. It would drop, or drastically reinterpret not only the idea
of holiness but those of “devotion to truth” and of “fulfillment of the deepest needs of
the spirit.” The process of de-divinization . . . would, ideally, culminate in our no longer
being able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human
beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal,
contingently existing human beings.21
In one of his Whiggish historical accounts of Western intellectual devel-
opment, Rorty suggests that the idea of an anti-authoritarian literary culture
emerges through the overcoming of two previous intellectual paradigms: theol-
ogized religion and modern secular Philosophy. On the eve of the Renaissance,
European intellectuals were still seeking redemptive truth in monotheistic reli-
gion, which “offers hope for redemption through entering into a new rela-
tion to a supremely powerful non-human person.”22 Rorty writes that, “[t]he
transition from religion to philosophy began with the revival of Platonism
in the Renaissance, the period in which humanists began asking the same

20 Bjorn Ramberg, “Richard Rorty,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/#2
21 CIS, 45.
22 PCP, 91.
38 Defending Rorty

questions about Christian monotheism that Socrates had asked about Hesiod’s
pantheon.”23 With the rise of modern secular Philosophy, redemption comes
to be sought through the acquisition of true beliefs, that is, accurate mental or
linguistic representations that capture the nature of reality. This representation-
alist epistemology emerges through Descartes’s and Locke’s attempts to pro-
vide a philosophical foundation for the new and powerful Galilean-Newtonian
science. What representationalism does, however, in Rorty’s view, is substi-
tute the Natural World for God, and modern science for theology (which
becomes increasingly “naturalized” by philosophical reason for many Enlight-
enment thinkers, as they attempt to make Christianity compatible with secular
science).
As modern Philosophy’s search for redemptive truth becomes the dominant
paradigm for Western intellectuals, literary culture develops out of it in three
steps. First, Kant’s transcendental idealism legitimizes freedom, morality, art,
and (philosophically rationalized) religion in the teeth of the mechanistic New-
tonian universe (of which we gain apodictic knowledge, on Kant’s account,
through the empirical methods of natural science). The next step is taken by
Hegel who, in response to Kant, bequeaths to us an “inadvertent exemplifi-
cation of what such a [literary] culture could offer – namely, the historical
sense of the relativity of principles and vocabularies to place and time, [and]
the romantic sense that everything can be changed by talking in new terms.”24
Rorty calls this “inadvertent,” of course, because Hegel believed, like Kant,
that he, too, was achieving apodictic knowledge (of “Spirit,” in his case). Nev-
ertheless, “Hegel’s supremely ambitious claims for philosophy were counter-
productive. His System was no sooner published than it became to be read as a
reductio ad absurdum of a certain form of intellectual life. Since Hegel’s time,
intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy” as the search for necessary
Truth.25
Finally, in the wake of Hegel’s historicism, the third step is taken by
Nietzsche and James: “Their contribution was to replace [post-Hegelian,
nineteenth-century] romanticism by pragmatism. Instead of saying that the
discovery of vocabularies could bring hidden secrets to light, they said that
new ways of speaking could help us get what we want.”26 Thus, the search for
Truth is thereby replaced by the search for contingent, useful “vocabularies” –
sets of concepts by which we cope with reality and which can amount to a
worldview or way of life. Thanks to this liberating progression, contemporary
literary intellectuals no longer need bother with the tired pursuit of the “meta-
physical comforts” promised by Philosophy. Instead, they can pragmatically
experiment with vocabularies simply with an eye for what results are produced,

23 PCP, 91.
24 CP, 149.
25 PCP, 91–92.
26 CP, 150.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 39

which are judged by standards that are themselves, too, evolving as part of the
experiment.
The literary endeavor also offers a sort of redemption, not by offering a
relationship with a nonhuman deity or with the True representation of reality
but by enabling intellectuals to make “the acquaintance of as great a variety
of human beings as possible.”27 Such acquaintance gives the intellectual a
vast reservoir of ideas upon which to draw as she engages in the humanist
adventure of deciding what she wants to do and who she wants to be. Rorty
concludes:

From within a literary culture, religion and philosophy appear as literary genres. As
such, they are optional. Just as an intellectual may opt to read many poems but few
novels, or many novels but few poems, so he or she may read much philosophy, or much
religious writing, but relatively few poems or novels. The difference between the literary
intellectuals’ readings of all these books and other readings of them is that the inhabitant
of a literary culture treats books as human attempts to meet human needs, rather than
as acknowledgements of the power of a being that is what it is apart from any such
needs. “God” and “Truth” are, respectively, the religious and the philosophical names
for that sort of being.28

Liberal utopia combines the societal qualities of providing enough toler-

ance and freedom for individuals to engage in novel projects of autonomous
self-creation while simultaneously minimizing the cruelty that society harbors.
Rorty recognizes that these two goals often find themselves in tension: the free
projects of some will be experienced as cruel and wrong by others. Neverthe-
less, contra Kant, he denies that Philosophy can provide an a priori balance
between freedom and the minimization of cruelty. This is because, in liberal
political deliberation, Philosophical positions, contrary to their own rhetoric,
do not stand above politics, allowing us to judge political positions from the
lofty perch of Truth, but are rather themselves always political and contestable
through and through. Our evolving conception of liberal freedom must be
approached dialogically and experimentally in liberal society, as the product of
ongoing political negotiation between liberally virtuous citizens, in one cultural
context after another.
Rorty’s importance thus lies, as Michael Bacon claims, “in his combination
of the two sides of pragmatism – its critique of representationalism, and the
role that this critique might play in achieving an anti-authoritarian society.”29
The rest of this chapter discusses the first part of Rorty’s project: his critique
of Philosophy in its guises of representationalism and essentialism. Indeed, this
negative subproject dominates Rorty’s work, and consequently also dominates

27 PCP, 91.
28 Ibid.
29 Michael Bacon, Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2008), xviii.
40 Defending Rorty

much of the criticism aimed at him. Nevertheless, it is the positive, utopian

project that is the actual purpose of his critique of Philosophy; the latter makes
no sense without the former.

Truth and Knowledge: Rorty’s Epistemological Behaviorism

Although Rorty insists that we give up representationalism as the modern era’s
epistemological search for necessary Truth, he recognizes that we do still want
an understanding of knowledge and of the authority that inheres in knowledge
claims. He therefore offers an alternative: a nonrepesentationalist, pragmatic,
“sociological” understanding of knowledge. He emphasizes that our norms
for what counts as legitimate inquiry and knowledge are social, and emerge
from the historically contingent problem-solving activities of our community of
inquirers. Unlike representationalism, this conception of knowledge supports
a genuinely anti-authoritarian liberalism because it insists that there are no
nonhuman authorities that dictate Truth to us.
As Jeffrey Stout observes, Rorty presents his critique of representationalism
in two ways: as “therapy” and as “prophecy,” and the latter term is indeed
a felicitous segue to Rorty’s vision of liberal utopia.30 Following Wittgen-
stein, Rorty, when in therapeutic mode, seems to suggest that the point of
his critique is simply to urge his fellow philosophers to abandon what Dewey
referred to as a “brood and nest of dualisms”: reality/appearance, subjectiv-
ity/objectivity, realism/idealism, realism/anti-realism, morality/prudence, phi-
losophy/literature, etc. The pragmatic point about these distinctions is that
none of them are necessary or need be drawn in any particular way, and
that our deployment of them should be evaluated by the consequences that
result. The implication of the therapeutic view of Rorty’s attack on repre-
sentationalism is that his critique aims merely to rescue us from linguistic
confusion that causes philosophical anxiety. Practically, this therapy “leaves
everything as it is”31 ; it does not call on us to do anything. We should just
relax, ignore irritating and meaningless philosophical impulses, and go about
using our ordinary language in our ordinary way. In this vein, Rorty often
pens passages like the following: “Pragmatists think that there are two advan-
tages to antiessentialism. The first is that adopting it makes it impossible to
formulate a lot of the traditional philosophical problems. The second is that
adopting it makes it easier to come to terms with Darwin.”32 He also writes
that the inspiration he takes from James and Dewey springs from the fact
that their “main accomplishments were negative, in that they explain how to

30 Jeffrey Stout, “On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism,” in
New Pragmatists, ed. Chery Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–31.
31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 39, § 124.
32 PSH, 66.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 41

slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic
tradition.”33
Such negative or minimalist descriptions of pragmatism, however, do a
disservice to Rorty’s project (not to mention to those of Dewey and James); they
are one-sided and incomplete, and thus misleading. (Again, this helps explain
why so many critics miss the full picture). Rorty’s minimalist descriptions
are unpragmatic because they are inarticulate about the full, practical point
of ceasing to use vocabularies of metaphysics. Rather, we must see Rorty’s
Wittgensteinian therapy as a tactic aimed at ushering in his cultural-political
ideal. Stout correctly recognizes this:

In Rorty’s work, therapeutic diagnosis becomes a means for advancing an assertively

prophetic vision that is not content to leave everything as it is. . . . In his prophetic
mode, Rorty asserts what appear to be rather sweeping philosophical theses, which
take the form of a utopian vision of post-Philosophical culture and a corresponding
meta-narrative about the overcoming of authoritarianism.34

When he is properly articulate about his project, Rorty is explicit that

“[c]riticisms of representationalist theories of mind and language (of the sort
in which I have specialized) remain sterile scholastic exercises until they are
tied in with attempts to get rid of the notion of appeal to a nonhuman author-
ity – the common element in the idea that we can appeal to the Divine Will
and the idea that we should attempt to represent Reality accurately.”35 The
point of this anti-authoritarianism is to cultivate the intellectual preconditions,
and encourage the pursuit, of his liberal ideal. As Charles Guignon and David
R. Hiley remark, Rorty’s “[a]ntifoundationalism aims at expanding possibili-
ties for self-description, thus rehumanizing humans by affirming freedom and
opening up possibilities through greater tolerance.”36
Rorty’s critique of representationalism, along with his own proposed soci-
ological understanding of knowledge, are thus integral to achieving his ethico-
political ideal. As we have seen, on Rorty’s account, representationalist epis-
temology begins with Descartes, who bequeaths to modern philosophy the
picture of knowledge as mental representations – “ideas” until the twentieth-
century linguistic turn; linguistic propositions thereafter – that mirror the
external world.37 Locke contributes to the picture by theorizing that these

33 PSH, xiii.
34 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,” 10–11.
35 Richard Rorty, “Reply to Jeffrey Stout,” in PRR, 548.
36 Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, “Introduction,” in RR, 22.
37 The “linguistic turn” refers to the shift in philosophy from the attempt to ground knowledge
in “experience” or “consciousness” to the attempt to discover how language maps the world.
As Rorty explains, “The turn toward language was thought of as a progressive, naturalizing
move. It seemed so because it seemed to easier to give a causal account of the evolutionary
emergence of language-using organisms than of the metaphysical emergence of consciousness
out of nonconsciousness” (CIS, 10).
42 Defending Rorty

representations, if they accurately correspond to reality, are caused in our

minds when the empirical world stimulates our sensory organs. The problem,
of course, is that this understanding of knowledge yields the familiar philo-
sophical bogeymen of modern skepticism and relativism: if all we know are
the inner, mental representations, how can we ever be sure that they accurately
depict the world outside? We cannot step outside of our heads and check.
Furthermore, because these inner representations cannot be checked against
anything that is not just one more representation – that is, cannot be checked
against the world itself, as it exists not under human description, to ensure
veracity – then it seems that one set of representations cannot be shown to
be any more true or right than any other set. In the face of these problems,
the goal of modern philosophy has been to identify privileged, foundational
representations that bear some hallmark of accuracy, from which we can then
methodically infer the rest of our knowledge.
The conventional narrative of modern epistemology divides the attempts to
solve the philosophical problems of representationalism into two broad, con-
trasting traditions: empiricism and rationalism. For modern empiricism, the
privileged representations must be sensory data or observation reports; for the
rationalists, who find the buzz of empirical experience too ephemeral and con-
tingent to constitute a proper, certain foundation, the privileged representations
must be a priori concepts that all knowers possess. Kant, the story continues,
famously attempts to reconcile these two foundationalist efforts in his tran-
scendental idealism: the rational mind necessarily conceptually formats the
incoming sense data, thereby ensuring their uniformity and reliability, though
never achieving knowledge of unformatted reality in itself (“an-sich”). Post-
Kantian epistemology has been wrestling with how to relate sensible intuitions
(the empirical “content”) and mental concepts (the rational “scheme”) ever
since. Moreover, Kant’s mysterious and inconvenient remainder – the world as
it is in itself or Ding-an-sich – despite his elaborate metaphysical assurances,
continues to raise the representationalist worries of skepticism and relativism.
What distinguishes Rorty from most of the contributors to the contemporary
epistemological debates is that his pragmatic attack on representationalism is
consciously driven by his normative agenda. He writes, “I think that putting
the issue [of objectivity versus relativism] in such moral and political terms,
rather than epistemological or metaphilosophical terms, makes clearer what is
at stake. For now the question is not about how to define words like ‘truth’
or ‘rationality’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘philosophy,’ but about what self-image our
society should have of itself.”38 Representationalist thinkers, by contrast, con-
ceive of Philosophy as the ultimate, neutral judge of cultural practices because
it defines what counts as knowledge. By identifying the universal criteria for
knowledge, Philosophy is able to “divide culture up into areas which represent

38 ORT, 28.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 43

reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent
it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).”39 Rorty condemns this traditional
conception of Philosophy, which imagines itself as a meta-discipline whose
special methods give it access to Truth and thereby renders its practitioners the
proper cultural authority above politics and ground-level normative debate. For
him, the only source of authority in a liberal culture should be its historically
evolving social practices of justification, and their associated norms, which the
liberal community develops and revises through ongoing free inquiry. “Free
inquiry” itself, of course, is a “social practice of justification,” and thus its own
norms that constitute it as a practice are also revised, though not all at once,
through its practice.
Rorty’s point, naturally, is not that his fellow philosophers (or scientists)
harbor secretly authoritarian fantasies or scheme to take over political power
and install themselves as philosopher-kings. His concern is rather that their
representationalist-essentialist projects encourage the a priori privileging of
certain areas of culture – natural science in our era, though it was formerly
theology and religion – over others. Thus, one of Rorty’s primary fears about
representationalism is “scientism”: the tendency, arguably widespread in mod-
ern intellectual culture, to believe that only the claims of natural science count
as real knowledge, while everything else is mere opinion and up for grabs. One
consequence of this automatic promotion of science is the immediate cultural
demotion of any field of inquiry, like the subjects of the humanities, which can-
not successfully adopt what passes for the “scientific method.” This result, at
the very least, puts the study of the humanities at a disadvantage in the compe-
tition for funding at our universities. The larger worry that proceeds from this,
which I won’t elaborate here, is the dark possibility of a society that achieves
great technical skill but loses its (liberal) conception of its own humanity.40
We can appreciate Rorty’s humanist concern when even a philosopher who
helped inspire his pragmatic critique of representationalism, W. V. Quine, can
suggest that “[p]hilosophy of science is philosophy enough.”41 While Rorty is
a booster of science and compliments scientists for often providing a superb
moral example of liberal virtue and cooperation, he is adamant that science
should not be privileged over other disciplines for the reason that it is somehow
“closer to truth or reality.”
Rorty claims Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science as an inspiration for
this view. Kuhn’s portrayal of scientific progress as historically changing

39 PMN, 3.
40 I will let readers decide for themselves how much the work of Diego Gambetta (sociology)
and Steffen Hertog (political science) illuminates this point with its contention that there is a
connection between engineering education, which we may presume is non-humanities-oriented,
and radical Islamic terrorism. See Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, “Why Are So Many
Engineers Among Islamic Radicals?” European Journal of Sociology 50 (August 2009), 201–30.
41 W.V. Quine, “Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory,” Mind 62 (October 1953), 446.
44 Defending Rorty

“paradigms” of thought that contain their own, unique criteria for success
points up the contingency of science and its methods, revealing its success
to be a product of shifting intersubjective agreement rather than the reveal-
ing of “objective truth,” a matter of sociology rather than epistemology. In a
provocative passage worth quoting at length, Rorty writes:
Reading Kuhn led me, and many others, to think that instead of mapping culture on
to a epistemico-ontological hierarchy topped by the logical, objective and scientific,
and bottoming out in the rhetorical, subjective and unscientific, we should instead map
culture on to a sociological spectrum ranging from the chaotic left, where criteria are
constantly changing, to the smug right, where they are, at least for the moment, fixed.
Thinking in terms of such a spectrum makes it possible to see a single discipline moving
leftward in revolutionary periods and rightward in stable, dull periods – the sort of
periods when you get what Kuhn called ‘normal science.’ In the fifteenth century, when
most philosophy was scholastic and almost all physics contentedly Aristotelian, both
physics and philosophy were pretty far to the right. In the seventeenth century, both
were pretty far to the left, but literary criticism was much further to the right than it
was to become after the Romantic movement. In the nineteenth century, physics had
settled down and moved right, and philosophy was desperately trying to do so as well.
But in the twentieth century, philosophy has had to settle for splitting itself up into
separate traditions (‘analytic’ and “Continental’), each of which claim to be ‘doing
real philosophy,’ and each of which have a fairly clear internal criteria for professional
success. In this respect – lack of international consensus about who is doing worthwhile
work – it remains much more like contemporary literary criticism than like any of the
contemporary natural sciences.42

Rorty’s goal, therefore, is to purge our epistemological language of any

trace of an a priori conception of a privileged Given, such as the “world” or
the “canons of rationality,” that would restrain the outcome of free inquiry. He
devises an ingenious description of knowledge, epistemological behaviorism,
that avoids both idealism – the implausible view that the world is merely a
product of the mind – and metaphysical realism, which insists that there is
one correct description of the world that properly captures what “it really
is.” On Rorty’s account, whether a proposition qualifies as knowledge (i.e., is
“true”) depends on whether it is justified in light of our historically contingent
social practices of justification, not on whether it is the product of necessarily
privileged representations. Rorty is careful, however, not to succumb to the
pragmatist temptation to conflate justification with truth, since he does not
want to say that whatever is justified is true. After all, truth is eternal and abso-
lute, while justification is always relative to an audience and their temporally
evolving practices. Rorty instead insists that the only way that we can correctly
apply the adjective “true” to a proposition depends on whether we think the
proposition is justified; justification is our only indicator of truth (i.e., to the use

42 PSH, 180–81. The relevant work of Kuhn is his groundbreaking The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Rorty’s Pragmatism 45

of the word “truth”).43 This is why we should forgo efforts to philosophically

define “Truth” or identify a necessary criterion for it that holds in all contexts
and instead focus on whether our practices of justification are, in the broadest
sense, satisfying our ever-morphing needs. As Rorty puts it,
The greatest of my many intellectual debts to Donald Davidson is my realization that
nobody should even try to specify the nature of truth. . . . Davidson has helped us realize
that the very absoluteness of truth is a good reason for thinking “true” indefinable
and for thinking that no theory of the nature of truth is possible. It is only the relative
about which there is anything to say. (This is why the God of orthodox monotheists,
for example, remains so tiresomely ineffable).44

Indeed, even when we contemplate the possibility of a proposition being

true but not justified, what we mean is that the proposition is not justified
to the relevant audience, not that it is never justified to anyone at all. To
even contemplate a proposition as being “true,” it must be seen as justified,
for example, to us. For instance, we can say that the proposition, “women
should be allowed to vote,” was unjustified (for most people, according to their
standards of justification) in the early nineteenth century. But it is justified to
us in the early twenty-first century, which is why we call it “true.” The idea
that there could be propositions that are true but are never justified, ever, is
something with which a pragmatist does not concern himself. If a proposition
cannot be justified, then, by definition, there are no good reasons to accept it
and act on it. To insist that it, despite being unjustified, is nevertheless “true”
is either a failure to give reasons for believing it or an implication that reasons
shall be forthcoming.45
Justification, in Rorty’s view, is a Wittgensteinian language game that takes
place within a communally constituted web of propositions with inferential
connections. Whether a claim is justified depends on whether it fits coher-
ently into this web, which is why Rorty (with Davidson) insists that only
a belief can justify another belief.46 Successful inquiry, on this view, is the
fruitful “reweaving of beliefs rather than discovering the [essential] natures
of objects.”47 Rorty’s understanding of knowledge is thus “coherentist,” to
be contrasted with the representationalist “correspondence” theories he repu-
diates. Coherence theories, however, face an obvious objection: doesn’t this

43 TP, 4.
44 TP, 3.
45 We can contrast this with Thomas Nagel’s central philosophical concern with reality that lies
forever beyond our descriptions of it. For Rorty, this possibility does not matter because it
cannot be taken into account in practice. For Nagel, however, this pragmatic deflation of
the ineffable and rejection of the “ambition of transcendence” is a sign, as Rorty puts it, of
“spiritual degeneration” (see ORT, 6–8; TP, 99–106). Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986) is a representative statement of Nagel’s anti-pragmatic,
anti-Wittgensteinian metaphysics.
46 ORT, 153; TP, 141.
47 ORT, 98.
46 Defending Rorty

inferentially constructed, “coherent-but-non-corresponding web” leave beliefs,

as John McDowell puts it, “spinning in a void,” out of contact with the world,
which is what they are supposed to be about?48 Indeed, Rorty is commonly
accused of being a “linguistic idealist” who implausibly holds that the world
for us is constructed by language – “everything is text” – and is therefore simply
what we decide to say it is. The apparent lack of constraint on belief implied
by this view is ultimately what exercises most of Rorty’s philosophical critics.
Rorty’s position, however, is much more nuanced than this.
Following Davidson, he responds to the accusation of “linguistic idealism”
by insisting that we are always in causal contact with brute, nonhuman reality:
because we become “knowers” by learning a language, our interactions with
the world cause us to have noninferential beliefs, which can then play a role in
the inferentialist, social game of justification.49 For example, the pattern of light
from the TV screen hits my retina, which sends signals that are processed by
my nervous system, which causes me, because of the linguistic “programming”
I have gained as a member of sports-watching America, to acquire the (depress-
ing) belief that the Oakland Raiders have once again missed the NFL playoffs.
I can then tell others, who may challenge this proposition, and I can respond
that I saw the score reported on ESPN SportsCenter (which presumes that we
all share a belief that this a generally reliable source for this sort of informa-
tion). Notice, however, that the sensory experience itself plays no justificatory
role; only the propositional belief, which the sensory episode noninferentially
causes me to have, plays this role.
Rorty thus follows Sellars in distinguishing between the “space of causation”
and the “space of reasons”: “The essential point is that in characterizing an
episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description
of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of
justifying and being able to justify what one says.”50 To be a knower is to
be engaged in a linguistic practice of reason-giving; it is the ability to make
claims, not the ability to have mental episodes (although Rorty and Sellars do
not doubt that we do have such episodes or that they can cause us to hold
beliefs and make noninferential claims). Robert Brandom elaborates:

To treat something as even a candidate for knowledge is at once to talk about its
potential role in inference, as premise and conclusion. Because a crucial distinguishing
feature of epistemic facts for Sellars is that their expression requires the use of normative
vocabulary, to treat something as a candidate for knowledge is to raise the issue of its
normative status. The Myth of the Given eventually appears as “of a piece with the
naturalistic fallacy in ethics” – the attempt to derive ought from is. This is because
talk of knowledge is inevitably talk of what (conceptually articulated propositional

48 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 66.
49 ORT, 101, 145, 159; PSH, 3; CP, 13–14.
50 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 76.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 47

contents) someone is committed to, and whether he is in various senses entitled to those
commitments.51

Thus, while a parrot can be trained to discriminate red objects and squawk
“Red!” when presented with such objects, it cannot take up a normative posi-
tion in the “space of reasons” (or practice of justification); it cannot give reasons
for why it squawks “Red!” When, however, I say, “The car is red,” you can
ask, “Why?” and then I can cite reasons (other propositions) for my assertion:
for example, “Because I can see it,” or “Because Jones told me,” or “Because
that’s what the ad says.” As Rorty puts it, “there is no such thing as justifica-
tion which is not a relation between propositions.”52 “What determines beliefs,
then, is not [solely] the physical event, but the socially constructed, institution-
alized vocabulary that provides the ‘space of reasons’ in which causal stimuli
come to have propositional form and a place in a set of inferential relations.”53
To ask, “Sure, but how do you really know the car is red?”, beyond our prac-
tices of justification, is to make the mistake of retaining the Myth of the Given,
and, hence, the representationalist view of knowledge, which brings along its
assorted difficulties of skepticism, relativism, subjectivism/solipsism (because
we are each trapped behind our individual “veil of ideas”), and nihilism. This
is why, on Wittgenstein’s account, after I have exhaustively explained to you
why I believe the car is red, I am finally reduced to the answer: “Because I know
English,” which is to assert, in other words, “Because I am correctly playing
the linguistic game of justification.”54
This neo-Kantian distinction between the space of causation and the space
of reasons, however, avoids the bugaboo of the mysterious Ding-an-sich: a
way that the world is that, by definition, forever escapes description. Rorty
and Davidson ask us to drop the distinction between mental concepts and
sensible intuitions or, as they label it, the “scheme-content distinction,” that
haunts modern empiricism: “the distinction between determinate realities and
a set of concepts or words which may or may not be ‘adequate’ to them.”55
The scheme-content distinction leads to skepticism and relativism because it
produces worries about whether our schemes accurately disclose “determinate
reality.” Instead, we should see ourselves as “programmed” with a vocabulary
of beliefs through our socialization into a historically contingent, commu-
nal language game.56 Because we pragmatically take ourselves to be actors
immersed in the world, we take these beliefs to be mostly true. That is to say,
the causal phenomena that constitute the world produce beliefs that are mostly

51 Robert Brandom, “Study Guide,” in Empiricism, Sellars, 123 (citation omitted). We see here
the collapse of the fact/value distinction to which Putnam refers in his epigraph to this chapter.
52 PMN, 183.
53 Guignon and Hiley, “Introduction,” 32.
54 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 100e, § 381.
55 ORT, 9.
56 TP, 141–42.
48 Defending Rorty

correct because of what Davidson calls the “veridical nature of belief”: our
beliefs must be mostly true because of the way they are formed – through cop-
ing with the world.57 A person who adhered to a set of beliefs that was mostly
false would not last long; indeed, it might not even make sense to suppose
that such a person could exist in our world, for how would she ever acquire a
thoroughly false set of beliefs? If beliefs are, as Peirce tells us, “habits of action”
then, holistically speaking, they must generally get the world right.
The pragmatist is unmoved by Cartesian “brain-in-a-vat” scenarios that
present the skeptical challenge that all of our beliefs could be false because,
as in the movie The Martrix, our “reality” is completely an illusion. What the
pragmatist cares about is how well we are coping with the “illusionary” reality;
if we are coping reasonably well, then we are practically getting our reality right,
whether it is “illusionary” from some perspective or not. Pragmatists make a
lawyer’s “relevance objection” to Cartesian skeptics: How does the possibility
that we are “brains-in-a-vat” change or mean anything for our practices?
This does not mean, of course, that some of our beliefs cannot be wrong (in
terms of other beliefs that we have or come to have) or, equally important, that
different individuals and communities cannot have serious disagreements. It is
rather that most of our beliefs are true and that we thus mostly agree with each
other. Two persons from two radically different cultures will still agree, for
instance, that rocks are hard, the sun is bright, sometimes it rains, and so on.
Nevertheless, they may still end up in mortal combat over whether one must
bow to another to show proper respect, or whether prayers must be said after a
lightning strike. But notice that our two combatants can only know what they
disagree about on a wide background of agreement, which enables them to see
one another as purposeful agents.58
While coping with the causal world gives rise to our language games, the
world does not insist that we interpret its causal phenomena in a particular
way and thus adopt a particular language game to cope with it.59 This is why

57 ORT, 135; PSH, 32; PCP, 106; Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowl-
edge,” in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed.
Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 318–19.
58 The locus classicus for this line of argumentation is Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of
a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
47 (1973–74), 5–20.
59 One must be careful here: Rorty’s naturalism commits him to the view that we should think
of the mind as the product of material causes. Thus, it is possible, in principle, that a causal
story could be told in the language of, for example, molecular physics of how it came to be that
certain human organisms began to play the liberal language game (or any other, including that
of molecular physics). In this sense, the causal world does and has determined which vocabulary
we speak. Practically speaking, however, it seems highly dubious that we could ever render a
causal account of the liberal mind that would, for instance, actually enable us to construct
one by physically manipulating brain matter. Rorty writes, “Wittgensteinians [with whom
Rorty idenitifies] are as good physicalists as Carnapians [who seek a causal understanding of
the mind-brain]. They are equally committed to the view that you cannot alter somebody’s
Rorty’s Pragmatism 49

we end up with cultural and ethical pluralism, which include disparate notions
of “rationality” and “common sense.” As Rorty puts it,
When we consider the examples of alternative language games – the vocabulary of
ancient Athenian politics versus Jefferson’s, the moral vocabulary of St. Paul versus
Freud’s, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake versus that of
Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than another,
of the world deciding between them.60

“Better” in the above sentence means “better tout court,” without reference to
particular purposes. Clearly, once we take into account a particular purpose,
then one language game might be superior to another in light of that purpose. If
we want to put a satellite into orbit, the Newtonian vocabulary will be superior
to Aristotle’s; if we seek spiritual sustenance in an idiosyncratic, Romantic
interpretation of Christianity, we are likely better off looking to Blake than to
Dryden. As Dewey insists, means and ends are perpetually up for reevaluation
in relation to each other. Rorty exhorts us to keep the process of articulating
this reevaluation going so that we avoid taking for granted our instruments
and goals, and the relationship between them. We must avoid reifying or
“ontologizing” our means and ends lest they become hindrances to achieving
other, perhaps new, ends.
Thus, while we cannot be more arbitrary than the causal pressures of the
world will let us be, “[t]hese pressures will be described in different ways at
different times and for different purposes.”61 This is what Rorty’s pragmatic,
compatibilist conceptions of freedom and ethical pluralism amount to: the
recognition that our language games are, strictly speaking, optional, depend-
ing on what ends we have, and our ends are plural and frequently change
through time. It is this insistence that we regard different vocabularies – the

psychological state without altering – somewhere, somehow – her brain state. What they
doubt is that there is a profitable level of inquiry in between folk psychology and neurology –
whether profitable tweaking will be facilitated by the discovery of what is ‘psychologically real’”
(Richard Rorty, “The Brain as Hardware, Culture as Software,” Inquiry 47 [2004], 227–28). It
is near-inconceivable that we should ever stop using the vocabulary of intentionality (Dennett’s
“intentional stance”), of beliefs and desires (“folk psychology”), to describe entities whose
behavior is sufficiently complex to lead us to think of them as agents. This vocabulary is
practically more useful in dealing with agency than is the causal vocabulary of natural science,
which is more useful when we describe less complex phenomena that can be understood as
mechanical rather than purposive, particularly when we want to control them. The point is
that the only thing that can privilege any particular vocabulary is usefulness for achieving
our goals. (See Robert Brandom “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and
Historicism,” in RC, 167–71). Thus, Rorty’s naturalism about the mind does not lead, as it
does for some neuroscientists, to treating it as mechanism; its point is rather to lead us away
from metaphysical, mysterious conceptions of the mind that potentially bolster, for example,
retrograde anti-science and authoritarian religious attitudes that undermine Rorty’s liberal
political ideal.
60 CIS, 5.
61 PSH, 33; ORT, 101; CIS, 6.
50 Defending Rorty

vocabulary of natural science, or of poetry – as tools for different ends that

prevents Rorty’s understanding of knowledge from falling prey to reduction-
ism: the idea that we can necessarily better explain one vocabulary in terms of
another, epistemologically privileged vocabulary.62 For example, although the
mind might theoretically be described, on Rorty’s naturalist understanding, in
purely causal terms by an ideal physical science, that does not mean that the
uniquely correct way to describe the emotion of love is to say that it is merely
a potent cocktail of brain chemistry. It is that, but love is also usefully and, in
many contexts, more meaningfully described poetically as being “like a red, red
rose.” There is no essence of “mind” or “love” to get hold of; their meanings
all depend on our desires and practices.
Rorty tells us, “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones –
no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind,
or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our
fellow-inquirers.”63 These “retail constraints” are practical and contingent, and
thus their usefulness can always be challenged and new constraints proposed.
Adopting this anti-authoritarian position, Rorty hopes, will help complete the
humanistic secularization of the modern world, and thereby cultivate the sort
of pragmatic, experimental liberal culture that Rorty hopes for.

Epistemological Behaviorism, Fallibilism, and the Liberal Virtues

Rorty suggests that we conceive of minds as “webs of beliefs and desires, of
sentential attitudes.”64 These linguistically constituted webs come into exis-
tence as members of a community, which creates and initiates individual minds
as participants in a normative practice of justification, of giving and asking
for reasons. Language, and the practices of justification that are central to it,
evolves as a particularly useful, extremely complex tool that helps us clever
apes better cope with the world. In this way, Rorty reconciles the mind with
Darwinian naturalism; there is no need for Cartesian dualism that divides real-
ity into two metaphysically unique but mysteriously related substances: mind
and matter. There is, consequently, no need for a nonempirical discipline –
philosophy or metaphysics – that tries to discover the nonphysical essence
of the mind. Rorty’s approach also makes basic our social nature: the indi-
vidual mind is a necessarily a social product of (some) linguistic community.
Following Dewey in this communitarian insistence, Rorty’s liberalism thereby
evades any Sandelian charges of trading on assumptions of “unencumbered
selves.”
These “mind-language webs” interact with the nonhuman world and each
other, which induces them to “reweave” their structures by adopting new

62 ORT, 113–25; CIS, 11–17.

63 CP, 165.
64 ORT, 93, 191, 192.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 51

beliefs and desires and dropping other ones (we often call this process “learn-
ing,” though reweaving occurs when one misperceives or is deceived as well).
The difference between interactions with the nonhuman world and with fellow
language speakers is that the former does not present us with propositions;
it does not speak to us. It can, again, noninferentially cause me to adopt a
proposition into the web that is my mind: if I see that it is raining outside, I
will likely be induced to believe that it is raining and thus assert to you, “It’s
raining.” From this proposition, you infer that you should take an umbrella,
because you do not want to get wet, and so forth. But notice that one could
infer any number of “truths” from the proposition depending on the language
game or “form of life” in which one is a participant. One might infer that we
should get the laundry in, or go hunting for frogs, or ambush the neighbors
because the rain will mute our approach, or rush outside to celebrate and pray
because the crops needed rain, and so on. How we conceive of and react to
any empirical sensation depends on the language game we are playing. (As a
participant of one sort of game, I may quickly withdraw my hand from a hot
coal; as the participant of another, I may continue to grasp it through the pain
in order to pass a test of manhood. The mistake is to think that one reaction is
somehow “more natural” or justified than the other, simpliciter, without refer-
ence to the language game.) Likewise, obviously, our language games depend
on how the world is because they evolved as part of it, enabling us to cope with
it linguistically.
The mistake of empiricism is to assume that we should be able to reach
relevant agreement with each other because we are “experiencing the same
thing”: the empirical world that is the same in all respects for everyone, the
“Given.” This assumes a “real” or “authentic” core of sensation that gives
us rock-bottom, undeniable truths, and that all other inferences from sensory
experience beyond this core are just the variable window-dressings of culture.
Scientistic empiricists go further and insist that the inferences drawn by the
practices of modern science are not mere window-dressing, but are universally
valid and should be accepted by all because they are based on empirical expe-
rience in a purer, more direct way than nonscientific propositions are. The
pragmatist responds, however, that whether the inferences of science should be
accepted depends on what one or one’s community wants to do. To be sure, the
inferences of modern science (as long as they hold up in the face of challenges)
have enhanced our ability to predict and control the natural world, but predic-
tion and control may not be the primary purpose of a set of beliefs. The purpose
may be entertainment, or increasing communal harmony, or contemplation of
the afterlife, or whatever else. The scientist’s explanation of a lightning strike
as involving ions in the atmosphere is in no way more “basic” than the descrip-
tion of it as an expression of Zeus’ wrath. The fact that both the scientist’s
and the ancient Greek’s differing descriptions of the strike overlap, in that
they agree that it was “bright” and “hot” and “loud,” does nothing to resolve
the differences between the further inferences they respectively draw from the
52 Defending Rorty

empirical sensation. The world does not demand that we adopt the vocabulary
of modern science rather than the vocabulary of ancient Greek religion, though
our purposes might. Purposes must be juggled against the “rightness” of any
description of the world.
Rorty’s approach to knowledge thus assumes that we all live in the same
world, and thereby avoids the hyperbole of Kuhn’s suggestion that people
operating in different scientific paradigms live in “different worlds.” Further,
as we have seen, this means that we mostly share the same beliefs about it. But
because different individuals and groups have different purposes, different sets
of descriptions of the world are more or less helpful to us as we pursue those
varying purposes. The mistake of the rationalists is to assume that there is a
necessary, a priori meta-vocabulary or cognitive faculty, usually labeled “Rea-
son,” that enables us to definitively judge all other vocabularies and neutrally
resolve conflicts between them.
Rorty’s problem with philosophical theories of truth and the metaphysical
realists’ insistence that inquiry must aim at “getting the world right” regardless
of our variable purposes is that these approaches to knowledge run the risk of
shutting down inquiry and suppressing liberal experimentation and pluralism.
Truth is an absolute notion: a true proposition can never be false. Rorty is not
interested in identifying criteria of truth, with the absolutism they would entail.
Rather, his position is that liberal culture and politics will “go better” if we
are fallibilistic and have the ability, produced by liberal education, to entertain
the possibility that our deepest beliefs could be problematic in some way and
could be other than what they are. We can cash out “go better” as meaning,
for example, more humane, more creative, more stimulating, more progressive
than past eras, and so forth, though each of these concepts is up for deliberative
grabs as well.
Rorty believes we will be more fallibilistic if we focus on our social practices
of justification, which we recognize as historically contingent, and let truth
alone. We continue to use the words “true” and “truth,” but preferably in
what Rorty calls a “cautionary” way, as when we say, “Your arguments satisfy
all our contemporary norms and standards of justification, and therefore I can
presently think of nothing to say against your claim, but still, what you say
might not be true.”65 This is an ordinary way to use these concepts that also
emphasizes our fallibilism with regard to any particular claim. Rorty continues,
“I take this cautionary use to be a gesture toward future generations – toward
the ‘better us’ to whom the contradictory of what now seems unobjectionable
may have come, via appropriate means, to seem better.”66
For Rorty’s critics, however, this fails to do justice to the idea of serious
inquiry and its necessary goal of objective Truth. One way to look at the
fundamental disagreement between Rorty and his critics is to understand it as

65 TP, 60.
66 TP, 61.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 53

a dispute over what properly constrains our beliefs and actions. It is a dispute
over the nature and identification of authority. Rorty’s critics think that he
goes too far in attributing the authority for our claims of knowledge to the
admittedly contingent, communal practices of justification. The basic thrust of
their attacks is, naturally, that the practices of justification of any community
can be mistaken. Ergo, a proposition can be maximally justified according
to those practices and yet still be false. There must be something beyond our
practices of justification – “Truth” – that determines the correct constraints that
apply to our beliefs and actions. Without these constraints, we have epistemic
anarchy and, accordingly, ethical and political conflict with no standards of
just resolution.
Conceiving of these constraints as contingent and practice-based, as opposed
to necessary and metaphysical, does encourage us to be ironic about them, and
to scrutinize them and subject them to challenge. Because Rorty wants to strip
our most cherished norms of their traditional rhetorical armor, they can seem
relatively more vulnerable to modification. The Right worries that this leads to
hubristic attacks on time-worn, traditional truths (whether in politics, religion,
science, or philosophy); the Left is concerned that if their ideals of liberation are
not warranted by something greater than historical practices, the ideals will be
robbed of their revolutionary mandate that calls us to break free of our current
practices. But the pragmatic disposition does not lead to wholesale skepticism
or nihilism about ideals (whether they are conservative or Leftist), but leads
rather to Hume’s “mitigated or moderate skepticism,” which is nondogmatic
and open to ethical experimentation.
In response to John Searle’s accusation that this position amounts to a
misguided rejection of the “Western Rationalistic Tradition,” Rorty writes:

Whereas [Searle] sees conditions of intelligibility, presuppositions, I see rhetorical flour-

ishes designed to make practitioners feel they are being true to something big and strong:
the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. On my view, the comfort derived from this feeling is,
at this stage in the maturation of Western humanity, as unnecessary and as potentially
dangerous as the comfort derived from the conviction that one is obeying the Will
of God. It is unnecessary and dangerous because our maturation has consisted in the
gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything
else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of
the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis
that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be
done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity. In political terms, it is the thesis that if we
can just keep democracy and reciprocal tolerance alive, everything else can be settled
by muddling through to some reasonable sort of compromise.67

The obvious response to this is: But where are these allegedly intersubjective
lines of constraint drawn? “Muddling through to some sort of compromise”

67 TP, 82.
54 Defending Rorty

is theoretically thin gruel; we want theory that gives us answers and points
to a course of action. From the vantage point of traditional Philosophy, this
pragmatism has simply (cravenly?) abandoned the epistemological enterprise
at the heart of human existence. How do we determine whether an experiment
is “bad,” and must be restrained, or “good” and should thus be tolerated or
encouraged? As we have seen, Rorty insists that there is no algorithm or philo-
sophical method for identifying necessary criteria for making this determina-
tion. We simply have to engage in a lot of adhockery and creative justification
in the different contexts of the challenges we face. Moreover, the thrust of
Rorty’s work as a whole suggests that liberally educated and socialized per-
sons, who exhibit the liberal virtues, are the best bet for making the correct
determinations over time. Rorty’s pragmatism thus makes him a type of “virtue
epistemologist,” and pragmatically there need be no distinction between the
intellectual/epistemic virtues and the ethico-political liberal virtues.68 It is the
liberal virtues that keep us responsible and keep our inquiries and experiments
within the realm of liberal justification. But Rorty is clear that there are no
guarantees; he simply believes that it’s our best chance for creating a free and
just civilization, however it might evolve.
Indeed, by urging us to self-consciously conceive of our most deeply held
norms as contingent products of history, Rorty’s work induces us to do two
things: (1) to study the historical development of those norms to better appreci-
ate their contingency and better evaluate them in light of our other (contingent)
norms and goals; and (2) be more articulate in our justification (or rejection)
of those norms. If we accept Rorty’s views, it will no longer be acceptable to
think that saying that something is “true,” or “more rational,” or “natural” is
a coup de grâce in the game of justification. We should see these adjectives as
terms of approbation that demand further articulation of the propositions to
which we apply them; they are not essential conversation-enders.

Critics: Is Rorty an Irresponsible Relativist?

Rorty’s oeuvre has been criticized by literally hundreds of scholars and intel-
lectuals; summarizing and addressing all of these criticisms here is thus an
impossible task. What I will try to do in this section and the next is defend
Rorty against some of the most representative and serious critiques. Of particu-
lar interest are those penned by thinkers who are mostly sympathetic to Rorty’s
work and who consider themselves part of the American pragmatist tradition.
This group includes prominent friends and interlocutors of Rorty, such as
Hilary Putnam, Jeffrey Stout, and Gary Gutting. But as an entrée into the cot-
tage industry of Rorty criticism, I will rely on the avowedly anti-pragmatism
philosopher, Thomas Nagel.

68 See, e.g., John Greco and John Turris, eds., Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Rorty’s Pragmatism 55

Nagel simplifies our task by identifying two predominant charges against

Rorty’s sociological description of knowledge: relativism and inconsistency.69
And, indeed, the latter arguably flows from the former: if Rorty is a relativist,
then he is inconsistent when he makes claims for the superiority of liberal-
ism over nonliberalism, modern science over Aristotelian science, and so on,
because a relativist cannot consistently make claims of superiority. Stemming
from these two fundamental criticisms, different critics emphasize different
aspects of the perceived failure of Rorty’s project.
Putnam, for example, who is a pragmatist thinker himself, has pressed
the charge of relativism against Rorty for decades, and his critique has been
favorably cited by such philosophical lights as Bernard Williams and Ronald
Dworkin.70 Like many other critics, Putnam takes issue with what he sees as
Rorty’s reduction of objectivity to mere solidarity with one’s epistemic commu-
nity and their norms of justification.71 Critics often render this alleged position
of Rorty as the pithy claim that “[t]ruth is whatever our peers will let us get
away with saying.” This is actually a paraphrase of a passage in PMN in which
Rorty addresses the question: “Can we treat the study of ‘the nature of human
knowledge’ just as the study of certain ways in which human beings interact
[i.e., sociologically], or does it require an ontological foundation (involving
some specifically philosophical way of describing human beings)?” The first
alternative is, of course, the pragmatic one that Rorty endorses.
The second alternative leads to ‘ontological’ explanations of the relations between minds
and meanings, minds and immediate awareness, universals and particulars, thought and
language, consciousness and brains, and so on. For philosophers like Chisholm and
Bergmann, such explanations must be attempted if the realism of common sense is to be
preserved. The aim of all such explanations is to make truth something more than what
Dewey called “warranted assertability”: more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus,
let us get away with saying. Such explanations, when ontological, usually take the form
of a redescription of the object of knowledge so as to “bridge the gap” between it and
the knowing subject.72
Given Rorty’s later insistence that “truth” is indefinable, this does appear to be
a misstep if read to imply that what is true is simply “what our peers will let us
get away with saying,” or even that truth is Dewey’s “warranted assertability.”
Nevertheless, Rorty has claimed ad nauseum in subsequent work that he holds

69 Thomas Nagel, Concealment and Exposure: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 159.
70 Bernard Williams, “Terrestrial Thoughts, Extraterrestrial Science,” London Review of Books
13 (February 7, 1991), 12; Ronald Dworkin, “Pragmatism, Right Answers, and True Banality,”
in Pragmatism and Law in Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1991), 360–61.
71 Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 67–
71; Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), 22–24.
72 PMN, 175–76.
56 Defending Rorty

Davidson’s position that, “[W]e should not say that truth is correspondence,
coherence, warranted assertability, what is accepted in the conversation of
the right people, what science will end up maintaining, what explains the
convergence on single theories in science, or the convergence of our ordinary
beliefs.”73 Critics who continue to associate Rorty with the bald claim that
truth is simply whatever one’s peers let one get away with saying thus attack
a straw man. Moreover, it is not clear that this passage, which dogs Rorty in
so many critiques of him, even asserts what his critics allege. If we interpret
it a bit more generously, we can understand this early statement as merely
an expression of Rorty’s emphasis on the social nature of justification (which
should leave absolute truth aside). After all, the statement is couched primarily
as a criticism of the representationalist conception of truth rather than as a
positive identification of the nature of truth.
Although Rorty clarified his position in the 1980s as he further embraced
Davidson, Putnam remains dissatisfied. He parses Rorty’s conception of knowl-
edge as possessing two problematic aspects: a contextualist aspect and a
reformist aspect.74 The contextualist aspect is Rorty’s “sociological view of
warrant,” which holds that we must look to our peers to determine whether a
proposition is justified. Putnam insists that this aspect leaves Rorty’s conception
of knowledge unable to account for the epistemic possibility that an individ-
ual can be warranted in asserting a proposition that is nevertheless rejected
as unjustified by his peers (using their current standards of justification). This
possibility, Putnam insists, is implicit in the very concepts of “warrant” and
“justification.”75 Indeed, even the Relativist accepts this because she recognizes
that most of her peers disagree with her relativism, and yet she argues for it
nevertheless because she believes it to be justified (i.e., independently of what
her peers believe).
Rorty responds that the status of a proposition as being justified is always
relative to some (potential) audience.76 As we have seen, it makes no pragmatic
sense to concern ourselves with the possibility of propositions that will never be
accepted as justified by any audience but which are nevertheless true. Indeed,
the idea of such propositions seems to assume something that both Rorty and
Putnam famously reject: a “God’s-eye view” that sees truths that will never
be known by any non-divine beings. Part of the confusion here comes from
the obvious fact that we can indeed easily imagine the lone, persecuted dis-
senter who is right about a proposition that her epistemic community nearly

73 Donald Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (June
1990), 309. Rorty expresses his agreement with this claim in multiple places, including: CP,
xxv–xxvi; ORT, 126–150; TP, 11, 24; and “Universality and Truth,” in RC, 26–7, n. 13.
74 Hilary Putnam, “Richard Rorty on Reality and Justification,” in RC, 84.
75 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 22.
76 TP, 21–22.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 57

unanimously and myopically rejects as false. Our favorite actual examples of

this sort of epistemic situation include many of our most cherished historical
heroes, who courageously stand up against wrongheaded conventional wisdom
in the name of “Truth.” But note that it is not the case that such dissenters are
justified, simpliciter, in spite of not being justified to their contemporaries. They
are justified to us. Using our currently held standards of justification, we rec-
ognize them as right and their peers as wrong, otherwise the example does not
work for us, the relevant audience for the example. Rorty’s picture of warrant
thus does allow for the possibility of, as he puts it, the “unhonored prophet of
some social or intellectual revolution whose time has not yet come.”77 More-
over, of course, we (or our successors) may come to the conclusion in the future
that we and the dissenter are wrong, and that the conventional wisdom of the
dissenter’s original community was actually right all along.
This response disarms two other sophisticated critics of Rorty: John
McDowell and Gary Gutting. McDowell attacks Rorty by insisting that

An utterance of “Cold fusion has not been achieved, so far, in the laboratory” has (if
I am right about the physics) a warrant, a justifiedness, that consists not in one’s being
able to get away with it among certain conversational partners, but in – now I disquote,
and implicitly make a claim – cold fusion’s not having been achieved, so far. Here the
terms “warranted,” “rationally acceptable,” etc., have collected an obvious answer, not
to the question, “to whom?,” but to the question “in light of what?,” and the question
“to whom?” need not be in the offing at all.78

According to McDowell, without this distinction between having justified to

one’s peers that X occurred, on the one hand, and whether X actually did, in
fact, occur, on the other, “there would be no ground for conceiving of one’s
activity as making claims about, say, whether or not cold fusion has occurred,
as opposed to achieving unison with one’s fellows in some perhaps purely dec-
orative activity on a level with a kind of dancing. . . . [Rorty] makes a mystery
of how we manage to direct our thought and speech as it were past the endorse-
ment of our fellows and to the facts themselves.”79 McDowell’s fear, shared
by Putnam and others, is that Rorty’s rhetorical substitution of “solidarity”
for “objectivity” as the aim of inquiry encourages inquirers to simply try to
please their audiences rather than to actually discover how the world is. This
renders inquiry both disingenuous and dangerous. Indeed, many critics argue
that because discovering the one, true nature of the world is the point of seri-
ous inquiry, whether scientific, historical, artistic, or moral, these activities lose
their motivation if Rorty’s view is accepted. Nagel, for instance, dramatically
insists that “[n]o basic science could be done by anyone who really took up

77 TP, 50.
78 John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitaing Objectivity,” in RC, 117.
79 Ibid., 118–19.
58 Defending Rorty

Rorty’s ironic historicism as an attitude to his own activities.”80 Apparently for

Nagel, mere problem-solving and increased ability to practically predict and
control nature is not be enough to sustain science. Human beings fall from the
status of serious investigators of truth to merely frivolous, unctuous flatterers
who produce sweet illusions for each other, to our ultimate detriment when
reality inevitably comes crashing in on us.
Rorty concedes to McDowell that “Did X happen?” does not have the same
meaning as the question, “Can saying, ‘X happened,’ pass muster in the current
practice?” But he insists that this difference in meaning does not mean that there
are two different norms implicated: if you are trying to determine if X happened,
you are unavoidably applying (but also modifying) the current norms of your
epistemic community. Rorty writes, “I see no norm relevant to assertability save
those set by one or another social practice – either current practice or some
possible better alternative. So where McDowell sees a distinction between two
questions – ‘to whom?’ and ‘in light of what?’ – I see a distinction between two
answers to the question ‘to whom?’. The answer may be ‘current practitioners’
or ‘some other, better informed or more enlightened practitioners.’”81
To McDowell’s recitation of Putnam’s argument that “norms of inquiry
transcend consensus” Rorty can reply that, as long as “transcend” means
“evolve intelligibly beyond current social practice to a conceivable future social
practice,” then he can agree. Indeed, our practices of inquiry are invariably rife
with tensions that can be exploited to develop the practice in one direction
or another (precedents in common law legal cases are an instructive example
of how such a process works). The problem comes when “transcend” means
something more than the temporal development of social practices and instead
implies “facts” or a “state of affairs” that are supposed to be criteria of “right-
ness” independent of our practices, however these practices develop. Rorty
insists, “If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that it substi-
tutes the notion of a better human future for the notions of ‘reality,’ ‘reason’
and ‘nature.’”82
Despite his protest that claims based on “the facts” do not need to presume
an audience, however, McDowell’s cold fusion example still assumes an audi-
ence that judges, using its current epistemic norms, whether or not it has indeed
occurred “in light of the facts.” This is because the claim is made according to
a practice of justification, and there is no practice without an implied audience
that developed it. Let’s remove this audience and try to imagine a sole nuclear
physicist who claims to have achieved cold fusion simply “in light of the facts.”
He presents all of his evidence and arguments to his peers, and they determine,

80 Nagel, Concealment, 160; see also Bernard Williams, “Auto-da-Fé: Consequences of Pragma-
tism,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell Basil, 1990), 31; Susan
Haack, “Vulgar Pragmatism: An Unedifying Prospect,” in R&P, 126–39.
81 Richard Rorty, “Response to John McDowell,” in RC, 125.
82 PSH, 27.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 59

sadly, that he has failed to achieve cold fusion. Might he still have actually
achieved it, even though no audience, including us, ever has this fact justified
to it? We can never know (since knowing assumes that it is justified to us), and
therefore it cannot practically matter to us (or to anyone, since it is never jus-
tified to anyone); we cannot act on premises that we do not accept. We cannot
entertain the possibility of doing so, because if we do, we are accepting, at least
hypothetically, what we have said we do not accept (i.e., that cold fusion has
been achieved).
Moreover, it is hard to see Rorty’s position as recommending the mere
deceitful, manipulative pleasing of one’s audience as the goal of inquiry (given
the hackles he raises among his readers, certainly he cannot be accused of
simply trying to please his audience!). Inquiry is still meaningful in Rorty’s
view because we have (discursive) knowledge of the world only insofar as we
believe that knowledge to be justified. While his critics argue, for example,
that scientists must aim at discovering the world regardless of whether they
can justify their findings to anyone, Rorty’s point is that, since designating
something a “discovery” is a matter of what can be justified, when scientists
practice science, they are (seriously and sincerely) applying currently accepted
norms, even as they are modifying those norms and developing new ones
within the practice. As Brandom says, every attempt at justification changes our
practices (even if normally only at the margins), just as every use of a concept
develops its content and, hence, changes it.83 Thus, in a sense, every new
claim is a challenge to our current practices, although the degree of challenge
exists on the Kuhnian continuum from “normal discourse,” implying very little
change, to “revolutionary discourse,” implying large changes. Insofar as we are
stably committed to our current practices, we cannot help but be resistant to
revolutionary claims that radically challenge those practices (as when the lone
physicist cannot convince us that he has achieved cold fusion, though maybe
a future audience, one that even we would recognize as better informed, will
believe him). This process of justification is thus more than a merely “decorative
activity.” It is the struggle to apply and develop our norms of justification in
light of further causal interaction with the world and linguistic interaction
with each other. There is no reason to think that Rorty’s account of inquiry is
somehow frivolous, and no reason to think that it fails to be “world-directed.”
The world and its causality are inescapable for inquirers; Rorty’s point is,
however, that inquirers should not treat it as an authority that impresses upon
us one correct description of it, regardless of the language game we are playing
(as empiricism would suggest). If we conceive of inquiry as a matter of applying
socially created, contingent norms, the ultimate point of which is to better fulfill

83 Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 157, 177. Cf. Jeffrey Stout, “Our Interest In Getting
Things Right” (“Each time we apply a concept we contribute something to the evolution of our
norms – all the more so when this involves explicitly stating those norms philosophically”), 30.
60 Defending Rorty

human needs, we will be more creative and dynamic as we engage in inquiry

to address our problems.
Gary Gutting also thinks that Rorty is guilty of confusing consensus (just
getting one’s peers to agree with one) and justification (making well-founded
claims about the world).84 His criticism, however, is more subtle and sym-
pathetic than McDowell’s because he agrees with Rorty that our norms of
justification are based on nothing more than historically contingent, intersub-
jective consensus. In other words, he appears to share Rorty’s emphasis on
social practice for knowledge claims, as opposed to McDowell’s emphasis on
“answerability to the world,” which raises concerns of authoritarianism for
Rorty. Nevertheless, Gutting thinks that Rorty’s account of justification too
often suggests that beliefs are justified only to the extent that one’s community
agrees on them. Gutting protests that “[i]t is quite possible for a single individ-
ual to be in accord with a community’s norms when the rest of the community
is not. For example, I could be the only person who pronounces my name
correctly or the only person who knows that the twenty-first century does not
begin until 2001.”85 Rorty can respond that one could be right about these
things and the community wrong, but only if the community (or a different
community that agrees with one’s presently idiosyncratic interpretation of the
norms) comes round to agreeing that one is right; one can only be right in light
of some social practice of justification.
Indeed, Gutting’s two examples are telling, perhaps because they do not
invoke the “hard, scientific fact” that analytic philosophers (like McDowell)
tend to favor in their examples. Can’t we imagine a community evolving, or
even deciding outright, to switch its norm about when the century started,
for example, from 2001 to 2000 (and likewise for all other centuries, perhaps
excepting the first)? After all, it would not appear to require much of a shift in
practices; indeed, Gutting uses the example, presumably, because lots of peo-
ple do forget this consequence of our current calendrical norms, even though
nothing of value really turns on the mistake (potential computer issues, like
Y2K, aside). Gutting’s example of the pronunciation of one’s name also illus-
trates how social authority determines what counts as knowledge: does one’s
community assume that each individual has the authority to determine how
his or her name is pronounced, or do one’s fellows determine this, as might
be the case in a community where everyone bears one of a few traditional
names with standardized pronunciations? If the latter, then arguably Gutting’s
example fails on its own terms: in such communities, one cannot be the only
one who knows how to pronounce one’s name, and has no authority to correct
others who pronounce it the consensus way. Both of these examples indicate

84 Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 22–24.
85 Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism, 22.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 61

how flexible and contingent our norms of justification can be, and thus they
actually support Rorty’s position against Gutting’s critique.
Gutting concedes such possibilities, and yet pushes back against what he
takes to be Rorty’s insouciance about the stubbornness of many of our norms.
For Gutting, norm change is just too easy on Rorty’s view. Gutting writes:
Of course, enough changes in the views and practices of the members of a community
will eventually lead to changes in its norms, since norms have no basis outside of the
community itself. But this does not mean that norms are changeable at the whim of a
group, even if the group includes everyone. Even if we all say something different, we
may not all be able to believe it or be able to reflect it in our practices. . . . Because of
his confusion about consensus, Rorty often portrays [justification] as a casual, readily
alterable agreement, as when he says that everything we know is known only under
“optional descriptions” or that “man is always free to choose new descriptions.” In
fact, to take an obvious case, the main elements of our scientific picture of the world
(atomic structure, evolutionary development) are deeply rooted and unlikely to change.
Any such change would require either profound alterations in our norms of reason-
giving or entirely improbable changes in the evidence available. Even our firmest beliefs
may well be contingent in the sense that they may turn out to be wrong. But Rorty tends
to confuse this modest fallibilism with a wildly implausible decisionist (or voluntarist)
view of knowledge.86
Gutting’s charge of “decisionism” is widely shared among Rorty’s critics,
and it forms the basis of accusations that Rorty is frivolous about knowledge
claims. Nagel, summing up the reaction of many philosophers to Rorty on this
point, writes that
[Rorty] seems genuinely to find it possible to change his beliefs at will, not in response
to the irresistible force of evidence or argument, but because it might make life more
amusing, less tedious, and less cluttered with annoying problems. It’s like moving the
living-room furniture around. The policy of tailoring your beliefs and truth claims to suit
your interests is the source of well-known horrors. Rorty has no use for any orthodoxies
of that kind – his values are impeccably liberal – but he really doesn’t feel the force of
reason as a barrier to accepting a belief that would make life easier. And I think that
without some feeling for the way in which conclusions can be forced on us by the weight
of evidence and reasons, it is impossible to make sense of many of the linguistic and
reflective practices that Rorty tries to capture in his pragmatist net.87

Gutting invites Rorty to unequivocally renounce his conflation of voluntary

consensus and justification, and the decisionism that stems from it, and embrace
what Gutting calls “humdrum realism.” Adopting this view means accepting
our commonsense understanding of the world: “[T]his baseline knowledge of
the world is simply a matter of knowing certain commonplaces, not of having
a theoretical account of this knowledge. . . . We can and must subscribe to all
the commonplaces: we know truths, many truths are about the world, such

86 Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism, 22–23 (emphasis added).

87 Nagel, Concealment, 160.
62 Defending Rorty

truths tell us the way the world is, and so on.”88 Gutting believes that if Rorty
would consistently adhere to a humdrum realism (as he does when he is on his
best behavior), he would save himself from some of his excesses.
I think we can make two replies on Rorty’s behalf to the charge that he
espouses a “wildly implausible decisionism.” The first is that Rorty has explic-
itly rejected such a view and agrees wholeheartedly with Gutting (and Dewey
and Davidson) that we start from a baseline of working knowledge comprised
of beliefs that we currently have no reason to doubt. Indeed, this approach to
knowledge is integral to classical pragmatism’s rejection of Cartesian skepti-
cism, which is why Rorty embraces it. Gutting, of course, recognizes this, but
finds too many offensive sentences in Rorty’s work that appear to blow past this
commonsense, nonphilosophical realism and flirt with the irresponsible views
about truth and knowledge that Rorty’s harsher critics attribute to him. For
instance, Gutting finds deep fault with Rorty’s decisionistic line in PMN that
Copernican theory eventually won out over the Church’s objections because of
“the Enlightenment’s decision that Christianity was mostly just priestcraft.”89
But is it fair to assume that Rorty’s position is that an anthropomorphized
“Enlightenment” literally, at one point, chose to accept Copernican theory?
Or is it more reasonable to chalk this rather blatant historical caricature up
to some provocative rhetoric? Gutting would probably agree that it is “just
rhetoric” but insist that Rorty should not be so “insouciant” in his discus-
sions of such important things, like the rise of modern science and the secular
worldview.90 And indeed, Rorty has issued a mea culpa for a “half-erased
decisionism” in PMN, which he admits can still be found in some of his later
writings.91
Nevertheless, to his critics’ dismay, Rorty never recanted his controversial
insistence that our vocabularies are, in some sense, “optional.” Moreover,
critics do not find his later writings any more reasonable on these issues and
thus continue to accuse him of decisionism. Hence, Rorty’s second reply to the
accusation of decisionism is that he is purposely using provocative rhetoric to
jar us out of old ways of thinking, recognize the contingency of our current
norms, and challenge us to be more experimentalist. Stealing that phrase of
Dewey’s of which he is particularly fond, Rorty reiterates that “the task of
philosophy is to break the crust of convention.”92 Contra Nagel, however,
Rorty does not believe that we can or should willy-nilly choose what to believe,
and he quite often, like all of us, finds himself compelled by evidence and
argument to adopt or reject beliefs. In order for a mind to exist at all, the
web of beliefs that constitute it must have a certain degree of coherence. Rorty

88 Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism, 31.

89 PMN, 329. Gutting it in Pragmatic Liberalism, 24.
90 Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism, 24.
91 TP, 92, n. 16.
92 EHO, 11.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 63

writes that “our minds are constrained (and in part constructed) by the need to
tie our beliefs and desires together into a reasonably perspicuous whole. That
is why we cannot ‘will to believe’ – believe what we like, regardless of what
else we believe.”93 This is why he concludes: “We Western liberal intellectuals
should accept the fact that we have to start from where we are, and that this
means that there are lots of views which we simply cannot take seriously.”94
Nevertheless, he insists that we must keep in mind that we are fallible
and that our norms of justification, which are simply beliefs themselves, are
contingent and could be otherwise. Rorty’s specific response to Gutting can be
that “modest fallibilism” is indeed normally the virtuous disposition of a citizen
in a well-working liberal society (or scientific community), but that we must
remain aware that what is sometimes called for is a more revolutionary fervor
that enables us to challenge Gutting’s “commonplace truths” (which, as we
know, in the past have included a parade of benighted propositions: women are
less rational than men, Jews cannot be trusted, the world is made up of the four
basic elements, and so forth). Indeed, while Rorty is adamantly against political
revolution in our contemporary developed democracies (though adamantly for
piecemeal political reform), he welcomes radical challenges to common sense
in the arts, religion, lifestyle choices, and so on – that is to say, in the private
realm of liberal society. While Rorty generally accepts Gutting’s pragmatic,
humdrum realism, it is rhetorically problematic: “humdrum” fails to capture
the cultural dynamism that Rorty envisions for liberal utopia; rather, it sounds
mired in the crust of convention. “Humdrum” seems to overemphasize the
normal discourse pole of Kuhn’s continuum at the expense of revolutionary
discourse. And for Rorty, this “rhetoric matters, especially if one sees, as I do,
the pragmatist tradition not just as clearing up little messes left behind by the
great dead philosophers, but as contributing to a world-historical change in
humanity’s self-image.”95
Rorty’s pragmatic position on knowledge and his rhetorical emphasis on
the contingency of our practices and norms of justification are thus meant to
foment experiment and change to be undertaken by liberally virtuous citizens.
His willingness to bet that such change is likely to be progressive over the long
haul stems from his faith in the historical trajectory of the liberal tradition
and in the virtuous members of the developed democracies. In his critical
assessment of Rorty’s dynamic vision of liberal progress, however, Bernard
Williams worries that
[t]he sort of dialectic in which Rorty’s self-conscious historicism places him is one in
which everyone can try to undercut everyone else by asking others whether they have
allowed for the ways in which their own consciousness has evolved the very thesis
they are advancing. Self-consciousness and reflective awareness, when made into the

93 Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” 15.

94 ORT, 29.
95 TP, 132.
64 Defending Rorty

distinctive attitude of a sophisticated philosophy, make it revolve ever faster; the owl
of Minerva, robbed by later scepticism of Hegel’s flight plan to the transcendental
standpoint, notoriously finds itself flying in ever-decreasing circles.96

The fear is that in Rorty’s post-Philosophical, literary, liberal utopia, our norms
will be too unstable to do their job of creating a moral and epistemic frame-
work in which we can successfully live; as Marx famously assesses the creative
destruction of capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air.” Without stable norms
of justification, we risk either an interminable, and possibly violent, conflict of
views or, as Williams’s suggests, boredom and ethical malaise, because it is all
“just talk” anyhow.
Albrecht Wellmer’s piles on here, arguing that Rorty’s endorsement of a
“generalized fallibilism” not only undermines our practices of justification but
is incoherent in light of his acceptance of Davidson’s argument that most of our
beliefs must be true. According to Wellmer, Rorty’s fallibilism commits him to
the proposition “that each single one of our beliefs may turn out to be false,
[but] if this were the case, it would also be conceivable that all our beliefs –
not all of them at the same time but all of them successively over time – could
turn out to be false (or unjustified),” which contradicts Rorty’s premise that
most of our beliefs are true.97 Wellmer proceeds to invoke Wittgenstein for the
proposition that our linguistic practices rest on “certainties”: assumptions that
nobody even cares to state because nobody would think of questioning them.
Wellmer writes,
If we want to call these certainties ‘true beliefs,’ their truth is not something to be decided
upon in the future but a precondition for having beliefs whose truth might be decided
upon in the future. Consequently, not only are truth and justification like conjoined
twins – one is not viable without the other, but both are dependent on certainties
that are not up for grabs in the process of inquiry. Therefore, a generalized fallibilism
is mistaken; it would undermine not only the idea of truth but also the concept of
justification.98

With his invocation of necessary, unchanging “certainties,” Wellmer attempts

to “stabilize” inquiry in the face of the alleged justificatory anarchy entailed by
Rortyan fallibilism.
Wellmer’s argument for the incoherence of Rorty’s fallibilism, however,
misses its target. Rorty can hold that most of our beliefs are true but still insist
that we do not know definitively which ones are or are not. That is enough to
sustain his fallibilism because it still enables him to say that, as far as we know,
any particular belief might be shown to be false. Wellmer’s worry that this
entails that all of our beliefs could, over time, prove to be false is exactly the sort
of “philosophical doubt” pragmatists dismiss because it has no implications

96 Williams, “Auto-da-Fé” 28. But why not ever-widening, more creative circles?
97 Albrecht Wellmer, “Rorty on Truth, Justification, and Experience,” in PRR, 332.
98 Ibid., 334.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 65

for practice. Rorty replies to Wellmer, “I see Wittgensteinian certainties as

assertions that we cannot, at the moment, think of any reason to doubt, and
consequently think are unlikely ever to require justification. There are many
such assertions, but I do not understand what their existence is supposed to
do for ‘the idea of truth.’”99 Rorty asks, “Why should a fallibilist be less able
or willing to justify his beliefs to others than a nonfallibilist?”100 Rorty is
perfectly aware that we need more or less stable norms for effective inquiry
(indeed, for communication to occur at all) but wants to eschew labeling such
norms necessarily “true” because of his anti-authoritarianism: such absolute
claims tend to unproductively constrain inquiry. While some constraints, at any
particular time, are indeed necessary for the practice of justification, we should
think of any particular constraint in pragmatic, fallibilist terms, rather than in
absolutist terms. Wellmer, in contrast, is trying to leap from the fact that we
want stable frameworks of inquiry to the metaphysical conclusion that there are
propositions that cannot be questioned because they necessarily true and which,
moreover, we can somehow identify (because otherwise his point is empty).
While Rorty concedes that his emphasis on the contingency of even our most
well-established norms fosters a context of inquiry in which radical challenges
to those norms are more likely to emerge, he asserts that his pragmatic emphasis
on empirical consequences in light of our current goals limits the extent of
actual radicalism.
To come back around, finally, to Putnam’s charge of relativism, Rorty rejects
it because he does not hold (as no one truly does) that any set of beliefs is as
good as any other. Instead, again emphasizing the social nature of justification,
he provocatively labels his position “ethnocentric,” which entails “that there
is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions
of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society – ours – uses
in one or another area of inquiry.”101 Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort
of sentence that gets misinterpreted by critics as suggesting that one can never
legitimately criticize the standards of one’s epistemic community. After all, if
Rorty’s instruction is that we should not seek a standard – truth – beyond
our community’s standards of justification, then we appear to be trapped in
them, without any standpoint from which to criticize them. Putnam therefore
concludes that Rorty lacks “any meaningful notion of reforming norms and
standards.”102
In making this criticism of the failed reformist aspect of Rorty’s project,
Putnam refers to another sentence of Rorty’s that is a favorite of critics: “[The
pragmatist] does think that in the process of playing vocabularies and cul-
tures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and

99 Richard Rorty, “Reply to Albrecht Wellmer,” in PRR, 346.

100 Ibid., 345.
101 ORT, 23.
102 Putnam, “Rorty on Reality and Justification,” 86.
66 Defending Rorty

acting – not better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better
in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors.”103
For Putnam, this is not good enough, for it again makes a concept – “reform” –
seem too dependent on communal consensus, and thus falls prey to relativism.
He suggests: “For example, since the community that Rorty speaks of is nor-
mally all of Western culture, it could happen that a neofascist tendency wins
out, and people cope better in the sense that it comes to seem to them that they
are coping better by dealing savagely with those terrible Jews, foreigners, and
communists.”104 Rorty’s view is wrong because,
Just as it is internal to our picture of warrant that warrant is logically independent
of the opinion of the majority of our culture peers, so it is internal to our picture of
“reform” that whether the outcome of a change is good (a reform) or bad (the opposite)
is logically independent of whether it seems good or bad. (That is why it makes sense
to argue that something most people take to be a reform in fact isn’t one.)105

In other words, Putnam does not think that Rorty’s attempt to take refuge in
ethnocentrism saves him from the charge of relativism; if anything, it is actually
an admission of (cultural) relativism.
Denying that he ever suggested that either warrant or truth was a matter of
“majority vote” – that is not usually the mechanism by which norms change
and progress – Rorty responds again by pointing out that, while he agrees
that a majority could be wrong about warrant or reform, it would be so only
in the relative judgment of some particular audience applying their historically
conditioned standards of justification.106 Warrant and reform do not just exist,
independent of a community of inquirers. As Jeffrey Stout describes Rorty’s
position, “The self-reliant inquirer is also inescapably a member of an inter-
pretive community, an invoker of norms involving the notion of rationality,
and a person constantly engaged in distinguishing truth from error on a retail
basis.”107 Putnam’s bludgeoning use of the phrase “logically independent”
obscures this fact, as it seems to suggest that instances of warrant and reform
exist as matter of logic, sub specie aeternitas.
Indeed, Putnam’s flirtation with such a context-independent God’s-eye view
is confirmed by his former student, Jennifer Case, who in an article endorsed
by Putnam elaborates his position: “If it is the case that whether a change
is a reform is logically independent of whether its outcome seems good or
bad, then whether a change is a reform is logically independent of whether
its outcome seems good or bad to us or, or for that matter, to anyone.”108 If

103 CP, xxxvii.

104 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 23.
105 Ibid., 24.
106 TP, 50, 55.
107 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,”16.
108 Jennifer Case, “Rorty and Putnam: Separate and Unequal,” The Southern Journal of Philos-
ophy, 33, 2 (1995), 173. In “Rorty on Reality and Justification,” Putnam compliments the
Rorty’s Pragmatism 67

this is correct, then Putnam’s argument presumes that there can be warranted
assertions and reforms of practices that will never be recognized as such by
anyone, ever. They are a matter of “independent logic” (known only to God,
perhaps?). To Rorty, again, this makes no practical sense, for unless warranted
assertions and reforms are recognized, they cannot be taken into account by us
as agents who are living a set of social practices. Only if one aspires to take a
God’s-eye view of things does it even make sense to talk of never-acknowledged
warranted assertions or reforms. Rorty is left to conclude that, in spite of the
many pragmatic passages in Putnam’s work that he admires, Putnam still has
yearnings for an “absolute conception of the world,” which is ironically exactly
what he rebukes Bernard Williams for seeking.109
This explains why Putnam has such difficulty with Rorty’s insistent empha-
sis on the audience-relativity of warrant and reform. A key part of Rorty’s
response to Putnam is his clarification of what he means when he suggests that
a “reform” is a change in practice that “seems better” than what preceded it.
The relevant audience to whom the change “seems better,” Rorty tells us, is
“language users whom we can recognize as better versions of ourselves.”110
What does “better” mean here? It means something like “more fully liberal,”
although the criteria for this are admittedly evolving. Rorty elaborates that we
recognize this audience as
people who have come to hold beliefs that are different from ours by a process that we,
by our present notions of the difference between rational persuasion and force, count
as rational persuasion. Among the interests and values we have recently evolved into
having are an interest in avoiding brainwashing and a positive valuation of literacy,
liberal education, a free press, free universities, and genial tolerance of Socratic gadflies
and Feyerabendian tricksters. When we picture a better version of ourselves, we build
into this picture the evolution of this better version out of our present selves through a
process in which actualizations of these values played an appropriate part. If we did not
build this process into the picture, we should not call the result “a version of ourselves,”
but something like “an unfortunate replacement of ourselves.”111

This is the best we can do if we want a pragmatic, nonmetaphysical, liberal

conception of “reform.” We start from our best, current ideals of liberalism,
which inevitably harbor various tensions among them, and we try to imagine
what living up to them more fully would entail.
Putnam, however, thinks that Rorty’s suggestion that we judge reform by
imagining what a hypothetical audience that more fully embodies our currently
held ideals would think borders on meaninglessness.112 And yet, in the absence

article as an “excellent analysis and criticism of Rorty’s arguments” against Putnam’s positions
(87, n. 14).
109 Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 80–107.
110 TP, 54.
111 TP, 54–55.
112 Putnam, “Rorty on Reality and Justification,” 85.
68 Defending Rorty

of any convincing ahistorical standard of rationality that can definitively iden-

tify a reform as truly a reform, what else can we do but tell hopeful, imaginative
stories, based on our best, historicist understandings of current practice and our
best guesses at what will be successful in the future? Rorty responds to Putnam:
“Hegel’s historicization of philosophy seems to me important precisely because
Hegel grasped the emptiness of Kantian attempts to make ‘Reason’ the name
of an ahistorical faculty, and to build ahistorical criteria into the structure of
the human mind. His solution was to start replacing transcendental arguments
with narratives – stories about how we hook up with our past.”113
This experimental project of reform is admittedly both hopeful and risky.
Indeed, the root of the apprehension that many of Rorty’s critics have about his
views is his bold acknowledgment that there are no guarantees that “progress”
will result. Rorty writes:

Does this mean that we have to hold open the possibility that we might come to be Nazis
by a process of rational persuasion? Yes. This is no more dangerous than holding open
the possibility that we might revert to an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology by a process
of rational persuasion. Neither possibility is very plausible, but to close either of them
off – as the ACLU keeps reminding us – is part of what we mean by “intolerance.”114

Critics cannot abide the suggestion that “rational persuasion” could lead to
Nazism, and they find the analogy to reversion to Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cos-
mology demonstrably wrong, because science (“necessary facts”) can be distin-
guished from morality (“contingent values”).115 Yet the hard-headed empiri-
cists who think the analogy fails because it just seems obvious that, while a
committed liberal might possibly be talked into becoming a Nazi, it is ridiculous
to suggest that modern science could ever be rejected for Aristotelian science,
should ask themselves which belief they hold more deeply: that it is wrong to
send innocent Jews to the gas chambers, or that nothing is faster than the speed
of light. It is simply not clear that our faith in science is more “grounded” than
our faith in liberal morality.
Nevertheless, Putnam infers that, for Rorty, calling something a “reform” is
mere rhetoric, a pat on the back our successors give to themselves, regardless
of whether the change they have embraced is really reform (again, apparently
from a God’s-eye perspective). Hence, Putnam’s “scare scenario” in which the
Nazis win and believe they have rightfully reformed all those wrongheaded
ideas about equal human rights and such. Like Nagel, Putnam knows that such
a development is the farthest thing from what Rorty would desire. Indeed, he
concedes that Rorty’s rhetoric or, as he also refers to it, Rorty’s “emotive”

113 Richard Rorty, “Response to Hilary Putnam,” in RC, 89.

114 TP, 54–55, n. 36.
115 As we will see in Chapter 4, Charles Taylor is one of these critics, though in contrast to the
“hard-headed empiricists,” he believes that moral knowledge is just as grounded in reality as
scientific knowledge, though moral reality and physical nature are ontologically distinct.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 69

use of “true” and “more rational” springs from good intentions. Putnam even
admits that, perhaps, “we will behave better if we become Rortians – we may
be more tolerant, less prone to fall for various varieties of religious intolerance
and political totalitarianism.”116 For Rorty, this is exactly the hope.117 Putnam,
however, remains skeptical. He continues: “But a fascist could well agree with
Rorty at a very abstract level [that what seems like reform is reform]. . . . If
our aim is tolerance and the open society, would it not be better to argue
for these directly, rather than to hope that these will come as the by-product
of a change in our metaphysical picture?”118 Indeed, this is a common claim
against Rorty: that his pragmatism is actually unpragmatic because his goal –
liberal utopia – would be more effectively achieved by, for example, producing
metaphysical arguments for the necessity of liberalism. But those who make
this claim misunderstand the point of Rorty’s liberal utopia: his bet is that
it will be more progressive in the long run than a society that continues to
use metaphysical rhetoric, even if that rhetoric seems to aim more directly at
achieving what we currently recognize as liberal goals.

Rorty versus Revisionist Pragmatism

The final criticism of Rorty that we examine comes from his long-time friend
and Princeton religious studies scholar, Jeffrey Stout. Like Gutting, Stout is a
particularly perceptive and relatively sympathetic expositor of Rorty’s work.
Nevertheless, he also cannot abide Rorty’s subversion of the notion of objectiv-
ity as a goal of inquiry. Against Rorty, Stout aligns himself with contemporary
“revisionist” or “new” pragmatists, like Brandom and Ramberg, whom he sees
as engaged in a renewed effort “to provide accounts of inquiry that are both
recognizably pragmatic in orientation and demonstrably hospitable to the cog-
nitive aspiration to get one’s subject matter right.”119 While pragmatism always
involves “some kind of anthropocentrism” because it accords philosophical pri-
ority to human practical activity (as opposed to contemplation of nonhuman
metaphysical entities), when it begins to lose sight of the objective dimension
of inquiry, as it does on Rorty’s account, it becomes “narcissistic.”120 The revi-
sionists aim to rehabilitate concepts like “truth” and “objectivity” that they
see Rorty’s pragmatism disparaging by his insistence that “there is nothing to
objectivity except intersubjectivity.”121
Stout’s critique resembles those of Putnam and McDowell because he insists
that the goal of objectivity is unavoidable in meaningful practices of inquiry.

116 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24.

117 TP, 57.
118 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 25.
119 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,” 7.
120 Ibid., 8–9.
121 TP, 72.
70 Defending Rorty

Stout, too, presses the importance of the distinction between getting one’s
subject matter right and achieving agreement with ones peers. He writes:
Losing sight of this distinction – or, worse still, deliberately trying to deface it – is what
turns pragmatic self-reliance into narcissism, because it leaves us able to focus only on
facts about ourselves as a community of inquiry while eliminating the normative notion
of objectivity that our community requires us to employ. . . . Getting something right,
in short, turns out to be among the human interests that need to be taken into account
in an acceptably anthropocentric conception of inquiry as a social practice. If inquiry is
to be understood pragmatically as a set of human activities answerable only to human
interests, and we grant that getting something right is among the interests implicitly at
work in these very activities, then we can have our pragmatism and our objectivity too –
that is to say, pragmatism without narcissism.122

One hears echoes of G.K. Chesterton’s classic takedown of pragmatism: “The

pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
But precisely one of the things he must think is the Absolute. . . . Pragmatism is
a matter of human needs; and one of the first human needs is to be something
more than a pragmatist.”123 Needless to say, Rorty disagrees.
Stout knows that he will get the same reply from Rorty that McDowell gets,
which Stout summarizes as: “If there is no practical difference between aiming
to hold true beliefs about something and aiming to be justified in holding
whatever beliefs I hold about that topic, it makes no sense to speak of truth
as a goal of inquiry.”124 Stout concedes that when we seek truth by engaging
in inquiry, it involves justifying the beliefs we come to accept as the outcome
of inquiry according to our best understanding of our currently held epistemic
practices, which means that we necessarily take a first-person, present-tense
point of view of those practices. From this point of view, obtaining truth
through inquiry, on the one hand, and justification, on the other, do appear to
be the same thing: to seek truth is to engage in justification. Nevertheless, Stout
insists that
[w]e need the distinction between truth and justification largely because we have an
interest in assessing the success of our own beliefs over time and because, to have
beliefs at all, we are necessarily caught up in communicative interactions with others,
interactions that require us to assess, as well as interpret, what those others say and
believe. Both of these forms of interpretive assessment involve departures from the
first-person, present-tense uses of the relevant expressions.125

Therefore, Stout concludes that inquirers must distinguish between “two sorts
of cognitive propriety: the kind that a person exhibits by believing respon-
sibly, given the epistemic circumstances, and the kind that a belief (or the

122 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,” 18.

123 Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Co., 1908), 64.
124 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,” 20.
125 Ibid., 21
Rorty’s Pragmatism 71

corresponding assertion) exhibits in getting the subject matter right.”126 This

distinction allows us to say of another that she is “epistemically entitled” to
believe something that we take to be false, or that we were, given what we knew
at a previous time t, epistemically entitled to hold belief p at t, even though we
now know that p is false.
Rorty can respond that “getting the subject matter right,” as well as being
able to make the latter statements, still inevitably involves justification accord-
ing to some group’s norms, even if that group is an imagined future entity
that has come to an improved understanding of a subject through means that
we recognize as epistemically responsible. There is still no norm of truth that
is separate from justification; contra Stout, we never leave the first-person,
present-tense point of view, even when we are reflecting on the positions of
others or on our own previous positions. While conceiving of different beliefs
that we do not currently hold is essential for critical scrutiny of our positions
and for understanding others, we must not hypostasize some imagined view-
point as the definitively “objective” one because, again, we do not have criteria
for such a God’s-eye perspective.
Indeed, we can see why Stout fails to make headway against Rorty in the
analogy he presents to show why Rorty is wrong: the case of an Olympic archer.
Is the archer trying to hit the target (truth) or merely trying to perform what
is recognized by the community of archers as perfect technique (justification)?
Certainly she is trying to have perfect technique, but only in order to hit
the target. Stout concludes that “achieving the goal involves something more
than simply displaying the virtues recognized within the practice – something
like actually hitting the target.”127 The problem with this argument is that
we still must judge, by our evolving, community-based epistemic standards
what “hitting the target” means. Normally, this is an uncontroversial matter in
archery, a matter of Kuhnian “normal discourse,” as it were: it means hitting
the bullseye as centrally as one can. But what if we decide to play a game that
instead involves putting an arrow in each of the concentric rings on the target?
(In darts, for example, there are many games that are not so bullseye-centric).
From Rorty’s perspective, Stout’s bare reference to “hitting the target,” as if it
is an obvious referent, smacks of the Myth of the Given. The goal of “hitting
the target” is still a matter of the communal language game, even if it is not
currently being challenged. Indeed, the problem with Stout’s analogy is that,
while “hitting the target” is a settled criterion in Olympic archery (for now),
there is no settled criterion for “truth.” It is Rorty and Davidson’s point that
the notion of truth is too abstract and absolute to be pinned down by practices
of inquiry that are always evolving and relative. Rorty, of course, further claims
that attempts to identify criteria for truth is a potentially dangerous activity
politically.

126 Ibid.
127 Ibid., 22.
72 Defending Rorty

Like other commentators, such as J.B. Schneewind and Neil Gascoigne, Stout
also makes much of Rorty’s intriguing discussion of “getting things right” in
his 2000 “Response to Bjorn Ramberg.”128 Stout suggests that Rorty makes a
“startling” concession to revisionist pragmatism’s efforts to preserve the objec-
tive dimension of inquiry. Rorty implies this concession when he writes that
“some readers may have noticed that Ramberg has persuaded me to aban-
don two doctrines which I have been preaching for years: that the notion of
‘getting things right’ must be abandoned, and that ‘true of’ and ‘refers to’ are
not world-word relations.”129 Stout contrasts this surprising admission with
Rorty’s former narcissistic position: “The idea of getting one’s subject matter
right that Rorty [now] embraces at Ramberg’s urging does not boil down to the
idea of getting ‘as much intersubjective agreement as possible.’”130 According
to Stout, when Rorty makes the mistake of defining “objectivity as solidarity,”
he ironically courts “an especially dangerous form of authoritarianism, because
it collapses objective norms into group conformity.”131 In light of Rorty’s con-
cessions to Ramberg, however, Stout hopes that he will now be willing to take
the next step and follow the revisionist pragmatists in accepting that objective
correctness – “answerability to the facts,” in Brandom’s idiom – is a norm that
is constitutive of inquiry and is distinct from (merely) convincing one’s peers.
The first thing to note here is that, if we go back to Rorty’s 1985 article,
“Solidarity or Objectivity?,” cited by Stout and which is a lightning rod for
Rorty criticism, it is clear that Stout’s accusation that Rorty’s position there
implies a problematic “social conformity” falls flat. We can see this by extend-
ing Stout’s quotation from the article about “getting as much intersubjective
agreement as possible.” Rorty writes:

From a pragmatist point of view, to say that what is rational for us now to believe may
not be true, is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea. It is to say
that there is always room for improved belief, since new evidence, of new hypotheses,
or a whole new vocabulary, may come along. For pragmatists, the desire for objectivity
is not the desire to escape the limitations of one’s community, but simply the desire for
as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference “us”
as far as we can.132

128 RC, 370–77. See, J.B. Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” in PRR, 479–
505; Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 218–20.
129 Rorty, “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” 375.
130 Stout, “Our Interest in Getting Things Right,” 18, citing ORT, 23.
131 Ibid., 25.
132 ORT, 23. See also, Richard Rorty, “Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress,”
74 University of Chicago Law Review 915 (2007), 923: “Eternal and absolute truth is the
only kind of truth there is, even though the only way we know what is true is by reaching a
consensus that may well prove transitory. All that can be salvaged from the claim that truth
is a product of consensus is that finding out what other people believe is, most of the time, a
good way to decide what to believe oneself. But only most of the time. If consensus were all we
ever had to go on, there would never have been either scientific or moral progress. We should
have had neither Galilean mechanics not the civil rights movement.” In Rorty’s broad Kuhnian
Rorty’s Pragmatism 73

This paragraph hardly presents inquiry as mere social conformity, but rather
celebrates an agonistic view of justification where new ideas compete and clash
with established beliefs to (hopefully) foment societal progress. By suggesting
that we should not think of the desire for objectivity as the “desire to escape
the limitations of one’s community,” Rorty is not suggesting that we should
passively accept current practices, but rather that inquiry should not frame
itself as achieving something more than the presentation of new, historically
conditioned and contingent options for practice.
Second, Stout and others read far too much into Rorty’s “Response to Bjorn
Ramberg,” although perhaps some of the blame can properly be laid at Rorty’s
feet: he humbly professes that Ramberg has helped him see the error of his
former ways when he concedes that we do, in fact, “get things right.”133 Yet
after fessing up to making the alleged errors identified by Ramberg, Rorty
quickly asserts that his pragmatism is not changed much by his concession: he
stills insists that justification and “answerability to the facts” do not constitute
two different norms, that no area of culture is more in touch with reality than
any other, and that his “militant anti-authoritarianism” remains intact.134 Fur-
thermore, there is ample evidence in Rorty’s earlier writings – at least since he
began his full-throated endorsement of Davidson’s approach to epistemology
in the early 1980s – that suggests that he always held this “reformed” posi-
tion urged by Ramberg. Indeed, Rorty writes in several places that we could
conceivably continue to use terms such as “representation” and “correspon-
dence” and phrases such as “making true” and “getting things right” as long as
we understand them through the Davidsonian-cum-pragmatist lens (as we will
see, however, he nevertheless thinks we would likely be better off without this
philosophically tainted language). This means understanding that these terms
and phrases do not to imply any epistemic, metaphysical relationships between
subject and object, or word and world, but instead rest on a web of inferences
that are shot through with human purposes.
For example, he wrote in 1988: “To say that you can only be wrong about
what you get mostly right is not to say that you can only misdescribe what
you have previously identified. It is rather to say that you can only misdescribe
what you are also able to describe quite well.”135 And in response to Hilary
Putnam, Rorty wrote in 1993:
“I do not think that I have ever written anything suggesting that I wish to alter ordinary
[nonphilosophical] ways of using ‘know,’ ‘objective,’ ‘fact,’ and ‘reason.’ Like Berkeley,

perspective, consensus on “normal” truths must be balanced with revolutionary proposals for
new truths.
133 Steven Levine agrees that Rorty clearly remains unconverted to revisionist pragmatism (Steven
Levine, “Rorty, Davidson, and the New Pragmatists,” Philosophical Topics 36, 1 [Spring
2008]: 167–92, and also Steven Levine, “Rehabilitating Objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the
New Pragmatism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 [December 2010], 567–89).
134 Rorty, “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” 375–76.
135 ORT, 105.
74 Defending Rorty

James, Putnam, and most other paradox-mongering philosophers (except maybe

Korzybski), I have urged that we continue to speak with the vulgar while offering a
philosophical gloss on this speech, which is different from that offered by the Realist
tradition.”136

Rorty’s gloss, of course, is his pragmatic gloss, and this matters because, while it
might not have an immediate effect on practice, “it might well, in the long run,
make some practical differences. For changes of opinions among philosophical
professors, sometimes do, after a time, make a difference to the hopes and fears
of nonphilosophers.”137
Rorty continues after his “concession” to Ramberg to be consistent with
these earlier writings, which demonstrates that he has not repented in the way
that Stout hopes. In an article first published in 2003, for example, we again
find him interpreting “getting things right” in his pragmatist way, albeit after
insinuating (again) that we probably would be better off if we stopped using
the phrase philosophically all together:
I am quite willing to give up the goal of getting things right, and to substitute that
of enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions. . . . The term
“getting it right,” I would argue, is appropriate only when everybody interested in the
topics draws pretty much the same inferences from the same assertions. That happens
when there is consensus about the aim of inquiry in an area, and when a problem can
be pinned down in such a way that everybody concerned is clear about what it would
take to solve it.138

Rorty further elaborates the two dueling interpretations (Realist-

metaphysical vs. Davidsonian-pragmatist) of “realist” tropes in a response
to Charles Taylor:
Taylor seems to think that neither I nor any one else would feel any “serious temptation
to deny the no chairs claim [“There are no chairs in this room”] will be true or false
in virtue of the way things are, or the nature of reality.” But I do, in fact, feel tempted
to deny this. I do so because I see two ways of interpreting “in virtue of the ways
things are.” One is short for “in virtue of the way our current descriptions of things
are used and the causal interactions we have with those things.” The other is short for
“in virtue of the way things are, quite apart from how we describe them.” On the first
interpretation, I think that true propositions about the presence of chairs, the existence
of neutrinos, the desirability of respect for the dignity of our fellow human beings, and
everything else are true “in virtue of the ways things are.” On the second interpretation,
I think that no proposition is true “in virtue of the way things are.”139

The penultimate sentence of this 1994 passage, which lists several true proposi-
tions, resembles Rorty’s supposedly “newly reformed” views in his “Response
to Bjorn Ramberg”:

136 TP, 44 (citation omitted).

137 TP, 45.
138 PCP, 124.
139 TP, 86–87.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 75

There is no such thing as Reality to be gotten right – only snow, fog, Olympic deities,
relative aesthetic worth, the elementary particles, human rights, the divine right of kings,
the Trinity, and the like. . . . Why cannot we get Reality (aka How the World Really Is
In Itself) right? Because there are no norms for talking about it. . . . There are norms for
snow-talk and Zeus-talk, but not for Reality-talk. That is because the purposes served
by the former, but not those served by the latter, are reasonably clear.140

Lastly, when Rorty examines Brandom’s groundbreaking work, Making

It Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994), he finds that Brandom and
he are largely in agreement on the objective truth versus justification-as-
solidarity issue. He thus disputes Stout’s assessment that Brandom is taking
an importantly different position. The one sticking point for Rorty, however,
is Brandom’s continued use of realist-representationalist language, even though
Brandom does usually give it the Davidsonian-pragmatist spin. Rorty writes,
“[Brandom] agrees with Davidson that interpretation comes first and objectiv-
ity later – that the distinction between intersubjective agreement and objective
truth is itself one of the devices we use to improve our social practices. But he
thinks that Davidsonians should be more tolerant of notions such as ‘represen-
tation’ and ‘correspondence to reality.’”141 The latter sticking point between
Rorty and Brandom concerns which rhetorical strategy is best for advancing
pragmatism (and, therefore, liberalism, for although Brandom for the most
part refrains from engaging political philosophy, he does acknowledge his gen-
eral sympathy for Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism).142 But, as we have seen, for
a Rortyan pragmatist, rhetorical strategy can make a big difference.143 Rorty
worries that Brandom’s use of realist tropes will be misinterpreted and used
by metaphysical realists to advance an authoritarian conception of knowledge:
“[A]ggressive realists like Searle will read ‘getting things right’ in one way,
while sympathetic pragmatists like me will read them in another way. . . . I see
Brandom’s persistence in using the terms ‘getting right,’ ‘really is,’ and ‘making
true’ as tools that will fall into authoritarian hands and be used for reactionary
purposes.”144
Rorty’s engagement with Brandom demonstrates the subtlety of the disagree-
ment between revisionist pragmatism and Rorty’s pragmatism. For instance,
Rorty has followed and endorsed Davidson’s conception of communication
and knowledge as “triangulation”: “The ultimate course of both objectivity
and communication is the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter and the
world determines the contents of thought and speech.”145 Rorty’s acceptance

140 Rorty, “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” 375.

141 TP, 130.
142 Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 177–81.
143 TP, 132.
144 TP, 134–35.
145 Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” 325. See Rorty’s discussion in “Response
to Bjorn Ramberg,” 373–76.
76 Defending Rorty

of this doctrine appears at odds with his anti-authoritarianism because it allows

that the nonhuman “world determines the contents of thought and speech.”
After all, doesn’t Rorty insist, as he famously entitled an early article, that
“The World [is] Well Lost”?146 And if the “world” is now allowed to deter-
mine our beliefs, Rorty should not feel such revulsion when Brandom writes:
“The nonlinguistic facts could be largely what they are, even if our discursive
practices were quite different (or entirely absent) for what claims are true does
not depend on anyone’s claiming of them. But our discursive practices could
not be what they are if the nonlinguistic facts were different.”147 What is going
on here?
Perhaps the most useful way to understand the disagreement between Rorty
and the revisionists is to recognize that Rorty is simply more concerned to
emphasize the human points of Davidson’s triangle relative to the revisionist
focus, which emphasizes the “objective” world point (as Rorty realizes, he
is more Jamesian, they perhaps more Peircean, in this respect). It is not that
on Rorty’s view the “world” does not matter – it is a starting assumption for
Rorty’s Davidsonianism. It is rather that there is nothing to say about the world
that is not inextricably communal, and therefore ethical and political. Rorty
sums up his Davidsonian epiphany: “[N]obody’s language has ever been or
ever will be unconstrained by the world, and [pace the Philosophical tradition]
nobody will ever be able to be interestingly specific about what these constraints
are and how they work.”148 This is why Rorty can claim that, assuming our
enmeshment in the world’s web of causation, there are no constraints on inquiry
about this web “save conversational ones.” Where the revisionists think Rorty
fails to appreciate the “objective dimension of inquiry,” Rorty worries that
the revisionists risk encouraging backsliding into metaphysical realism and,
thus, authoritarianism. As Rorty replies to Stout, “What [he] calls narcissism,
I call ‘self-reliance.’”149 In Rorty’s view, Brandom was on the right pragmatic
track in an earlier article where he emphasizes that “all matters of authority or
privilege, in particular epistemic authority, are matters of social practice, and
not objective matters of fact.”150
By now, it should be clear that Rorty’s objection to Brandom’s assertion that
“what claims are true does not depend on anyone’s claiming of them” unprag-
matically suggests a structure of objective truths that preexists our discursive
practices. Such an idea is too easily read as an incarnation of the Myth of the

146 CP, 3–18.

147 Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 331.
Rorty writes that this phrase “might make Davidson’s hair stand on end” (TP, 132). Whether
it would or not, it certainly does make Rorty’s.
148 Richard Rorty, “Response to Frank Farrell,” in R&P, 194 (my emphasis).
149 Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tra-
dition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (June 2010), 423.
150 Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” The Monist 66 (1983), 389–
90.
Rorty’s Pragmatism 77

Given. While Rorty can agree that we will accept new claims as true as they
become justified to us, Brandom’s rhetoric can be interpreted as suggesting that
these truths are waiting there for us to discover them, provided we are rational
in our inquiries. Brandom should instead more clearly adopt Rorty’s epistemic
agnosticism about the “objective world” and agree that, while it is true that
our discursive practices could not be what they are if the world was different,
we should avoid general references to “nonlinguistic facts” that exist before
they become justified to us. Only when claims are justified to us can we assess
whether their objects preexisted our discursive practices, like dinosaurs or the
Big Bang. This avoids the authoritarianism of the Given and enables inquirers
to more freely acknowledge the role that multifarious human purposes play in
our practices of inquiry.

Conclusion
Brandom correctly suggests that Rorty understands pragmatism as
announcing nothing less than a second Enlightenment. The first Enlightenment had the
idea of human beings, in their practical conduct, as under the sway of some nonhuman
authority, as though the norms that ought to govern our interactions with each other
could be read metaphysically off the world. That is opposed to a view that it’s up to
us to discern moral norms, to decide how we want to behave and ought to behave.
That, in Rorty’s vision of pragmatism, freed us from the idea that in our account of
the way things are, we’re subject to norms that are somehow written into the way the
world is, as opposed to thinking of our cognitive activities as social undertakings where
standards of evidence are to be discovered and determined by the inquirers.151

This controversial conception of pragmatism, with its emphasis on anti-

authoritarianism, is ethically central to Rorty’s liberal democratic political
theory. With it, he endeavors to subvert the long tradition of the intellectual
“Quest for Certainty,” still carried on by contemporary epistemologists and
metaphysicians, that he believes to be incompatible with liberalism. Indeed,
as we saw in the last two sections, even many contemporary pragmatists,
on Rorty’s view, fail to fully pursue pragmatism to its anti-authoritarian
denouement.
Rorty’s pragmatism is an exhortation to liberals to change their self-image,
which he believes will bring progressive practical consequences. He succinctly
sums up the world-historical change in self-image that he hopes to inspire:
One way to describe this change in self-image is to say that human beings (in the richer
and more powerful parts of the world) have shown an increasing ability to put aside
the question What is the meaning of human life? And to substitute the question What
meaning shall we give to our lives? . . . So my preferred narrative is a story of human

151 Robert Brandom and Jeffrey J. Williams, “Inferential Man: An Interview With Robert Bran-
dom,” sympoke 21, 1–2 (2013), 379.
78 Defending Rorty

beings as having recently gotten out from under the thought of, and need for, authority.
I see James’s suggestion that we carry utilitarianism over from morals into epistemology
as crucial to this anti-authoritarian movement of the spirit. For James shows us how
to see Truth not as something we have to respect, but as a pointless nominalization of
the useful adjective we apply to beliefs that are getting us what we want. Ceasing to see
Truth as the name of an authority and coming to see the search for stable and useful
beliefs as simply one more part of the pursuit of happiness are essential if we are to
have the experimental attitude toward social existence that Dewey commended and the
experimental attitude toward individual existence that Romanticism commended.152

With Rorty’s anti-authoritarian pragmatism clearly before us, we can proceed

to examine his vision of liberal utopia.

152 Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” in R&P, 71.

2

Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism

So long as man remains free, he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully
as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established
beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful
creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but
to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that
all may be together in it.1
– The Grand Inquisitor
The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson
suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything,
where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything – our
language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance.
To reach this point would be, in Freud’s words, “to treat chance as worthy of
determining our fate. . . . ” Figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust,
and Wittgenstein illustrate what I have called “freedom as the recognition of
contingency . . . ”. I shall claim that such recognition is the chief virtue of the
members of a liberal society, and that the culture of such a society should aim at
curing us of our “deep metaphysical need.”2
– Richard Rorty

If Dostoevsky’s petulant old theocrat is right about the feebleness of human

nature, then Rorty’s hope for a heroic, liberal democratic future is indeed in
vain, and the bulk of his philosophical writing sadly otiose. For this hope
is the driving force of his intellectual work. From it stem his highly technical

1 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov, Constance Garnett, trans. (Ware, Hertsfordshi-
ire, UK: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2007), 278.
2 CIS, 22, 46.

79
80 Defending Rorty

wranglings over philosophy of language and epistemology, his works of literary

and cultural criticism, and his commentaries on the contemporary political
scene. But what does this future look like, and why has it evoked such interest
and, frequently, scorn? I have already noted that Rorty never gives us a nuts-
and-bolts description of his ideal political regime. In computer programmer
lingo, this is a feature, not a bug. Rather, Rorty insists that “[a]sking for
pragmatism’s blueprint of the future is like asking Whitman to sketch what
lies at the end of that illimitable democratic vista. The vista, not the endpoint,
is what matters.”3 He recognizes that he is a humanities scholar, not a policy
expert: his philosophical training enables him to render the broad historical
and cultural outlines of the ideal liberal community, rather than, for example,
the specific tax structure of it.
Moreover, his reticence in spelling out the details highlights the freedom and
open-endedness of the liberal experiment. As Jeffrey W. Robbins comments,
for Rorty, “[t]he greatness of a democratic system of governance, therefore,
is not its guarantee of the actualization of its ideals but its recognition of the
contingency of any political system as a work in progress.”4 Indeed, a central
assumption of the pragmatic view of liberal democracy is that, as the political
community strives to identify and implement justice, our understanding of
what justice entails continues to evolve as we learn new things and face new
political challenges. Liberal justice is a moving target. Our politics is a process
of continually reconsidering and extending our currently held conception of
justice, and thus of reforming our laws and institutions, particularly in light of
the plural, novel activities that people use their freedom to invent. One does not
presume to know what a liberally virtuous people will do with their freedom,
and this unpredictability produces the Romantic excitement of liberal culture.
But one thing we do know is that living successfully amid, and as a participant
(to one degree or another) of, this dynamic process requires citizens to possess
unique liberal character traits and knowledge that society must cultivate in
them.
Although Rorty does not detail the policy specifics of liberal utopia, he does
give us suggestive glimpses of several general features of this society that he
cannot imagine it failing to possess. For instance, he writes: “A liberal society
is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform
rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic
and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that
an ideal liberal society is one which has no other purpose except freedom, no
goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the
outcome.”5 This is very general, of course, but it captures the inspirational

3 PSH, 28.
4 Jeffrey w. Robbins, “Foreword,” in Richard Rorty, An Ethics For Today: Finding Common
Ground Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), xii.
5 CIS, 60.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 81

spirit of Rorty’s liberalism; it is the only sort of answer that one should give to
the broad query, “What’s the point of liberalism?”
When I attempt to envision Rorty’s liberal utopia, I tend to think of an
idealized Silicon Valley (where, coincidentally, Rorty taught at Stanford in the
last years of his life). This is the ultimate pragmatic liberal community, where
highly educated problem-solvers from around the world meet to creatively,
deliberatively, progressively, and competitively innovate in order to find solu-
tions to, as Dewey expansively referred to them, “the problems of men.” It is a
community where citizens are, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not
judged by the color of their skin, nationality, or cultural background, but by the
content of their character and the usefulness and attractiveness of their ideas.
Moreover, their multifarious backgrounds are cherished for their diversity, as
they add to the repository of ethical ideas from which the community can draw
as it faces novel challenges. It is a community where every citizen, ideally, is
the product of an excellent, Millian liberal education, and which celebrates
pluralism and the clash and synthesis of ideas, since this process constitutes the
creative, risk-taking spirit of liberal culture.
Indeed, whether or not this accurately describes the actual Silicon Valley
or is merely a splendid myth (perhaps based on the apotheosis of Steve Jobs,
who famously claimed to have acquired some of his unrivalled aesthetic sense
from taking a course on, of all of the “useless” humanistic endeavors, callig-
raphy at that Oregon bastion of the liberal arts, Reed College), this idealized
Valley is full of “techies” who are also “fuzzies,” who have deep apprecia-
tion for the humanities and refuse to accept C.P. Snow’s suggestion that there
is a fundamental incompatibility between the scientific and the literary. The
superstructure of this culture features, of course, robust liberal institutions,
like representative democracy, independent courts and universities, a gener-
ous welfare safety net (which ideally won’t be used by many), and a free and
vigorous press. As Rorty puts it, “in such a society, communication would
be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a
matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at
the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.”6
And, I might add, an electorate that possesses the liberal virtues in abundance.
Cynics can sneer at this cheery, TED-talk-cum-welfare-state liberalism, but
pragmatists will always respond with the question: Do you have a better, more
feasible alternative?

Approaching Liberal Utopia

As one can glean from the discussion so far, Rorty’s airy conception of liberal
utopia seems to be more style than substance. Rorty is spare in his description

6 Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 40.
82 Defending Rorty

of it in part because he does not think there is much about it that is terribly
novel in any immediate practical sense. This is evident in a breezy passage from
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS), which is a typical, Rortyan sketch of
his positive vision:
[A]ll that matters for liberal politics is the widely shared conviction that we shall call
“true” or “good” whatever is the outcome of free discussion – that if we take care of
political freedom, truth and goodness will take care of themselves.

“Free discussion” here does not mean “free from ideology,” but simply the sort which
goes on when the press, the judiciary, the elections, and the universities are free, social
mobility is frequent and rapid, literacy is universal, higher education common, and
peace and wealth have made possible the leisure necessary to listen to lots of different
people and think about what they say. . . .

In such an ideal society, discussion of public affairs will revolve around (1) how to
balance the needs for peace, wealth, and freedom when conditions require that one of
these goals be sacrificed to one of the others and (2) how to equalize opportunities for
self-creation and then leave people alone to use, or neglect, their opportunities.7

If contemporary liberals find little to disagree with in this description, it is

because it is so general and banal. If this is all Rorty has to say about his ideal
liberal polity, we might wonder why he even bothers. Indeed, he insists that
he does not have very much original to add to the practical ideas about lib-
eralism that we already possess. Rorty professes that he basically agrees with:
Mill’s practical ideas about liberty idealized in the “Harm Principle”8 ; Rawls’s
practical ideas about equality idealized in the “Difference Principle”9 ; Haber-
mas’s practical ideas about democratic deliberation idealized by Habermasian
“domination-free communication”10 ; and Dewey’s practical ideas about edu-
cation for democratic citizenship idealized by Deweyan liberal education.11
Rorty identifies himself as a stalwart, if conventional, believer in European-
style social democracy. He confesses that he does not know the exact policy
mixture that will produce the optimal balance of “governmentally controlled
capitalism plus welfare-statism,” but it seems to him that the Scandinavian
approach of the late twentieth century is the best we have seen so far.12
Although Rorty’s politics appear to be standard welfare-liberal fare, his
pragmatic rejection of Philosophy and recommendation that a “literary spirit”
take its place nevertheless constitute a new ethical approach to achieving the

7 CIS, 84–88.
8 CIS, 63.
9 Giovanna Borradori, “After Philosophy, Democracy,” interview with Richard Rorty, in Take
Care of Freedom, ed. Mendieta, 43; see also, Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to
Bernstein,” Political Theory 15 (November 1987), 564–80.
10 CIS, 66–67.
11 PSH, 118.
12 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 565; PSH, 230.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 83

sorts of goals that Rorty’s favorite liberal philosophers advocate. This is why
it has generated an academic buzz and leads Steven Kautz, for example, to
assert that Rorty’s is an “altogether novel liberalism.”13 As Rorty puts it,
while he broadly subscribes to the same social democratic political goals as
Rawls and Habermas, “[o]ur differences concern only the self-image which a
democratic society should have, the rhetoric which it should use to express its
hopes.”14 But changes in self-image and rhetoric can, in Rorty’s view, make
all the difference, and he believes that the acceptance of his pragmatic virtue
liberalism will better advance liberal justice and progress than rival theories of
liberalism. Citizens who have been educated to be pragmatic liberals, and who
therefore accept the contingency of their values, will be less likely to engage in
political violence, and more likely to settle their disputes through deliberation
and persuasion. Because they are fallibilists, they will be less likely to insist
on the righteous certainty of their political agendas and lord political power
over their opponents, and more likely to be politically circumspect, moderate,
and tolerant of a range political differences. Yet they will also know when to
display political courage and speak out against injustice. They will, in short,
be more likely to be good liberal democratic citizens.
As we have seen, Rorty urges liberal political philosophers to pragmatically
purge their arguments for liberalism of metaphysical language. He maintains
that “the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essen-
tial to the beginnings of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to
the preservation and progress of democratic societies.”15 Metaphysical claims
about “Natural Rights” or “Rationality,” because they are essentialist and
espouse necessity, can become potential obstacles to new and better ways of
understanding our liberal commitments. They are thus, in a sense, rhetori-
cally nonliberal, even though they are made in defense of traditional liberal
practices. Rorty’s pragmatism strips us of metaphysical comforts, putting our
deepest moral beliefs up for potential challenge. Understandably, this makes
many people, including liberal theorists, uneasy.
A recent debate between political philosophers Michael Blake and James
Tully nicely illustrates the disagreement between essentialist liberalism and
pragmatic liberalism. Blake elaborates and defends an essentialist “liberal
foundationalism” against Tully’s nonfoundational theory of “agonistic democ-
racy.” Although Tully, to my knowledge, has never adopted the pragmatist
moniker, he is easily co-opted.16 Tully argues that democratic self-government
means that “any rule (law, norm, right, principle) would always be open in

13 Steven Kautz, Liberalism and Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 87.
14 CIS, 67; Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 567.
15 CIS, 44.
16 See his extremely pragmatist and Rortyan article, James Tully, “Political Philosophy as Critical
Activity,” Political Theory 30 (August 2002), 533–55. Tully begins by writing that political
philosophy “starts from and grants a certain primacy to practice” (534) and concludes that we
should be skeptical of political philosophy’s traditional activity of developing “comprehensive
84 Defending Rorty

principle to the challenge and negotiation of agents (individuals and groups)

who are subject to it through the exchange of public reasons.”17 Blake coun-
ters: “Ironically, it may be the case that only by taking certain liberal values as
not themselves the object of disagreement and collective revision – by insisting
that certain objections to them are excluded – can we defend against certain
objectionable patterns of political exclusion. The only way to defend liberal plu-
ralism, that is, may sometimes be to insist upon certain forms of orthodoxy.”18
Blake argues that the “moral equality of persons” is a norm that must be
regarded as “foundational” to liberal democratic politics, and that refusal to
see it as such is “both theoretically unmotivated and politically dangerous.”19
Only liberals who take equality as foundational can, for example, properly
condemn “hate speech” aimed at marginalized groups as inconsistent with that
foundational value. Blake claims that nonfoundationalist agonistic democrats
like Tully, however, treat hate speech like any other political speech: it has an
equal right to compete in the public sphere. “The agonistic approach, in refus-
ing to exclude anything from the sphere of political discourse, runs the risk of
excluding marginalized citizens simply from this openness to disagreement.”20
In spite of this conviction, however, Blake backs away from recommending
actual state censorship of hate speech. Instead, he claims that his main concern
is with the wherewithal of liberal theory to respond to such speech. His point
is that the norm of equality is an essential condition of democratic deliber-
ation and self-governance, and thus cannot itself be put up for deliberation
without undermining the practice of democracy itself. Thus, Blake concludes
that “enshrining” such a norm in a constitution, placing it “beyond the pale of
political discussion,” is necessary for the preservation of legitimate self-rule.21
Tully responds that Blake has presented a one-sided view of nonfounda-
tional liberalism. He argues that there are “two equiprimordial principles of
legitimacy” for liberal democracy: “constitutionalism or the rule of law (the
liberty of the moderns) and democracy or popular sovereignty (the liberty of
the ancients).”22 In his critique, however, Blake has downplayed the former,
which causes him to mistakenly worry about the moral relativism of Tully’s
democratic politics. While Tully does indeed maintain that any rule or norm

theories” of justice and instead put “freedom before justice” when we think about liberal
politics (551).
17 James Tully, “A Reply to Michael Blake and Leif Wenar,” in Political Exclusion and Domi-
nation: NOMOS XLVI, ed. Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York
University Press, 2005), 250 (emphasis added).
18 Michael Blake, “Liberal Foundationalism and Agonistic Democracy,” in Political Exclusion
and Domination, ed. Williams and Macedo, 231.
19 Ibid., 232.
20 Ibid., 235.
21 Ibid., 238–39. Blake’s position is reminiscent of Albrecht Wellmer’s position on “Wittgen-
steinian certainties” discussed in Chapter 1.
22 Tully, “Reply,” 250.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 85

is politically challengeable, “the exercise of [democratic] freedom with respect

to a contested rule would itself have to be exercised through the latest rules
of law protecting individual and minority rights, due process, the procedures
of public reason, civic disobedience, the liberal right to revolt, and so on (the
liberty of the moderns), even though these rules in turn could be challenged
on another occasion, in order to respect the equiprimordality of the two basic
principles.”23 Tully’s response to Blake’s fears, then, is that we are pragmati-
cally in media res: we have norms, institutions, and a tradition of politics that
provide practical constraints on deliberation. “While the current theories and
civil procedures of public reason and reciprocity must be open to reasonable
challenge and amendment in the course of the struggle, this reflexive, bootstrap-
ping and nonfoundational feature of dialogue is nevertheless rule governed and
thus not equivalent to ‘anything goes.’”24
My addition to this otherwise astute picture of pragmatic liberal democracy
would be to add that Tully’s diverse citizens who engage in such political dia-
logue must be educated and cultivated to possess an array of liberal virtues
that enable them to deliberate and interact as equals in the way he imagines.
These virtues, broadly possessed by the citizenry, and even more than Tully’s
evolving structure of rules, norms, and tradition in which democratic dialogue
takes place, are the pragmatic answer to Blake’s fears. Pragmatic virtue liberal-
ism offers no guarantees concerning outcomes, however; any theory that offers
guarantees comes at too high a price in terms of freedom.
What is evident about the Tully-Blake exchange is that it is a version of
the more general clash between pragmatists and essentialists. Blake wants the
comfort of foundationalism to ensure that his marginalized citizens are not
dialogically disadvantaged. Tully replies that, ironically, the sort of a priori
Kantian principle of equality that Blake favors as an essential foundation has
been used in the past to exclude marginalized peoples as “nonpersons,” and
that it is because the norm of equality has been put up for debate that egalitarian
progress has been made.25 Nevertheless, Tully wants to reassure Blake that,
even though in principle any norm can be challenged, in practice there is always
a provisional hierarchy of norms that serves to prevent extreme arguments from
being taken seriously.26 Do the citizens of contemporary advanced democracies
really need to philosophically guard themselves from, for example, arguments
for the revival of chattel slavery? From the pragmatic perspective, this is a
“philosopher’s worry,” on par with the epistemological worry that no one else
has a mind. Are Blake’s worries merely that?
Blake uses the tricky problem of hate speech to support his case for foun-
dationalism, specifically the hate speech of rabid antigay activist, Reverend

23 Ibid., 251.
24 Ibid., 252.
25 Ibid., 255–56.
26 Cf. ORT, 29.
86 Defending Rorty

Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, and of Aryan Nations founder,
Richard Butler. Again, while Blake hesitates to censor such speech (though it is
certainly something that could follow from his position), he criticizes Tully for
being unable to theoretically rule out such speech “ab initio” on the grounds
of liberal equality. Tully’s response is that such speech can be quickly prac-
tically dismissed on his view because it so blatantly flies in the face of the
agonistic democrat’s deepest-held, though potentially revisable, beliefs. Just
because one is a pragmatist and accepts the contingency of one’s beliefs does
not mean that these beliefs are frivolously held, or that all beliefs must be held
with equal commitment. Fallibilism is not relativism. Although Tully does not
accept any particular conception of equality as an unassailable foundation for
a just politics, our current, liberal democratic ideal of equality is, of course, an
extremely well-supported pragmatic starting place for nonfoundationalist lib-
erals: the burden to overcome this presumption is so strong that Tullians would
scarcely entertain the scurrilous ideas of Phelps and Butler any longer than Blake
would.
As pragmatists, at this point, we might ask just what the disagreement
between Blake and Tully actually amounts to in practice. Clearly, Tully sees
his moral and political beliefs pragmatically as a “Quinean web” or a “Neu-
rathian boat” in a state of constant, normally piecemeal, revision.27 But does
Blake really see his beliefs as a rigid, hierarchical, inverted foundationalist
pyramid, with “moral equality” as the fixed base? As Tully notes, for all his
foundationalist rhetoric, Blake very much embraces the “dialogical turn”; he
is not, to borrow Charles Taylor’s phrase, a “Raving Platonist” who believes
that he possesses the Truth and that there is nothing left to discuss. Indeed,
in the closing pages of his piece, Blake eloquently discusses human finitude
and the ongoing, unfinished nature of social criticism. Perhaps the question for
Blake is: If we “enshrine” a foundational norm in our constitution to put it
“beyond” deliberation, is it never deliberatively revisable? In light of his sincere
commitment to ongoing political dialogue, I surmise that Blake would allow
constitutional revision for very good reasons. Moreover, as Tully points out,
the meaning of “equality” is exactly what is debated in democratic politics; in
this sense, Blake would agree that it is never placed “beyond” deliberation. If

27 Quine likens our knowledge to an evolving web of connected beliefs that is perpetually revised,
usually at the peripheries where the less well-established beliefs reside, when challenged by new
experience (W.V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empricism,” Philosophical Review 60 [January
1951], 20–43). Otto Neurath stated his famous anti-foundationalist boat metaphor for our
body of knowledge like this: “We are like sailors who must reconstruct their ship on the open
sea but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new
one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way,
by using old beans and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely new, but only by gradual
reconstruction” (quoted in Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, and Thomas E. Uebel,
Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996], 139).
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 87

Tully and Blake are not practically so far apart on the issue of hate speech, then
the main difference between them seems to be rhetorical. But, as we know, for
Rorty, this is a difference that can make difference.
Tully shares Rorty’s concern that essentialist rhetoric like Blake’s can lead to
dogmatism and authoritarianism. We get an inkling of this in Blake’s desire to
exclude certain arguments “ab initio,” and in his criticism that Tully’s position
is problematically open to illiberalism. While neither Tully nor Rorty can con-
template taking the likes of Phelps or Butler seriously, they are also aware that
people once felt the same way about Frederick Douglass and Margaret Sanger.
As Gadamer recognizes with his concept of a dialogical “fusion of horizons”
between ethically diverse interlocutors, being open to pluralism entails an ethi-
cal gamble: in genuine dialogue with an ethical Other, one’s own commitments
must be open to revision. Tully’s pragmatic nonfoundationalism refuses to rule
anything out “ab initio” because doing so may not only silence the Butlers and
Phelpses but also risks silencing those we may come to recognize as Douglasses
and Sangers. Because liberalism has no fixed essence, because our concept of
“individual freedom and equality” is a porous container that we move prac-
tices in and out of as we continue to debate what constitutes liberal justice, we
should not be focused on ruling out things ab initio. By eschewing foundation-
alist rhetoric in the hope of ethical progress, Tully is arguably just that much
more open to pluralism at the margins than Blake’s more risk-averse, defensive
position is.
But should he be? Is the pragmatic liberal too tolerant, and thus too willing
to countenance possible injustice in the name of openness? An interesting anec-
dote by Leif Carter involving Rorty and staunch liberal moral realist, Ronald
Dworkin, nicely illustrates what is at stake between the rhetorical styles of
Rorty and Tully, on the one hand, and Dworkin and Blake, on the other.
Carter writes:

I have had the fortunate chance, on separate occasions, to ask Richard Rorty and
Ronald Dworkin roughly the same question: Suppose, while flying over some remote
and primitive land, you are forced to parachute out of a crippled plane. You land
among a people with no experience of western values. Given your “supernaturally”
sudden arrival, you are treated with great respect and deference. While waiting for a
rescue, you discover that the tribe practices female genital mutilation (FGM). What do
you say to persuade them to stop the practice? Dworkin’s answer (I paraphrase both
responses) was blunt. “I would tell them the practice was monstrous!” Rorty’s answer
was longer. “I would explain that we don’t practice FGM and that we find our women
are happier. That makes our men happier. Try it, you might like it.”28

Clearly, we might think Dworkin’s answer is the correct gut response, and we
might assume that Rorty, given his “wet liberal” credentials, shares Dworkin’s

28 Leif Carter, “Review of A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and the Mind, by Steven L. Winter,”
Law & Politics Book Review 12 (June 2002), 280.
88 Defending Rorty

visceral negative reaction to FGM. The question, however, is: Which verbal
response to the natives is better? For a pragmatist, this means, “Which response
is likely to be more effective in practice?” I think it is a good bet that Rorty’s
pragmatic attempt to engage the tribe in conversation is more likely to be
effective.
In their confrontations with the tribe, one gets the sense that Dworkin,
after his initial bald and forceful condemnation of FGM, would launch into
a lecture on how FGM violates the inherent dignity of all persons. Rorty, by
contrast, would, through thick description, try to make liberal practices and
society look good in comparison to the tribe’s, and show how those practices
connect up with a host of norms that come down firmly against FGM. If
pragmatists are right that there is no Enlightenment-style, universal moral
faculty with which all persons are endowed, and to which Dworkin, as a
Kantian, would want to appeal, then Rorty’s effort to engage their web of
beliefs in order to urge them to extrapolate from those beliefs to the correct,
anti-FGM conclusion would seem to be a more effective way to approach the
problem.29 Of course, if the tribe believes in the rightness of FGM as deeply as
liberals believe in its wrongness (it is at the “core” of their web, well-connected
to and supported by lots of other authoritative beliefs), Rorty is unlikely to
have much luck. But, as a good Gadamerian, he would do his best to “fuse
horizons” with them. He attempts to enter into their conversation and change
it from the inside (as well as he can), where Dworkin’s approach simply throws
a foreign language at the tribe, containing strange phrases like “equal human
rights,” which do not make much sense to them. Against this approach, Rorty
writes, “I think that discarding the residual rationalism that we inherit from
the Enlightenment is advisable for many reasons. . . . One practical reason is
that getting rid of rationalistic rhetoric would permit the West to approach the
non-West in the role of someone with an instructive story to tell, rather than in
the role of someone purporting to be making better use of a universal human
capacity.”30
The content of our liberal values and the activities of our liberal practices
must be politically always up for grabs, though usually mainly at the margins.
Debate over these values and practices is what constitutes liberal democratic
politics. Metaphysical theories of liberalism, however, hypostatize values and
practices and make us blind to the fact that they are, ultimately, optional. Meta-
physical arguments for liberal toleration, for example, still insist on necessary
limits on what should be tolerated. Deontological and “natural” theories of
rights tend to be absolutist about the content of rights and the sort of activities
we can engage in under their aegis. But we know that the meanings of rights

29 This is not to say that hermeneutic dialogue is always to be preferred in the face of horrible
practices when other options, for example, force, are available. In this hypothetical, of course,
the only power that Dworkin and Rorty have is the power to be listened to.
30 PCP, 55.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 89

must shift over time in order to take into consideration other values, new activ-
ities, and new conceptions of liberal justice (e.g., I can no longer just dump
my waste in the river that flows through my property, as perhaps I once could,
and claim that it is justified because of my property right). While liberal meta-
physicians argue that certain foundational liberal values and practices simply
should not be up for debate as a matter of principle, Rorty is willing to put his
commitments at deliberative risk. This means, to quote Rorty’s passage once
more, that “we have to hold open the possibility that we might come to be
Nazis by a process of rational persuasion.” But for liberally educated, liberally
virtuous people, such an outcome is unlikely, and the upside – liberal progress –
requires that we take the risk. Rorty is hopeful that accepting the contingency
of liberal values and practices is more likely to bring progress compared to the
defensive strategy of the liberal essentialist.
Rorty’s justification of liberalism is thus rhetorically idiosyncratic, even if
his practical political positions are not. For example, rather than elaborating
and defending a scheme of rights or theory of democratic deliberation like
conventional liberal theorists do, Rorty, borrowing from Judith Shklar, simply
writes that liberalism can be understood as a commitment to the proposition
that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.”31 This sort of unadorned assertion
has led many of Rorty’s critics to conclude that, when it comes to his liberal
theory, “there just isn’t any there, there.” “Where’s the beef?” asks Richard
Bernstein.32 Indeed, we are perhaps ill-served even applying the term “theory”
to Rorty’s somewhat desultory discussions of liberalism. It is his contention
that inspirational narratives and descriptions that present life in liberal culture
attractively will be generally more effective in bolstering proper commitment to
liberal values and practices than would treatises on liberal political philosophy.
Just as he wants to exchange the absolutist rhetoric of Philosophy for the more
flexible and tolerant idea of “cultural criticism,” he substitutes the pragmatic
idea of “cultural politics” for Political Philosophy or Theory.
Rorty’s rhetorical strategy for justifying his vision of liberalism is thus inno-
vative, strange, and, inevitably, annoying to many liberal theorists, who prefer
their political theory laden with more substantive philosophical claims. His
lack of system and detail has unsurprisingly led to misunderstandings, some
of which could have been prevented had Rorty been more careful in places.
Although he does not offer a systematic political philosophy, Rorty’s discus-
sions of liberalism do emphasize several key concepts. In addition to “cruelty,”
these concepts include: the liberal civic virtue of irony and a more radical,
intellectual form of ironism; the public-private divide (which entails Rorty’s
endorsement of Rawls’s “political liberalism,” although I shall argue that this
is a mistake on Rorty’s part); and the idea of a “post-Philosophical, literary
culture,” with its special denizen, the ironist “strong poet.” The following

31 CIS, xv.
32 Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” in RR, 137.
90 Defending Rorty

subsections sketch and attempt to clarify these features of Rorty’s liberalism

and show how they fit into my virtue liberal interpretation of Rorty. With
this deeper understanding of Rorty’s liberalism in hand, the next chapter will
address a chorus of his critics.

Cruelty
A democracy is distinguished not only by its form of government, but also by the pres-
ence of institutions such as a free press, free universities, and an independent judiciary.
These institutions help the nation come to grasp the existence of previously unrecog-
nized forms of cruelty and suffering: the cruelty of whites against blacks, for example,
or the suffering of gays. In a fully democratic society, unnecessary suffering would not
exist.33

We begin with “cruelty,” since Rorty equates “liberal politics” with the public
effort to eradicate unjustified societal suffering. Like Mill’s famous “harm”
concept, Rorty’s “cruelty” is a capacious, protean category whose content
evolves as the liberal community politically debates its meaning in the context
of practical conflicts. The concept includes not only the infliction of unjustified
physical suffering but also, significantly, unjustifiably causing others to expe-
rience humiliation, a sophisticated form of suffering experienced by language
users, which involves having one’s self-conception mutilated.34 We feel humil-
iated when we perceive that our values and concerns are not being treated
with proper respect. The condemnation of cruelty, however, does not mean
that liberal utopia will somehow be bereft of suffering or humiliation. In any
recognizably human society, but particularly in liberal ones that purport to tol-
erate and even celebrate pluralism, there will be ideological conflict and, hence,
winners and losers of political and cultural struggle. The losers of democratic
elections, court cases, public debates, and cultural arguments will often feel
humiliated and that they are being treated unjustly. “But nobody said that the
practice of democratic politics could eliminate humiliation,” and the key to lib-
eral democracy is that currently defeated parties have the expressive freedom
to continue to make their case to their fellow citizens.35
Thus, even utopia will still contain the ongoing deliberative process of iden-
tifying, evaluating, and, if they are persuasive, addressing new claims of cruelty.
Rorty directs us to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as the “best introduction
to political philosophy” for an example of a society that attempts to completely
do away with cruelty and suffering. Huxley’s chilling dystopia reminds us that
it is a fool’s errand to try to create a “social world without loss.”36 Although

33 Wolfgang Ullrich and Helmut Mayert, “Persuasion Is a Good Thing,” interview with Richard
Rorty, in Take Care of Freedom, ed. Mendieta, 81–82.
34 CIS, 89–90.
35 Richard Rorty, “Reponse to David Owen,” in RRCD, 112.
36 This is how Rawls describes Isaiah Berlin’s fundamental insight (John Rawls, Political Liberal-
ism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 197, n.32).
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 91

cruelty and suffering cannot be eliminated from human life without the cure
becoming worse than the disease, in liberal society, the causes of suffering
must have available public justifications that plausibly establish that the suffer-
ers are still being treated as free and equal citizens. Such justifications ideally
demonstrate that the suffering is not the product of cruelty.
Of course, at a sufficiently high level of generality, we might surmise that
few cultures, nonliberal ones included, actually understand themselves to pro-
mote genuine cruelty, which would seem to be rarely, if ever, justified. Rorty’s
invocation of the idea thus might seem overbroad and therefore unhelpful for
distinguishing liberalism. In order to give practical substance to Rorty’s concept
of cruelty, we must start by placing the goal of minimizing it in the histori-
cal context of our post-Enlightenment Western civilization that, as Charles
Taylor remarks, has placed unprecedented moral emphasis on “the avoidance
of suffering.”37 We must further understand the liberal commitment to min-
imize cruelty as implicating more familiar liberal values, such as individual
equality and freedom. Thus, to deny a fellow citizen his equality and freedom
by violating his rights is to treat him cruelly. When a practice is identified
as cruel through public discourse and comes to be condemned by a demo-
cratic consensus, an emergent norm, which perhaps even becomes legislated, is
established against the practice. The pragmatic starting place of such political
debates is the existing, traditional meanings of liberal values and their applica-
tions to our practices; when a pragmatic liberal comes to a new recognition that
a practice is cruel, he supports changing and extending those traditional mean-
ings to reach and condemn the practice.38 Thus, for example, he might argue
in favor of the Civil Rights Acts by demonstrating how society’s treatment
of African Americans is cruel and hence unjustified in light of the tradition,
properly interpreted, of our public, liberal values.
As both Alan Malachowski and David Owen have observed, we can better
understand why Rorty equates liberalism with the avoidance of cruelty if we
look at Judith Shklar’s original passage that inspired him to do so.39 Shklar
writes: “To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by
revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against
God. . . . When [cruelty] is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of
itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm.”40
The commitment to avoid cruelty in Shklar’s account is thus secular, humanis-
tic, and anti-authoritarian in the sense that it does not claim a metaphysical or
divine basis. It becomes clear why Rorty prefers Shklar’s “avoidance of cruelty”

37 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 395.
38 ORT, 29.
39 Alan Malachowski, Richard Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 134–
35; David Owen, “The Avoidance of Cruelty: Joshing Rorty on Liberalism, Scepticism and
Ironism,” in RRCD, 94.
40 Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 8–9.
92 Defending Rorty

as the primary liberal political commitment, instead of employing the more tra-
ditional normative concept that usually plays this role in political philosophy:
justice. From Plato to Rawls, “justice” tends to come with a lot of Philosoph-
ical baggage. Shklar’s concept, by contrast, fits better with Rorty’s pragmatic
“renunciation of religious and metaphysical sources for moral convictions.”41
“Cruelty” also has a more visceral appeal than the well-worn philosopher’s
concepts of “justice” and “injustice,” and is thus potentially more rhetorically
effective.
Rorty’s concept of cruelty supports his account of liberal moral progress, of
how liberal society becomes, indeed, more just. It does so by extending empa-
thetic solidarity to cruelly marginalized individuals and groups. It is empathy,
induced by the expanding of our imaginative capacities, our ability to “put
ourselves into the shoes of Others” and see them as fellow sufferers, that is
the first step toward accepting them as political equals and extending formal
justice to them.42 In one of many eloquent passages on this theme, Rorty writes
that

the moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between the agents of love and
the agents of justice. In other words, such a democracy employs and empowers both
connoisseurs of diversity and guardians of universality. The former insist that there
are people out there whom society has failed to notice. They make these candidates for
admission visible by showing how to explain their odd behavior in terms of a coherent, if
unfamiliar, set of beliefs and desires – as opposed to explaining this behavior with terms
like stupidity, madness, baseness, or sin. The latter, the guardians of universality, make
sure that once these people are admitted as citizens, once they have been shepherded
into the light by the connoisseurs of diversity, they are treated just like all the rest
of us.43

The agents of love, through “detailed description of what unfamiliar people

are like” and “redescription of what we ourselves are like,” are the iden-
tifiers of cruelty. Their efforts put perceived cruelty on the public agenda,
where liberally virtuous citizens can debate whether political reforms must be
undertaken to implement liberal justice more fully. According to Rorty, the
“detailed descriptions” produced by the agents of love, aimed at enlarging our
imaginations, most effectively come in the form of novels, movies, journalistic
accounts, and the like, rather than in formal treatises (which are the traditional
vehicle for theories of justice.)44 Rorty thus joins Martha Nussbaum in his con-
tention that narrative is more important for moral and political progress than

41 Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” 111.

42 CIS, xvi.
43 ORT, 206.
44 CIS, xvi; TP, 12; Ullrich and Mayert, “Persuasion Is a Good Thing,” 67.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 93

analytical theory is.45 His choice of “cruelty” as a central concept of liberalism

is a product of this belief.

The Civic Virtue of Irony

Perhaps the most significant, and controversial, contribution that Rorty makes
to liberal political thought is to emphasize the importance of a sense of irony
as a crucial virtue for liberal citizenship and, indeed, for liberal civilizational
progress. It is the virtue of irony, produced by humanistic liberal education, that
protects liberal utopia from becoming, as it were, utopian: it prevents us from
ever thinking that we have achieved the ideal, “cruelty-free” society, or that
social critique, reform, and improvement are passé. Given irony’s importance
to his social ideal, it is particularly unfortunate that Rorty’s key discussion of
it in CIS is somewhat muddled. The primary problem is that he inadvertently
implies and conflates two different and conflicting senses of irony. The first
sense is the civic virtue that all liberal citizens should ideally possess because it
helps them be tolerant, adaptable, and just. The second sense is the more active
and radical mental habit that “ironist intellectuals” exhibit as they challenge
the conventional wisdoms of the cultural domains in which they work. These
two senses of irony exist on a continuum, as they both pragmatically accept
contingency and reject essentialism, but we must distinguish them to make
proper sense of Rorty’s occasionally confusing use of the singular term. By
carefully reconstructing his discussion, we can parse his two uses of “irony”
and see how they are related, and how they both play crucial, but different,
roles in liberal politics and culture.
Rorty introduces his conception of irony by describing the person who
exhibits it – the “ironist” – and indeed, he gives us two differing descriptions of
the ironist in various places in his book that evince his dichotomous use of the
term “irony.” He tells us first that the ironist “is the sort of person who faces up
to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone
sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those
central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time
and chance.”46 The ironist, ultimately, “thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature,
a real essence.”47 Perhaps most controversially, Rorty tells us that because the
ironist embraces the contingency of her most deeply held beliefs, she realizes
“that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed.”48
As we know from the previous section, a liberal is someone who, at his
moral core, is anti-cruelty in the Rortyan-Shklarian sense. Thus, liberal ironists

45 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1992).
46 CIS, xv.
47 Ibid., 74.
48 Ibid., 73.
94 Defending Rorty

are people who include among their contingent beliefs and “ungroundable
desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation
of human beings by other human beings may cease.”49 Rorty tells us that liberal
utopia is populated by liberal ironist citizens: “the citizens of my liberal utopia
would be people who had a sense of the contingency of their language and
moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community.
They would be liberal ironists – people who met Schumpeter’s criterion of
civilization, people who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency
of their own commitment.”50 Rorty therefore concludes that, in liberal utopia,
“ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal.”51
He also notes that most citizens of extant liberal democracies are not ironists
but rather are nonintellectual traditionalists who do not accept the contingency
of their most dear beliefs. They are instead “still committed to some form of
religious belief or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism.”52 This is consis-
tent with Rorty’s claim that ironism must be universal in liberal utopia because
contemporary liberal societies are not liberal utopias yet, but are hopefully
moving in that direction. Thus, a goal of pragmatic liberal socialization and
education must be to make all citizens – intellectuals and nonintellectuals –
ironists. This is an idealistic achievement that is simultaneously democratic,
onerous, and, of course, highly controversial. Still, Rorty’s claims for irony so
far appear to hang together coherently.
Later in CIS, however, Rorty appears to contradict himself by suggesting that
there would be nonironist citizens in liberal utopia but that, to confuse things
further, these nonironists would nevertheless accept the contingency of their
commitments. He writes: “In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would
still be ironists, although the nonintellectuals would not. The latter would be
commonsensically nominalist and historicist. So they would see themselves as
contingent through and through, without feeling any particular doubts about
the contingencies they happen to be.”53
How can we reconcile these statements with the earlier claims? Rorty ini-
tially asserts that the mark of the “ironist” is the acceptance of contingency,
historicism, and nominalism, and indicates that this is what distinguishes the
ironist from the nonironist. But then he claims that “nonintellectuals” can
accept contingency and be “commonsensically nominalist and historicist,”
and yet remain nonironists. Moreover, if ironism is “universal” in liberal
utopia, then mustn’t all citizens be ironists? Rorty suggests this but then
appears to backpedal. Further, Rorty writes that “irony is the opposite of

49 Ibid., xv.
50 Ibid., 61.
51 Ibid., xv (emphasis added).
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 87.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 95

common sense.”54 What can it mean to be “commonsensically historicist and

nominalist?” Doesn’t this amount to an incoherent combination of opposites –
“commonsensical irony”?
These discrepancies in Rorty’s discussion surface after he presents the sec-
ond, more radical and comprehensive definition of the “ironist,” and Rorty’s
intent and meaning become clearer after we take this into account. This sec-
ond definition is preceded by his introduction of the useful concept of the
“final vocabulary,” which consists of the terms that one uses to describe one’s
identity, values, and worldview. Rorty writes,

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions,
their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our
friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts
and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively
and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s
“final vocabulary.”55

Rorty then issues his second definition of the “ironist” as someone who fulfills
three conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses,
because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by
people or books she has encountered; (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 vocabulary is closer to
reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined
to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral
and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to
the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.56

On this definition, it is apparent that there is much more to being an “ironist”

than mere acceptance of contingency and being fallibilistic. This second “iro-
nist” is an intellectually restless, seemingly neurotic character, who “spends her
time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong
tribe, taught to play the wrong language game,” even though “she cannot give
a criterion of wrongness.”57 She feels impelled to challenge and transform her
final vocabulary by perpetually seeking out and comparing it to, and reweaving
it with, alternative final vocabularies. She seeks “autonomy,” to be the author
of herself, “rather than a copy or replica of somebody else.”58

54 Ibid., 74.
55 Ibid., 73.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 75.
58 Ibid., 25, 43.
96 Defending Rorty

We can now make sense of Rorty’s discussion if we match the two senses
of irony and their associated definitions of “ironist” to the distinction that
he draws between intellectuals and nonintellectuals. The first sense of irony,
which applies to all inhabitants of liberal utopia – intellectuals and nonintel-
lectuals – is a civic virtue that good liberal democratic citizens possess. Cast
in Aristotelian terms, this civic virtue is a Golden Mean between a deficiency
of commitment to one’s values and beliefs (e.g., wishy-washiness, superficial-
ity, lack of seriousness, possessing an unstable moral identity) and an excess
of commitment (e.g., rigidity, close-mindedness, dogmatism, fanaticism). Pos-
sessing this virtue entails conceiving of one’s final vocabulary as a product of
historical contingency and thus not rooted in any ultimate reality. It supports
“critical open-mindedness”: a sense of one’s own fallibility and finitude, which
can nevertheless be combined with an ability to be steadfast in one’s currently
best-justified judgments. It is a complex cognitive and emotional capacity that
enables citizens to maintain the disposition of the fallibilist balance. This fal-
libilism, which must be clearly distinguished from a paralyzing or frivolous
skepticism or nihilism, enables liberal citizens to be properly, though not abso-
lutely, tolerant in their politics.
It is especially significant that the civic virtue of irony is based on a sense
of contingency associated with “historicism.” The fallibilism of irony is much
more nuanced than simple doubt or tentativeness about one’s final vocabu-
lary. Rather, irony is produced by critical study of the history of humanity’s
beautiful and often problematic ethical pluralism: the wide range of multi-
farious responses to the challenges of the human condition that people of
different times and places have developed. Historicist irony thus stems from
an educated recognition of historical conceptual change and its contingency.
Although Rorty, unlike Dewey, does not develop a comprehensive philosophy
of education, it is clear from his work that someone who is a “historicist” has
received a deeply humanist, liberal education.
Because it is rooted in the study of human pluralism (which includes, of
course, our pluralistic study of the nonhuman), irony has the potential to be
creative in a way that simple doubt does not. After all, the sense of finitude
induced by such study ideally brings with it the illumination of the many
options that might be open to us as we attempt to solve the problems we con-
front. Irony involves appreciation for the power of redescription, of changing
the terms by which we know ourselves and the world. It is this creative aspect
that is particularly highlighted, and even radicalized, in Rorty’s discussion of
his second sense of irony as the chief characteristic of intellectuals. But it is also
important for the universal civic virtue of irony, though perhaps in this context
it is more helpfully thought of as “ethical and political adaptability.” Because
virtuous citizens of liberal utopia accept the contingency of their final vocabu-
laries in light of their knowledge of pluralism, they can more easily, and more
willingly when they must, adapt and modify their beliefs and practices. They
possess the knowledge and wherewithal to tweak their final vocabularies when
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 97

life in liberal society requires them to. In support of this virtue liberal interpre-
tation of irony, Alan Malachowski aptly observes, “Successful ‘redescription’
requires considerable knowledge, insight and skill.”59
The civic virtue of irony facilitates liberal politics because the evolving polit-
ical settlement of law and policy, which aspires to establish a regime of liberal
justice, makes ethical and legal demands on citizens that a sense of irony equips
them to deal with. Because the norms, laws, and policies of this settlement are
always subject to change through democratic politics (which includes the activ-
ities of the courts), liberal citizens must be able to change their practices, and
therefore their beliefs which support those practices, to abide by the terms of
that shifting settlement. Liberal citizens must be adaptable. If, for instance, I
am a farmer and my particular method of slaughtering livestock comes to be
deemed cruel and unjust by enough of my fellow citizens, who successfully vote
to get it outlawed, then I must cease to use this method and switch to a legal
method even if it is economically burdensome. This example, of course, does
not appear to implicate any deep changes to my final vocabulary, although it
could: I could be a certain stripe of libertarian who insists that, as a matter of
deeply held principle, my livestock are my property to dispose of as I wish, and
that the state is therefore stealing from me by forcing me to switch to more
expensive methods of slaughter. A more salient example, perhaps, is the Dutch
ban on Jewish kosher and Muslim halal methods of slaughter on the grounds of
animal cruelty. The democratic debate over whether the law unjustly infringes
upon religious liberty continues, of course, yet regardless of one’s position on
this matter, it is clear that the law was legitimately enacted through the Dutch
liberal democratic political process, and that Jewish and Muslim citizens are
therefore prima facie obliged to obey it.
The liberal political settlement requires citizens who lose in the democratic
process to possess the ethical adaptability to abide by the law, even if they
believe it to be unjust, even as they attempt to get the law changed by con-
tinuing the political debate.60 Assuming Dutch Jews and Muslims are unable
to convince the courts or a democratic majority to reverse the law, they must
modify their religious beliefs and render their practices consonant with new
legal reality – that is, with the new, provisional yet legally binding, definition
of liberal justice that the law implements. Rorty believes that this adaptation
will be more easily and better accomplished if the members of these communi-
ties possess the civic virtue of irony. Religious believers who, on the other hand,

59 Malachowski, Richard Rorty, 183.

60 I intentionally leave aside questions of when civil disobedience or political revolution might
be justified, which would carry us too far afield. Suffice to say that I (rather conventionally)
think both can be justified along a continuum of increasing levels of injustice, with civil dis-
obedience reasonably employed against injustice that meets a certain threshold of severity, and
political revolution as the last resort against a badly unjust regime. Both of these methods of
political activity are, in any case, generally (and hopefully) marginal in a reasonably just liberal
democracy.
98 Defending Rorty

insist that their traditional method of ritual slaughter is divinely commanded,

rather than a historically contingent practice invented by their ancestors in a
different time and place, will be less likely to abide by the law or, at least, more
likely to harbor a politically destructive resentment toward their fellow liberal
citizens.
Again we see that Rorty does not imagine a liberal politics bereft of strife,
or that adjustment to evolving norms and laws is easy; to the contrary, a
certain amount of political strife indicates that the pluralism he cherishes
remains healthy. He just thinks that metaphysical and religious views held
non-ironically and insistently injected into political debate is a recipe for an
unhealthy, unproductive politics. The civic virtue of irony enables citizens to
“reweave” their ethical identities to adapt more easily to the vicissitudes of
life in the liberal regime; it enables them to, as liberal citizens, live up to their
commitment to be just. Rorty concludes that, “To see one’s language, one’s
conscience, one’s morality, and one’s highest hopes as contingent products,
as literalizations of what were once accidentally produced metaphors, is to
adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an ideally liberal
state.”61
If this first sense of irony is a civic virtue ideally possessed by all liberal
citizens, the second sense of irony is less directly political and more exclusively
an ethic of the intellectual class. Although, as we have seen (and unhelpfully
adding to the confusion), Rorty occasionally uses the term “ironist” inclusively
in the first sense to refer to all of the citizens of liberal utopia, he most often
employs it in his second sense as a synonym for “pragmatist intellectual,” who
is distinguished from intellectuals who are metaphysicians seeking necessary,
“objective” truths. Pragmatist intellectuals are the Millian eccentrics, the con-
ceptual innovators, who produce their new ideas by ironizing and redescribing
various parts of culture, giving them a new spin.
Rorty distinguishes the intellectuals from the nonintellectuals of liberal
utopia by telling us, in the much-criticized passage quoted above, that the
former have “radical and continuing doubts” about their final vocabularies
because they have been impressed by others they have come across. While non-
intellectuals in liberal utopia accept the contingency of their final vocabularies,
they are, by contrast, generally satisfied with their current, often inherited, final
vocabularies, or at least feel no compulsion to attempt to transform them by
actively seeking out new ones. Intellectuals, on the other hand, take it as their
métier to seek out and create new final vocabularies in which to formulate
novel forms of individuality and life.62 Because, in liberal utopia, intellectuals
are still politically liberal, however, they must be able to justify the practical
results of their conceptual experiments as not producing gratuitous cruelty.

61 CIS, 61.
62 See, PCP, 90.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 99

A common critical response to Rorty’s description of the intellectual ironist

is to ask why, if the ironist believes that no final vocabulary is closer to the
Truth, would she worry that hers is “wrong?” What can “wrong” mean here?
John Horton suggests that the ironist’s worry must simply be the manifestation
of a psychological state, and therefore not a matter for cognitive inquiry. On
this account, the ironist is indeed neurotic: she worries even though there is
no rational justification for it.63 Rorty agrees that the ironist’s worry is a
psychological state, but he thinks that Horton’s description fails to do justice
to it: to say that the ironist’s worries “are not a matter of cognitive inquiry
seems to presuppose that where criteria end, so does the need to think about a
problem.”64 While the ironist may agree that her worry from the viewpoint of
natural science is a matter of brain chemistry creating the psychological state,
she does not want to reduce her intellectual quest to create a new self-identity
to merely changing that chemistry. The search for meaning, which is also the
activity of creating meaning, exhibits its own meaning in an emergent, semi-
articulated way, which can often only be more fully described in retrospect –
as ever, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.
Perhaps the best way to understand what the ironist is up to is to recog-
nize that our final vocabularies are usually fraught with tensions and even
inconsistencies.65 We do not have to go all the way with Isaiah Berlin and
conclude that conflict is ontologically embedded in our values to see this. The
difference between the ironist intellectual and the nonintellectual is that the
former obsesses about these tensions and embraces them as both problematic
and exhilarating, as opportunities for freedom and creativity. Nonintellectuals
tend to ignore or do not see the tensions that the intellectual worries about.
This lack of worry on the part of nonintellectuals is not necessarily problem-
atic because these tensions do not exist by necessity or by the “natural order of
things.” The intellectual, however, by dint of contingent idiosyncrasies in her
current final vocabulary, is motivated to innovate by seeking out other, perhaps
exotic, final vocabularies to experiment with and play off of her own troubling
tropes. The intellectual can often to some degree articulate the difficulties and
problems she is experiencing with her current final vocabulary. She may have
some sense of what sort of new thinking might resolve these problems and of
what intellectual direction she is striking out in. But, again, on Rorty’s account,
these problems are not necessary, despite the fact that they feel pressing to the
intellectual facing them; they could, in principle, be ignored, as they are by
nonintellectuals. The ironist, qua ironist, recognizes that her need to seek out
a new final vocabulary is itself contingent, but this does not subvert her desire

63 John Horton, “Irony and Commitment: An Irreconcilable Dualism of Modernity,” in RRCD,

20.
64 Richard Rorty, “Response to John Horton,” in RRCD, 29.
65 ORT, 13, 16.
100 Defending Rorty

to innovate (Nagel is wrong to suggest that an “ironist scientist” is somehow

an oxymoron).
Thus, although they may understand themselves to be addressing a particular
intellectual difficulty in a specific cultural context, Rorty suggests that, from the
viewpoint of the larger context of the “conversation of mankind,” we should see
ironists as striving for novelty for its own sake, because it stimulates, inspires,
and gratifies (at least temporarily). Rorty writes:

The generic task of the ironist is the one Coleridge recommended to the great and
original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged. But the judge he has in
mind is himself. He wants to be able to sum up his life in his own terms. The perfect life
will be one which closes in the assurance that the last of his final vocabularies, at least,
really was wholly his.66

Of course, the ironist realizes that, taken literally, this is an impossible task
because his final vocabulary is always parasitic on others that are not of his
making; no one’s truly a sui generis, “independent” thinker. This is part of the
ironist’s irony, and by recognizing this and embracing his own contingency, “he
sees no futility in his failure to become an être-en-soi.”67 Rather, the ironist is
intrigued by the imaginative power of “redescription” which enables his quest
for novelty. It is the practice of intellectual irony, in particular, that involves an
active commitment to the proposition “that anything can be made to look good
or bad by being redescribed.”68 Those who succeed in creating attractive new
vocabularies are the “heroes” of the liberal polity, Bloomian “strong poets,”
who are driven to create by love of the new, the fear of death, and the “anxiety
of influence” – that is, the worry that they are mere epigones of past greats.69
I suggested earlier that the sense of irony that marks the intellectual is “less
directly political” than the civic virtue of irony. I hedge because, akin to his
muddled, if still inspiring, general account of irony, Rorty’s presentation of the
role that intellectual irony plays in liberal culture suffers from its own perplex-
ities. This role is centrally implicated in another important and controversial
feature of liberal utopia: the public-private divide.

The Public-Private Divide

Rorty insists that we think of liberal society as containing two distinct nor-
mative spheres: public and private. The public sphere is where liberal citizens
attempt to live up to our commitment to diminish cruelty in society, especially
through political deliberation concerning how the democratic state should use
its monopoly on legitimate coercion to achieve this end through law and pol-
icy. The private sphere is where individuals can freely pursue their idiosyncratic

66 CIS, 97.
67 Ibid., 99.
68 Ibid., 73.
69 Ibid., 24–25, 53.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 101

personal projects that are not aimed at achieving, though are not practically
incompatible with, the public project of diminishing cruelty. The political pro-
cesses in the public sphere thus establish the state-enforced framework of law
and rights that sets the boundaries on the activities that take place in the private
sphere. These boundaries are perpetually challenged, debated, and reformed
through democratic politics and court cases as liberal society strives to imple-
ment a just regime. For Rorty, any recognizably liberal society will feature both
a public and private realm because most of the ideas and activities produced
by individuals and groups in a free society take place comfortably within the
framework of law and rights, and thus are not problematic in terms of the
public quest for justice. This is merely to say that these activities are generally
uncontroversial, or at least that they are legitimate uses of freedom that have
not been identified as “cruel” or “harmful” by a critical mass of democratic
citizens such that there are significant calls for the state to regulate or prohibit
them.
While it true that, in a pluralistic society, any activity or practice can poten-
tially become a matter of public justice (and perhaps most “uncontroversial”
activities are seen as unjust or cruel by some marginal party or other), prag-
matically, only so many salient political items will get serious attention in the
public sphere at any particular time. As pragmatists, we start our analysis for
determining whether an activity is “cruel” or “harmful” from our current,
though admittedly plural and incomplete, understandings of those terms. Per-
haps the defining characteristic of liberalism is the assumption that, as long as
a new activity or venture in the private sphere does not obviously violate any
traditionally recognized rights or cause apparently unjustified harm (against
which the rights protect), the burden of proof is on those who want to prohibit
it to convince us that it does, contrary to first appearances, violate rights and
result in cruelty. It is this shifting of the burden of proof in favor of liberty
that is the genius of the liberal tradition, captured succinctly by Mill’s Harm
Principle. This is why Rorty frames his invocation of the public-private divide
as a “negative point”: liberals do not have to “positively” justify their pri-
vate activities as bolstering the public quest for liberal justice; they must only
be prepared to “negatively” defend these activities as not undermining that
quest.70
For readers who have never taken seriously the ideal, originally formulated
by Plato and later associated with Enlightenment thought, of a political regime
based on Philosophical Reason, Rorty’s announcement of the divide between
public and private may not seem particularly noteworthy (perhaps because
such readers are already pragmatists by temperament). After all, he is merely
following Mill and endorsing the standard liberal view that the democratic state
should not dictate most of our pursuits, which should be left up to individual

70 Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with
Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 2001), 62–63.
102 Defending Rorty

choice as long as they do not violate the rights of others. The idea of the private
realm – including “the right to be left alone,” as Warren and Brandeis phrased
it in their seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article – is deeply embedded in
American culture, even if its marginal parameters have always been politically
disputed.71
For Rorty, however, understanding and embracing the public-private divide
was more of a hard-won intellectual achievement than it is for the average
American citizen, who reflexively accepts some version of it. Because of his own
contingent personal history, Rorty had to overcome his early attraction to the
twin intoxicants of Platonism and Trotskyism. In his autobiographical essay,
“Trostsky and the Wild Orchids” (which amply illustrates Nietzsche’s dictum
that philosophy is confessional), Rorty admits that, as a young “Trotskyite,”
he hoped and expected that the rationalist, Platonic approach to politics could
save humanity.72 He bought into the Enlightenment dream that Philosophical
Reason could deliver an irrefutable set of moral principles that would form the
foundation of a truly just regime, to which we should then dedicate our all of
our energies to implementing.
As his study of philosophy and history progressed, however, Rorty was
struck by the historical contingency and limits of Philosophical Reason.73 He
became skeptical of the Enlightenment faith in Reason as a universal faculty
that, if used properly, brings all rational people to the same moral and scientific
conclusions. Like the postmodernist Continental thinkers to whom he became
attracted, he began to appreciate more fully the depth and irreconcilability of
humanity’s ethical pluralism. He realized that not only has it proved extremely
difficult to achieve the monistic Philosophical dream to, in Yeats’s words, “hold
justice and reality in a single vision,” but also that practical attempts to do so
are fraught with danger. Political systems that aspire to merge the pursuit of
justice with the achievement of individual autonomy are rationalistic fantasies
that potentially lead to totalitarianism: illiberal regimes that “force citizens to
be free” in a particular way in all areas of life.
Rorty instead came to accept that there is no way or need to justify legitimate
private activities in terms of their contribution to social justice. Looking back at
his own past, Rorty decided that his adolescent, Trotskyite self should not have
fretted so much about whether Trotsky would have approved of his personal,
eccentric fascination with wild orchids.74 The point of liberalism, in contrast to

71 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4. 5 (1890),
193–220.
72 PSH, 3–20.
73 Richard Bernstein, among others, claims to detect a “God that failed” tone in Rorty’s writing
because of this (Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn [Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010],
214).
74 PSH, 7.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 103

more synoptic philosophical or religious worldviews, is that there is room in a

well-balanced, ethically lived life for both the pursuit of justice and the pursuit
of socially irrelevant individual interests.75 Nancy Frankenberry nicely captures
Rorty’s position when she writes that, “[f]ar from disastrously dichotomizing
important aspects of human life, [liberalism’s public-private divide] is the best
way to combine private fulfillment, self-realization, with public morality, and
a concern for justice.”76
Thus, the reason that Rorty places such emphasis on the centrality of a
public-private divide to liberalism is that he seeks to address a philosophical
tradition to which he was once attracted but now finds unhelpful and even
threatening to the liberal project. Concurring again with Berlin, Rorty insists
that we must reject those philosophical and religious traditions that unwisely
aim to “fuse the public and the private,” because they lead to the repression
of legitimate freedom and pluralism.77 Because his purpose is simply to warn
against such all-encompassing fusion, he barely engages, at least in his philo-
sophical writings about liberalism, in the philosophical debates about where
exactly the line between public and private should be drawn, about which par-
ticular private activities are, and which to fail to be, compatible with liberal
justice. Rather, he pitches his description of the public-private divide at such
a high level of abstraction that he hardly claims anything that is controversial
for liberals of any variety.
It is particularly curious, then, that philosophical critics, including many
liberal theorists, have responded to it like a herd of bulls seeing the flash of
a red cape. Daniel Conway recites the common charges leveled at Rorty’s
formulation of the divide:
No element of Rorty’s utopian theorizing has elicited stronger challenges than his insis-
tence on separating the public allegiance to liberal ideals from the private pursuit of
self-creation. Rorty’s critics have insisted, for example, that his public/private distinc-
tion is not sufficiently liberal; that it is not sufficiently ironic; that it allows too much
seepage from the private into public; that it allows too little seepage from the private
into public; that it represents an atavism of an unowned attempt at ‘first philosophy’;
that it is contrary to the fallibilist spirit of American pragmatism; and that is neither
possible, nor desirable, nor necessary to maintain it.78

While much of this criticism rests on overwrought misunderstandings of

Rorty’s position, it is significant that two of Rorty’s most sympathetic and
insightful readers, Michael Bacon and Christopher Voparil, identify Rorty’s

75 Ibid., 7–14.
76 Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Bernstein and Rorty on Justification by Faith Alone,” in The Prag-
matic Century, ed. Davaney and Frisna, 91.
77 CIS, xiii.
78 Daniel Conway, “Irony, State and Utopia: Rorty’s ‘We’ and the Problem of Transitional
Praxis,” in RRCD, 78 (citations omitted).
104 Defending Rorty

problematic handling of the distinction as the most glaring weakness of his

work.79
Part of the problem is that Rorty makes a rhetorical mistake by overem-
phasizing the distinction. He unnecessarily presents it in provocative language
that leads readers to assume he is claiming more than he actually is; indeed, he
concedes that he must have been misleading when he introduced his thinking
about the distinction in CIS to elicit such hostile reactions.80 In that book’s
introduction, Rorty boldly declares: “This book tries to show how things look
if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and
are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as
equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.”81 He elaborates: “The vocabulary
of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argumentation. The
vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumen-
tative exchange.”82 Rorty gives two principal reasons for the public-private
divide: (1) to protect individuals, especially ironist intellectuals, from oppres-
sive public demands of conformity by ensuring that they have cultural space
in which to conduct their life experiments; and (2) to safeguard the ongoing
public endeavor to diminish societal cruelty from these experiments which, in
the case of intellectuals, are typically ironic and radical.83 Ironic experimen-
tation, which involves redescribing traditional vocabularies in new terms, as
when Nietzsche describes pity as motivated by will to power, or when Marx
writes that religion is an opiate of the masses, can be offensive and humiliating
to traditionalists.84 Muslim rage against Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, or Christian
condemnation of Serrano’s Piss Christ, illustrates this. A liberal society, accord-
ing to Rorty, should nevertheless permit these artists the freedom to create their
art, but should not adopt their irony as the official position of the state. Rorty
concludes, “Irony seems inherently a private matter,” “irony” here meaning
redescription that is not ostensibly aimed at reducing cruelty and advancing
the equality and freedom of all citizens.85
Rorty further elaborates the distinction between the two realms by separat-
ing intellectuals into two groups according to the realm in which their works
will be useful to liberal society: (1) the ironists, whose works are particu-
larly useful for private quests for autonomy but are useless and possibly even

79 Bacon, Richard Rorty, 92–93; Christopher J. Voparil, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 134.
80 Rorty, “Response to Daniel Conway,” 91.
81 CIS, xv.
82 Ibid., xiv.
83 Rorty’s separation is thus reminiscent of, and indeed encompasses, the traditional separation
between Church and state liberal societies, which is justified on the grounds that it both keeps
intractable theological disagreements out of politics and keeps religion from being corrupted
by the mundane concerns of politics.
84 CIS, 89–90.
85 Ibid., 87.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 105

politically inimical to the pursuit of liberal justice (this group includes such
thinkers as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault); and
(2) the liberal artists and writers who alert us, through art and reportage, of
previously unrecognized cruelty to which we should attend to advance our goal
of establishing a liberally just regime. Rorty further breaks down the works
of this second group into those that help us recognize our own cruelty, which
we sometimes cause through our private pursuit of autonomy (e.g., the work
of Dickens and Nabokov), and those that help us recognize the cruelty of our
social institutions. These latter include the works of liberal political philoso-
phers (e.g., Mill, Dewey, Rawls), as well as literature and journalism (e.g., the
work of Dickens, again, Sinclair, and Orwell). The key is to make sure that
ironic redescription not aimed at furthering liberal justice remains in the pri-
vate cultural realm, while the pursuit of political justice, especially as advanced
by the power of the state, remains in the public cultural realm. As Rorty puts
it, “The compromise advocated in this book amounts to saying: Privatize the
Nietzschean-Sartrean-Foucauldian attempt at authenticity and purity, in order
to prevent yourself from slipping into an attitude which will lead you to think
that there is some social goal more important than avoiding cruelty.”86 For
secular liberal politics, intellectual irony is like theology: potentially politically
dangerous to the liberally just regime.
This presentation of the divide has attracted accusations that Rorty wants a
“rigid separation,” an “apartheid” even, between the public and private that
conservatively banishes irony from politics.87 Indeed, because he presents it
in a heavy-handed way and says so little else about liberalism that has the
same sort of philosophical ring to it, his critics cannot resist the opportunity to
pounce (“Aha! A philosophically fraught distinction!”). Under the assumption
that Rorty must be claiming something novel, critics either assail him for failing
to give any philosophical arguments establishing principles that enable us to
draw the line between public and private – Isn’t such line drawing the point
of liberal political philosophy? – or they impute to Rorty certain principles
and then attack those principles.88 Both responses, however, miss the point:
Rorty’s pragmatic position is that traditional philosophizing is not much help
for drawing the distinction. He intentionally refuses to identify a philosophi-
cally grounded division between which activities should be mandated or pro-
scribed by the state and which activities should be left up to private individual
choice. Instead, he offers generalities: “The closest we will come to joining
these two quests [public justice and private self-creation] is to see the aim of a
just and free society as letting its citizens be as privatistic, ‘irrationalist,’ and

86 Ibid., 65.
87 See, e.g., Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of
Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 267.
88 See, e.g., Keith Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” Ameri-
can Political Science Review 89 (December 1995), 962.
106 Defending Rorty

aestheticist as they please so long as they do it on their own time – causing no

harm to others and using no resources needed by those less advantaged.”89 In
liberal politics, the boundary between the public and the private gets drawn,
and redrawn, through the ongoing democratic political process; there is no nec-
essary way that it should be drawn, though we pragmatically start our political
negotiations from where the boundary currently is.
Determining the practical division between public and private constitutes
the unique challenge of liberal politics. The history of our liberal politics shows
us many instances where what was once thought personal (private) has now
become political (public), as the feminist slogan goes, and thus, for example,
we now have more progressive domestic abuse laws than we did previously
because a husband’s private “freedom” to abuse his wife came to be publicly
recognized as “cruel,” and thus unjustified in terms of liberal justice enforced
by the state. In the case of the American Prohibition, what was personal and
private – having a cocktail – became political (perhaps an instance of regress!),
but was then shifted back across the divide with the passage of the Twenty-First
Amendment (though alcohol remains on the public agenda in certain respects,
e.g., driving after consuming cocktails has become a much more public matter,
and consequently more regulated by the state). Liberal citizens must continually
judge and deliberate about where justice draws the public-private divide as new
experiences and practices, and with them new claims about cruelty and justice,
emerge from the myriad activities of free individuals in liberal society. The
success of this activity of judging and deliberating is, of course, dependent on
degree to which the citizenry is liberally educated and possesses the liberal
virtues.
An interesting practical question for Rorty’s conception of the divide emerges
from Blake’s example of hatemongers like Phelps and Butler. Is their speech
activity public or private? In one sense, it is obviously public and arguably
(unquestionably, for most liberals) cruel. Shouldn’t Rortyan liberals then seek
to have the democratic state eradicate this hate speech in order to diminish
cruelty? And yet many liberals, including Rorty, maintain that agitators like
these should be free to express their odious ideologies. If we refuse to censor
hatemongers, does this mean that we accept that their lives devoted to purveying
bigotry are in some sense legitimate Millian experiments in the private realm
(which also aim at making illiberal policy changes in the public realm)? After all,
isn’t the point of the private realm to allow citizens to live out their idiosyncratic
and even nonliberal visions of the good life?
In spite of the fact that political hate speech has public ambitions and is an
act of cruelty, pragmatic liberals like Rorty reject state censorship because they
believe that it is generally the wrong tool to combat this cruelty; it is too likely to
be abused and, moreover, most hate speech is fortunately already marginalized

89 CIS, xiv.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 107

in contemporary liberal societies (of course, if the Aryan Nation started to

gain substantial membership, started winning elections, etc., all bets are off; a
pragmatic liberal government may have to act to suppress such illiberal political
speech activity, as several liberal European governments are legally empowered
to do). But this does not mean that a Rortyan liberal is indifferent to the cruelty
of hate speech. Rather, she will speak out against it, condemn the harm that
it inflicts, and try to ensure that her fellow citizens are not taken in by any
illiberal ideologies. Rortyan liberals also suspect that proper liberal education,
with its inculcation of the liberal virtues, for all citizens will result in fewer and
fewer Phelpses and Butlers.
This raises a further question: If one receives the requisite liberal educa-
tion and develops the civic virtue of irony among other liberal virtues, like
autonomy, toleration (to some degree), and law-abidingness, is it possible that
one still could be a committed bigot, while perfectly understanding that one’s
commitment to bigotry is contingent? Rorty, at one point, suggests that “there
is no reason why a fascist could not be a pragmatist in the sense of agreeing
pretty much with everything Dewey said about the nature of truth, knowledge,
rationality, and morality.”90 One can be a Nazi ironist, for example, who rec-
ognizes the contingency of his antiliberal beliefs but is nevertheless willing to
die for them. And yet, while possible, this seems unlikely. Barry Allen makes the
point in response to Rorty’s statement about the possible existence of fascists
who are also pragmatists: “I can’t picture it. Fascists believe in will, ‘unshake-
able determination,’ a Fürhrerpinzip; and in all consistency reject democracy
in politics, individuality in ethics, and experimentalism and fallibilism in the
theory of knowledge.”91 Unlike pragmatism, illiberal ideologies do not tend
to cultivate fallibilism and experimentalism based on exposure to pluralism
in their adherents. Rather, they tend to want “true believers,” not ironists.
Indeed, Rorty admits, “it is nevertheless obvious why those who favour a prag-
matist account of the nature of human knowledge tend to admire Whitman
and Jefferson more than they do Baudelaire and Hitler.”92
It is thus difficult, if not impossible, to be an authentic antiliberal in liberal
utopia, where all citizens possess the civic virtue of irony and are ideally com-
mitted to the public project of diminishing cruelty. As Macedo memorably puts
it, “The liberal polity requires that the Nazis be law-abiding Nazis and that is
not easy. They cannot be ‘gung-ho’ Nazis, in fact they cannot be Nazis at all
but only play at it.”93 In Rorty’s terms, they have to be Nazi ironists in pri-
vate, while abiding by liberal public morality (as the Westboro Baptist Church

90 PSH, 23; PCP, 32.

91 Barry Allen, “What Knowledge? What Hope? What New Pragmatism?” in The Pragmatic Turn
in Philosophy, ed. William Eggington and Mike Sandbothe (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 152.
92 PSH, 39, n. 1.
93 Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitution-
alism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 260.
108 Defending Rorty

attempts to do by scrupulously comporting with all legal requirements when

conducting antigay protests). This, as Macedo notes, is a difficult (impossible?)
and certainly a morally dangerous trick to pull off, because the Nazi ironist
would, as a liberal, have to plausibly believe that his Nazi fantasies do not actu-
ally cause any unjustified cruelty to anyone. He would privately be committed
to the position that the Final Solution is warranted, but publicly be committed,
in practice, to the proposition that Jewish citizens must be treated as free and
equal. One sees the problem; it arises from the fact that a recognizably Nazi
life is simply irreconcilable with any currently plausible conceptions of liberal
justice.
The difference between Rushdie and Serrano, on the one hand, and Phelps
and Butler, on the other, is that by contemporary liberal standards, the expres-
sive activities of the former are not generally deemed cruel, while those of the
latter are (even if we are circumspect about having the state censor them).
This is, of course, a loaded and contingent distinction, and perhaps some self-
described liberals hold Rushdie’s writing and Serrano’s art to constitute hate
speech as much as, or maybe even more than, Phelps’s and Butler’s activities.
Although the latter judgment may strike most mainstream liberals as mistaken
and even outrageous, it is possible that the minority of liberals who hold this
position will in the future convince the rest of us that Rushdie’s and Serrano’s
works really do cause unnecessary humiliation and should be condemned by
liberals (and maybe even censored by the liberal state). In any case, these are
the political issues that are the objects of liberal politics, as we try to determine
in practice where the line between public and private is justly drawn.
Nonplussed that his critics interpret him so literally and starkly, Rorty has
made subsequent attempts to deflate his conception of the public-private divide.
He states in an interview:

I don’t think that private beliefs can be fenced off [from the public sphere]; they leak
through, so to speak, and influence the way one behaves toward other people. What
I had in mind in making the distinction was this: the language of citizenship, of pub-
lic responsibility, of participation in the affairs of the state, is not going to be an
original, self-created language. . . . I don’t think [private and public vocabularies] are
synthesizable, but that doesn’t mean that the one doesn’t eventually interact with the
other. . . . When people develop private vocabularies and private self-images, people like
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Derrida, it’s very unclear what impact, if any, this will ever
have on public discourse. But over the centuries, it actually turns out to have a certain
impact. . . . Having a great imagination and altering the tradition in insensible ways is
going to make a difference in public affairs somewhere down the line.94

Moreover, it is not that the vocabularies of Nietzsche, et al., are intrinsically

private. It is rather that, in Rorty’s interpretation of them, these thinkers are

94 Michael O’Shea, “Toward a Postmetaphysical Culture,” interview with Richard Rorty, in Take
Care of Freedom, ed. Mendieta, 50–51.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 109

not concerned with the liberal aspiration to minimize societal cruelty. He there-
fore does not see how their works bolster the contemporary public project of
establishing liberal justice. To the contrary, their works tend to be critical
of democratic equality and bourgeois liberalism, and instead praise counter-
Enlightenment ethical ideals. Given our contemporary liberal ideals, the only
way that the works of illiberal ironists should effect politics is indirectly, by
helping instill in us a sense of the historical contingency of our ideals (i.e., help-
ing cultivate the civic virtue of irony) and by, in good Millian fashion, keeping
us sharp in our arguments against rival, illiberal worldviews.95 Rorty would
concede, of course, that someone might redescribe these thinkers and argue
that there are liberal elements in their works; it is just that Rorty does not think
that this is why they are most interesting. Because of this, he relegates them to
the private sphere, although he admits that their radical ideas may positively
influence liberal public discourse in unexpected ways over the long haul.
Since there is no philosophical way to draw the line between the public
and private, Rorty does not a priori or eternally rule out any ideas from
being potentially relevant to the pursuit of liberal justice. He would agree
both that, in liberal politics, issues that start out as personal predilections fre-
quently become important political causes, and that our private interests and
endeavors inevitably affect our participation in liberal politics, perhaps often
in unrecognized ways. It would be surprising, for instance, if Rorty’s own pri-
vate obsessions with orchids and bird-watching did not affect his thinking on
environmental policy (though he never wrote on the subject). More broadly,
his deep appreciation for these treasures of the natural world influenced his
character, imagination, and values in various ways that cannot but have had
ramifications for his thoughts on public matters. As an acolyte of Dewey and
Mill, it is hard to imagine that Rorty holds that the development of private
individuality is completely irrelevant to politics. While he agrees with Berlin
that quests for intellectual purity in politics are immature and dangerous, he
also notes that “the spin-offs from private projects of purification turn out
to have enormous social utility.”96 We hope with Dewey and Mill that our
personal passions, idiosyncrasies, and narratives will often enrich our political
discourse as we engage with each other in democratic deliberation.97

95 I invoke Mill’s famous liberal saw: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little
of that” (J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991], 43).
96 EHO, 72.
97 For a perspicuous discussion of this issue by a sympathetic critic, see chapter 5 of Voparil,
Richard Rorty. Like others, Voparil criticizes Rorty for insisting on “an inviolable barrier
between private self-cultivation and public justice” (134). He suggests that Rorty could bolster
his pragmatic liberalism by moving in a Millian direction by recognizing the importance of
individuality for democratic politics. I think Rorty is already closer to Mill in this sense because
I see his overemphasis on the divide as simply a rhetorical mistake that is inconsistent with his
larger conception of liberal utopia and democratic politics.
110 Defending Rorty

This more flexible and complex interpretation of Rorty’s public-private

divide is confirmed by his unhesitating acceptance of a “friendly amendment”
offered by Daniel Conway. Recognizing that Rorty’s critics tend to misunder-
stand his discussion of the divide, Conway offers a more nuanced reading of
it. He analogizes Rorty’s discussion to Mill’s similar position, noting that Mill
at first, too, appears to suggest a rigid distinction between, in Mill’s parlance,
“self-regarding” and “other-regarding” actions. But, Conway suggests, Mill
goes on to modify and soften the distinction as he points out the complexities
of applying it to real-world situations. Likewise, we should understand Rorty’s
public-private distinction as

a heuristic device, designed both to honour and to convey a basic, pre-theoretical senti-
ment shared by ‘us liberals.’ Having established the coeval value of privacy and solidar-
ity, Rorty might then undertake a more nuanced negotiation of their competing claims,
gradually softening his guiding distinction to accommodate a pragmatic melioration of
the institutions of liberal democracy.98

Approaching Rorty’s distinction thusly, Conway argues that it does not set up
an impermeable barrier between the two realms. Rather, the “public/private
split operates as a pragmatic filter, allowing the ripest fruits of utopian think-
ing to transit from private to public, but only after they have been adequately
harmonized with the guiding ideals of liberal democracy . . . [because] some
private labours of self-creation might eventually inform the quest for greater
solidarity.”99 Bacon agrees that this is a better understanding of what Rorty
is after, arguing that, “[t]he redescriptions of the ironist can themselves some-
times help this liberal concern to avoid cruelty, exposing hitherto unrecognized
instances of injustice and thus expanding the frontiers of our moral world.”
He similarly concludes that, “[i]f we accept that irony can have a role to play
in public life, Rorty gives us much in the way of indicating how this role might
lead to moral progress.”100
This is what Rorty attempts to convey when he writes that “the heroes of the
liberal society are the strong poet and the utopian revolutionary.”101 Rorty’s
rhetoric here, however, is easily misunderstood, because politically these two
ironist, “revolutionary” figures are still liberals, and thus not politically “revo-
lutionary” at all: they do not endeavor to overthrow or radically transform the
liberal order; nor are they completely “alienated” from liberal society. Rather,
when it comes to politics, they protest “in the name of society itself against
those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own [liberal democratic]
self-image.”102 In other words, they engage in immanent rather than radical

98 Conway, “Irony, State and Utopia,” 79.

99 Ibid.
100 Bacon, Richard Rorty, 92.
101 CIS, 60.
102 Ibid.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 111

social critique in their attempts to reform liberal politics and institutions. Rorty
labels them “revolutionary” because of the way they inspire liberals to be bet-
ter liberals with their novel ideas and poetic creations. Although Rorty fails to
clarify such subtleties in CIS, they do constitute his considered position, which
is why he gladly embraces Conway’s amendment.103
These redescriptions of Rorty’s conception of the liberal public-private
divide, offered by Rorty and his (few) allies, should make his position more
comprehensible and palatable to liberal theorists. But, of course, for critics who
are truly antiliberal, they will still fall short; Conway’s “filtering,” or “taming,”
of irony to make it fit for the liberal public sphere is exactly what such critics
protest. Rorty, however, is finally unsympathetic to such criticism. While there
is no doubt that conceptual innovators are needed for liberal progress, Rorty
will still insist that liberalism is the “last conceptual revolution” that West-
ern political thought needs.104 Liberal political innovation in the developed
democracies is reformist, not revolutionary. This is why Rorty writes that,
although “a liberal culture whose public rhetoric is nominalist and historicist
is both possible and desirable, I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought
to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist.”105 A public rhetoric that is
“ironist” (in the second, more radical sense) exemplifies what Bernard Yack
has called the “longing for total revolution,” which demands that “our auton-
omy be embodied in our institutions.”106 While revolution, conceptual and
political, might be justified against repressive and violent illiberal regimes, it is
dangerous and retrograde when launched against a society that has flawed but,
nevertheless, recognizably liberal practices and institutions. Our liberal public
rhetoric must start from where we are: arguments that are likely to be useful
to the public discourse of contemporary liberal democracies must couch their
suggested reforms in the vocabulary of freedom and equality, and must use
those terms in reasonably familiar ways. Rorty thus positions himself between
the essentialist liberals, like Blake and Dworkin, who are too risk averse,
and the anti-liberal ironists, like Nietzsche and Foucault, who dangerously
reject the liberal project.
Rorty’s overemphasis on the practical public-private division unfortunately
obscures what in practice is an active negotiation between the two spheres,
and the reality that ideas which start out as private ironic experiments can
often become crucial to the public project of liberal reform. Rorty’s later,
more nuanced elaborations of his understanding of the public and private,
however, defuse the apoplectic accusations that he necessarily banishes the

103 Rorty, “Response to Daniel Conway,” 92.

104 CIS, 63.
105 Ibid., 87.
106 Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent
from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 385.
Rorty identifies the “longing” that Yack describes in Foucault’s work (CIS, 65).
112 Defending Rorty

bold, unconventional ideas of ironist strong poets from the public sphere,
or insensitively shields cruelty in the private sphere. Such banishment would
seem not only irredeemably conservative coming from a thinker who clearly
demands liberal progress but also completely unfaithful to the liberal tradition
itself. Moreover, in Rorty’s ideal, liberally virtuous citizens remain open and
vigilant with regard to the unending stream of arguments claiming to identify
hitherto unacknowledged cruelty that must be addressed in the name of liberal
justice. When we look back on the history of liberal democracy, a primary
way in which liberal progress has been fomented was through the efforts of
intellectual cultural critics who inspired social movements and taught us all to
think differently, thereby reforming our public vocabulary.

Rorty, Rawls, and “Political” Liberalism

Related to Rorty’s commitment to the public-private divide is his professed,
but ill-considered, allegiance to Rawls’s theory of political liberalism, which
has resulted in further misunderstandings of his liberalism. Politically, it is
easy to understand why Rorty embraces Rawls: Rawls is the most important
liberal egalitarian theorist of the last fifty years, and Rorty is sympathetic to
the social democratic politics that arguably proceeds from Rawls’s theoreti-
cal arguments. But even more important to the Rorty-Rawls relationship is
Rorty’s interpretation of Rawls’s shift from the liberal theory he presented in A
Theory of Justice (TJ) to his subsequent formulation of “political liberalism.”
Rorty believes that this development reveals that Rawls is actually arguing
for an anti-metaphysical, historicist basis for liberalism rather than a Kantian
metaphysical basis, which is what Rorty and others originally took him to be
purveying in TJ.107 The title of Rawls’s post-TJ article, which formed the basis
of Political Liberalism, is “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical.”108
This, naturally, was music to Rorty’s pragmatist ears.
The problem is that, even if Rawls and Rorty both reject the traditional
Philosophical project of identifying metaphysical grounds for liberalism, they
do so with different intentions. Rawls’s goal is show that a proper commitment
to liberalism can be relatively ethically undemanding and thus stably accom-
modate a greater diversity of comprehensive doctrines, many of which entail
metaphysical propositions. Rorty’s ultimate goal, in contrast, is to free liberal
culture from metaphysical language altogether. Rorty appears to think, how-
ever, that this difference is inconsequential and that Rawls can be effectively
enlisted on behalf of his pragmatist project. Yet because Rorty, as a virtue
liberal, does not hold that liberalism must be ethically undemanding in the face
of pluralism, he and Rawls are actually at odds with one another.
Rorty’s attempt to co-opt Rawls is a thus rhetorical misstep for at least two
reasons: (1) it leads interpreters to attribute to Rorty more Rawlsian baggage

107 ORT, 183–84.

108 Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985), 223–51.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 113

than he intends or needs to take on; and (2) Rorty’s endorsement of Rawlsian
political liberalism obfuscates his commitment to virtue liberalism. As I argued
in the Introduction, political liberalism and virtue liberalism conceptualize lib-
eralism in opposed ways, or at least adopt rhetorically incompatible strategies
to justify it: political liberalism aspires to minimize the ethical demands of lib-
eralism, while virtue liberalism emphasizes that it must always deeply shape
ethical life. If Rorty is an orthodox political liberal, then the claim that he is a
virtue liberal is a nonstarter.
Both of these problems raise the subtle question of what exactly Rorty
endorses in Rawls’s theory. Unsurprisingly, I argue that Rorty does not sub-
scribe to anything in Rawls’s theory that conflicts with his virtue liberalism.
His acceptance of Rawls occurs at such a high level of generality that it does
little to undermine the claim that he is a virtue liberal who effectively avoids the
pitfalls of minimalist liberal theories like Rawls’s. Moreover, although Rorty at
times unfortunately appears to share Rawls’s ethical minimalism, he also pens
many passages that conflict with it. While both thinkers want to make liberal-
ism look attractive to nonliberals, in the final analysis, Rorty is never so naı̈ve
as to believe that tweaking liberal theory is likely to render the acceptance of
liberal practices significantly less burdensome for nonliberals. He thus rejects
the primary thrust of Rawls’s minimalist theory.
If this is correct, however, how does Rorty make the mistake of thinking that
his virtue liberalism and Rawls’s theory are simpatico? There are two things that
can be said in response. The first is that, as I noted in the Introduction, Rawls’s
theory is ambiguous about what is ethically entailed by its requirement that
citizens have “reasonable” comprehensive doctrines and possess the “political”
virtues. While Rawls wants to insist that these requirements leave most ethical
doctrines “untouched,” his critics correctly argue that they are far more onerous
than Rawls seems willing to imagine. Rorty could thus plausibly read Rawls’s
political liberalism to be closer to a virtue liberal theory than Rawls intends.
The second response is that Rorty endorses political liberalism as an initial step
toward his virtue liberal utopia. This means, of course, that he does disagree
with Rawls, who sees the political liberal regime as the legitimate end goal of
liberalism. Just as Rawls imagines that a peaceful, morally thin modus vivendi
will ideally develop into a more stable and just, political liberal overlapping
consensus, Rorty hopes that the latter consensus, with its pragmatic liberal
politics, will continue to evolve into virtue liberal utopia, with its pragmatic
liberal culture.
In stark contrast to the academic throng who spill barrels of ink interpret-
ing the subtleties of Rawls’s arguments, Rorty doesn’t put much effort into
closely parsing Rawls’s dense analytical prose. The primary reason that Rorty
finds Rawls interesting is for his argument that the starting point for discus-
sion about liberal justice is not a priori speculation about human nature and
dignity, but rather “certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the pub-
lic political culture of a democratic society. This public culture comprises the
114 Defending Rorty

political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their

interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and
documents that are common knowledge.”109 Rorty interprets this apparently
historicist, in media res approach to political philosophizing as Rawls show-
ing his pragmatist orientation.110 Accordingly, Rorty claims that, “Rawls is
not attempting a transcendental deduction of American liberalism or supply-
ing philosophical foundations for democratic institutions, but simply trying to
systematize the principles and intuitions of American liberals.”111 If Rawls’s
baroque argumentative apparatus is successful at attracting philosophers and
logophiles to social democracy, more power to it, though we know that Rorty
believes that more literary genres are superior for motivating most people to
embrace social democratic politics than are theoretical treatises like Rawls’s.
Rorty’s reduction of Rawls’s opus to a pragmatic “intuition pump” for social
democracy is what allows him to shrug off many of the most hotly debated
details of Rawls’s theory.112 For example, Rawls famously claims that when
liberal citizens engage in “public reason” to debate “constitutional essentials
and matters of basic justice,” they must “not to appeal to comprehensive reli-
gious and philosophical doctrines.”113 This is why the conception of justice
that emerges from this deliberation is allegedly “free-standing” from any com-
prehensive doctrine and is therefore acceptable to an overlapping consensus of
citizens who live by diverse comprehensive doctrines.
Predictably, however, Rawls’s restriction of the sorts of arguments that can
legitimately be part of public reason is one of the most attacked features of
the theory. Although Rawls wants to formulate a liberalism that better accom-
modates pluralism, his critics claim that his exclusionary definition of “public
reason” renders his theory patently intolerant of the very pluralism he professes
to respect.114 Because of his endorsement of Rawls, Rorty opens himself up
to this charge that political liberalism illegitimately excludes arguments from
the public realm because they are not “reasonable,” in other words, properly
liberal and (especially) secular. In an article addressed to Rorty, David Owen

109 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 13–4.

110 Rorty is aware, however, that Rawls seems to want to resist a historicist reading of his work.
See, PCP, 47.
111 ORT, 189.
112 Richard Rorty, “Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices,” in Democracy and Dif-
ference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 333.
113 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 224–5.
114 In response to this criticism, Rawls did later revise his position and concede that one can
introduce into public debate arguments based on one’s comprehensive doctrine, as long as
they are accompanied by properly public reasons “in due course” (Political Liberalism, li–
lii). But this did not mollify many critics, who argue that Rawls still demands citizens to
disingenuously adopt positions and make arguments that are not theirs (which are based
intrinsically on their comprehensive views).
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 115

writes that Rawls’s restrictive conception of public reason wrongly precludes,

for example, a Catholic citizen from invoking religious arguments in a public
political discussion of abortion legislation. Echoing the concerns of religious
thinkers such as Nicholas Wolterstorff and Philip Quinn, Owen accuses Rawls
of barring the Catholic citizen “from advancing the reasons that actually most
matter to her, that is, the reasons why she holds that abortion is wrong.”115
In his reply to Owen, Rorty deflates these concerns by considering what
Rawls’s alleged preclusion amounts to in practice. He offers three alternative
examples of how the restrictions of public reason might work:

(1) When mention is made in a public meeting (e.g., the local caucus of a
political party, called to elect or advise candidates for legislative office
[or, I would add, a debate on the Senate floor]) of the view of the
Catholic Church, and of the speaker’s ardent adherence to that Church,
the speaker is gaveled down.
(2) Such mention in such a meeting is not gaveled down, but practically
everybody in the meeting finds it in very bad taste (though nobody says
so).
(3) Such mention in such a meeting is respectfully and sympathetically heard,
but practically everybody in the meeting silently dismisses it as completely
irrelevant to the discussion.116

Rorty says (and he thinks Rawls would agree) that he would sympathize with
(3), and maybe even (2) in certain circumstances, but sees “no need to gavel
anybody down – assuming the speaker does not take up too much time.”117
Regardless of whether Rorty has Rawls right, he simply is not concerned to
theoretically restrict the sorts of political arguments that citizens can make. On
his pragmatic account of public reason, ideally, liberally virtuous citizens decide
for themselves, in media res, what arguments are reasonable or unreasonable.
While political deliberation is always subject to practical constraints (which,
of course, can be challenged in some circumstances), there is, contra Rawls, no
need for prima facie theoretical constraints.
Most theorists, however, see Rawls’s attempt to limit a priori the kinds of
arguments that are acceptable in liberal politics as an essential feature of his
political liberalism. Rorty, by contrast, glides blithely over it. Hence, Rorty’s
response to what many see as a damning flaw in Rawls’s theory is to say,

115 Owen, “Avoidance of Cruelty,” 105; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Why We Should Reject What
Liberalism Tells Us About Speaking and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons,” in Religion
and Contemporary Liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University
Press, 1997); Philip L. Quinn, “Political Liberalisms and Their Exclusions of the Religious,”
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 69, 2 (1995), 35–56.
116 Richard Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” 111–12.
117 Ibid., 112.
116 Defending Rorty

“It’ll all work out in practice if we have reasonably democratic institutions and
people’s hearts are in the right (liberal) place.” While frustrating to theorists
who take the details of Rawls’s theory seriously, this is exactly the response
Rorty should make as a pragmatic virtue liberal: the prerequisite that people’s
hearts be in the right (liberal) place means that they possess the liberal virtues.
In this way, Rorty evades much of the criticism aimed at Rawls because he does
not actually endorse the details of Rawls’s theory. Indeed, contrary to what
he occasionally suggests, he does not actually endorse the “political” liberal
project at all.
Nevertheless, there are passages where Rorty indicates that he agrees with
Rawls that political liberalism leaves a significantly wide range of nonliberal
beliefs and practices “untouched.” In the famous article where he first glosses
and defends Rawlsian political liberalism, Rorty writes that, although political
liberal theorists can be content with his preferred, pragmatic conception of the
self as “a centerless web of historically conditioned beliefs and desires,” he
would not “commend” it to fellow citizens who subscribe to comprehensive
metaphysical doctrines “built, for example, around the love of God, Niet-
zschean self-overcoming, the accurate representation of reality as it is in itself,
the quest for ‘the one right answer’ to moral questions, or the natural superi-
ority of a given character type.”118 Rorty asserts that, although some of their
comprehensive doctrines are illiberal, “such persons may, for pragmatic, rather
than moral reasons, be loyal citizens of a liberal democracy.”119
These sentiments appear to put the lie to my reading of Rorty as a virtue
liberal. Indeed, he comes off here as even more ethically minimalist than Rawls,
describing what sounds like modus vivendi liberalism. Rawls, after all, insists
that a reasonable citizen’s allegiance to political liberalism is moral, not merely
pragmatic; it is the shift from (grudging) pragmatic allegiance to a moral accep-
tance of the overlapping consensus that marks the difference between modus
vivendi and political liberalism.
Elsewhere, Rorty envisions liberal society as a “Kuwaiti bazaar” where
diverse peoples haggle peacefully and profitably with others whom they may
believe are religiously and ethically despicable, and then retreat from this plu-
ralism to their own exclusive “private clubs” to be among those who share
their values and worldview.120 He writes,
The relevant point is that one does not have to accept much else from Western culture
to find the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice attractive. The advantage of
postmodern liberalism is that it recognizes that in recommending that ideal one is not
recommending a philosophical outlook, a conception of human nature or the meaning
of human life, to representatives of other cultures. All we should do is point out the
practical advantages of liberal institutions in allowing individuals and cultures to get

118 ORT, 192.

119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., 209–10.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 117

along together without intruding on each other’s privacy, without meddling with each
other’s conceptions of the good.”121

He concludes that a commitment to “Rawlsian procedural justice” can be a

matter of “expediency,” rather than a moral commitment, for the members of
the various “clubs.” Here again, Rorty’s “Kuwaiti bazaar” analogy actually
seems more reminiscent of Kukathas’s modus vivendi “liberal archipelago”
than of Rawlsian political liberalism, and thus all the more ethically minimal-
ist. Rawls certainly does not conceive of the practice of public reason as merely
the haggling of self-interested parties for their own profit; even parties with
incompatible unreasonable comprehensive doctrines can manage that. Rorty’s
position here thus seems more minimalist than political liberalism is and evi-
dently opposed to virtue liberalism.
Fortunately, however, a Kukathasian or Rawlisan minimalist interpretation
of these passages is flatly contradicted by other things that Rorty writes, which
demonstrate that he properly appreciates and supports the stringent, unavoid-
able ethical demands that liberalism places upon citizens. For example, Rorty
notoriously insists that liberalism is an “ethnocentric” “form of life” that began
to emerge in the North Atlantic states a few centuries ago.122 It is particularly
idiosyncratic when compared to nonliberal ways of life, because
it is a culture which prides itself on constantly adding more windows, constantly enlarg-
ing its sympathies. It is a form of life which is constantly extending pseudopods and
adapting itself to what it encounters. Its sense of its own moral worth is founded on
tolerance of diversity. The heroes it apotheosizes include those who have enlarged its
capacity for sympathy and tolerance. Among the enemies it diabolizes are the people
who attempt to diminish this capacity, the vicious ethnocentrists.123

Rorty claims that Rawls admits that liberalism is a local, ethnocentric affair
when Rawls writes that political liberal citizens must look to our own public
traditions of liberal democracy to identify the contents of a political concep-
tion of justice, as opposed to deducing that content from a theory of human
nature or reason. Rawls, however, would never use the term “ethnocentric”; an
ethnos indicates something much ethically thicker than merely “a set of polit-
ical relations.” In another passage, Rorty imagines a conversation he would
have with the illiberal parents of some of his students, and employs combative
tones that the accommodating political liberal would never condone:
There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we
liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists,
male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a
citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can
envisage merging horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in

121 Ibid., 209.

122 ORT, 203–10.
123 Ibid., 204 (emphasis added).
118 Defending Rorty

the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of
dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so
inclusivist to tolerate intolerance such as yours.124

This is strident stuff, and Rorty no doubt would temper it on pragmatic grounds
if he thought that it would lead to a defensive retrenchment of a parent’s or
student’s illiberal beliefs. But it is nevertheless rhetorically hard to square with
Rawlsian political liberalism.
Lastly, Rorty embraces the ethically substantive language of virtue in describ-
ing his liberal utopia, as when he writes that
[t]he [liberal] procedural republic tries to instill in its citizens the virtues of compromise
and tolerance, and to educate them out of other virtues (those of the warrior or the nun,
for example) – the kind of virtues that might get in the way of compromise and toler-
ance. . . . [It] instills virtuous habits in its citizens by arranging for them to experience
[through sentimental education] what Hume called “a progress of sentiments.”125

Rorty’s liberal utopia thus hardly seems to be a regime that aspires to leave
citizens’ ethical doctrines “untouched.” Indeed, Rorty’s commitment to the
cultivation of the civic virtue of irony in all citizens is directly opposed to the
accommodationist aspirations of political liberalism. Rawls and other mini-
malist liberals attempt to make liberal politics more accommodating of wider
pluralism by being, to use Macedo’s term, “reticent” about what a commitment
to liberal politics ethically entails. Nothing in Rorty’s work, however, suggests
that the citizen of liberal utopia is anything other than a historically unique,
moral and political exemplar, whom it takes a great deal of acculturation and
education to produce.
In his praise of Rawlsian political liberalism, Rorty fails to acknowledge
that he and Rawls eschew metaphysics for different reasons. For Rawls, the
existence of incompatible metaphysical doctrines is the ineradicable “fact of
pluralism” that liberalism must take as a given, and that political liberalism is
designed to accommodate as much as reasonably possible. Rawls simply wants
to keep those clashing metaphysical claims out of the public sphere, while
allegedly allowing them to flourish in the private realm. But Rorty does not
share this specific theoretical goal of Rawls: Rorty’s pragmatic liberal utopia
does not strive to accommodate as many comprehensive metaphysical doctrines
as it can, but rather aims undermine metaphysical talk because of its absolutist
rhetoric. Abolishing metaphysics from the public realm is just a first step for
Rorty. He hopes that metaphysical talk will simply fade from liberal utopia,
in both the public and private realms, as its citizens develop the civic virtue of
irony and see themselves as “commonsensically historicist and nominalist.”

124 Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” in RC, 22.

125 Richard Rorty, “In Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” in Debating Democracy’s Discontent:
Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy, ed. Anita L. Allen and Milton C.
Regan, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 120, 121.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 119

The difference between Rorty and Rawls is further brought into sharp relief
in an online exchange between Damon Linker and Matthew Yglesias that
took place in the week of Rorty’s death in June 2007. Linker writes that,
although Rorty should be congratulated for helping make “liberalism more
philosophically and morally humble,” liberals still have “ample reason to resist
Rorty’s lead in making the abandonment of truth a precondition of liberal
politics.” Linker continues in a Rawlsian vein:

One of liberalism’s greatest strengths, after all, is its flexibility – its compatibility with
many (though not all) cultures. This flexibility flows from liberalism’s minimalism. It is
a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of life. A liberal society will permit and
even encourage the proliferation of competing comprehensive views of what constitutes
a good human life. Some of these views will be consistently pragmatic; like Rorty’s,
they will deny the possibility of appeals to extra-human truths. But many others will
be based on more traditional (foundationalist) assumptions – assumptions about God,
about scientific truths, about the ability of reason to answer ultimate human questions.
Those who affirm such views do not necessarily threaten the liberal political order –
unless, of course, they deny the right of others to affirm their own very different views.126

Here, Linker gives us a nice summation of the political liberal conception,

including what might be its slogan: “Political Liberalism: A Philosophy of
Government, Not of Life.” This view maintains that political liberalism is
different from, and superior to, other value systems (including comprehensive
liberalisms) because it is more tolerant and open to ethical pluralism.
This is, however, a misleading and inaccurate characterization of what a
commitment to liberalism entails. Linker is wrong: liberalism is and must be
a philosophy of life; it cannot avoid this by attempting to be “merely” a
philosophy of government. The reason for this is obvious: government sets up
the political and legal framework that constitutes the rules for which activities
citizens can engage in and how they can interact with each other. In other
words, government, insofar as it is effective, plays a large role in determining
our ethics and morality, the way we live our lives. This is not to say, of course,
that government officials necessarily micromanage our beliefs, decisions, and
affairs, but rather that, at the very least, government institutions, laws, and
policies exert a broad influence, even if only indirectly, on our decisions and
affairs. As Macedo puts it, in a liberal regime, “basic liberal values (of respect
for persons and their rights, for example) wash across and seep into the whole
of our lives, not determining all our choices but limiting them all and structuring
and conditioning our lives as a whole.”127

126 Damon Linker, “End Point,” The New Republic, June 11, 2007, online at: www.newrepublic
.com/article/end-point. I, of course, would dispute Linker’s understanding that Rorty makes
liberalism more “morally humble,” a conclusion at which Linker likely arrives because he
assumes that morality must have a metaphysical justification.
127 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 54.
120 Defending Rorty

Liberals, it is true, are often blind to this fact, and political liberals par-
ticularly so. Like Linker, they tout liberalism’s alleged superior toleration, its
capacity to peacefully accommodate “pluralism” relative to regimes based on
nonliberal comprehensive doctrines. From one perspective, this is correct: if
we describe the dimensions of choice that liberalism leaves up to individu-
als and private associations as “freedom,” and the diverse product of those
choices as “pluralism,” then liberal society does indeed typically afford more
freedom and pluralism than nonliberal alternatives do. But notice that the dice
are loaded: liberalism defines “freedom” and “pluralism” according to its own
values and then concludes that it does the best in respecting these things. It is
difficult for liberals to think past our assumptions about what freedom entails:
individual choice about religion, friends and associates, occupation, place of
residence, and so on. Michael Walzer once identified liberalism with a com-
mitment to what he labels the “Four Mobilities”: geographic, social, marital,
and political.128 According to liberalism, individual choice with regard to these
dimensions of life simply is “freedom.” And we could, of course, multiply
Walzer’s “Mobilities” to try to make explicit all the different dimensions in
which liberal citizens believe they should be free to choose as they live lives.
In a just liberal regime, one can choose to live what appears to be a wide
variety of lives, ranging from that of a New Age hippie living in an agricul-
tural commune in the San Joaquin Valley to that of a Muslim Wall Street
investment banker living on the Upper East Side. This is “freedom”; liberal
government does not take an official stance on one’s choices about such things
(that is, as long as they fall within the “legitimate” range determined by liberal
values).
Liberals must recognize that their definition of and valuing of freedom is
not shared by many cultures. Most obviously, for some traditionalist, tribal-
religious cultures, the freedom to engage in many of the activities that liberals
take for granted is not real freedom at all, but rather simply temptation to sin
or impiety. Real “freedom” (if the culture uses the term) is to live a virtuous
and pious life within a particular faith community without ever considering any
other options, all of which are clearly spurious. A liberal education that prides
itself on critically exposing students to different ways of thinking, including
different religious options, is to be shunned as dangerous for that very reason.
Whereas liberals see a big difference between the respective lives of the hip-
pie and the investment banker, a nonliberal cloistered monk may see no real
difference at all: they are relevantly the same because they are both lives that
lack a proper relationship to God. For the monk, authentic “freedom” may be
his choice of which set of prayers he will say each day – it is the only really
important choice in life, after all. Or it may be “freedom” from the temptations

128 Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Political Theory 18 (February
1990), 12.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 121

of the world outside his monastery. The Four, or One Thousand, Mobilities of
liberalism do not matter much at all to him, for they do not comprise real free-
dom. If you come from culture that, with your deep approval, practices FGM,
or child marriage, or bear baiting, or that properly discriminates between peo-
ple born into different castes, then you won’t find liberalism free or tolerant.
Rather it will strike you, as it must, as one more comprehensive doctrine, shot
through with demanding ethical substance.
As Linker parenthetically acknowledges, liberalism only respects pluralism
that is compatible with its evolving values, which includes its traditional insis-
tence that individual choices over a range of dimensions should not be directly
interfered with by the state. This is what our vocabulary of individual rights
and the public-private divide (with its separation of church and state) supports.
Liberalism’s uniqueness is constituted by the fact that the dimensions on which
it allows individual choice – particularly free religious choice – are different
than the dimensions on which nonliberal cultures typically allow choice (and
these cultures are unique in substance from each other as well, of course).
Indeed, it might even be the case that liberalism allows for individual choice
with regard to some dimensions that most other cultures do not allow, which
is why nonliberals, regardless of which comprehensive doctrine they live by,
are commonly scandalized by liberalism: “You liberals leave something of that
great importance up to individual determination rather than have the commu-
nal authority decide? Are you crazy?” But this difference does not mean, contra
Linker, that the liberal regime is more “flexible” or ethically “minimalist” in
general than other regimes. It is only if you value individual choice on the same
dimensions – if your perspective is already liberal.
Although Linker joins Rawls in misunderstanding the ethical requirements
of liberal politics, he does perceptively recognize that Rorty is not truly a
Rawlsian political liberal. For Linker, however, this is why Rorty should be
rejected. Linker writes,
Rorty came perilously close to transforming liberalism into a monistic philosophy – a
comprehensive doctrine to which all liberal citizens must pledge absolute allegiance. To
be sure, the content of this monistic philosophy was the anti-philosophy of pragmatism.
But that was beside the point. In the end, Rorty insisted that the good of the nation
required that his fellow Americans accept the truth of his anti-foundationalist view of
truth.129

This is why Linker concludes that liberals would do better to follow “less
dogmatic philosophies of liberalism,” like Rawlsian political liberalism.
While Linker is correct that Rorty is not a political liberal, his character-
ization of Rorty as a “monist,” however, is misleading. As Linker charges,
Rorty’s liberal ideal does require all citizens to be pragmatists because they

129 Linker, “End Point.”

122 Defending Rorty

must all possess the civic virtue of irony. But is this pragmatism meaningfully
“monistic?” Linker here makes the same mistake as do others who assume
Rorty must be arguing for a metaphysical position that holds that metaphysi-
cal vocabularies are false because they do not accurately represent reality. As
we have seen, Rorty is not making this claim; rather, he is recommending a
virtue that he thinks will lead to a better politics and culture. Applying the
political liberal framework to Rorty, Linker suggests that Rorty’s liberalism
is a comprehensive doctrine, although hopefully I have said enough to put
the distinction between comprehensive views and political conceptions in fatal
doubt: being a good “political” liberal in practice ultimately involves the same
demanding attitudes, habits, and knowledge that being a good pragmatic liberal
does.
Yglesias applies the political liberal framework to Rorty as well, but mistak-
enly concludes that Rorty is a faithful Rawlsian political liberal. Yglesias dis-
tinguishes Rorty’s theory of liberal politics, which he claims is Rawlsian, from
Rorty’s cultural criticism, which stems from his unique brand of pragmatism,
in order to explain how Rorty can be both a proponent of political liberalism
and an advocate for a thoroughly secular, post-metaphysical culture. When it
comes to politics, Yglesias explains, Rawlsians are indifferent (“neutral”) to
the details of all the comprehensive doctrines existing in the “background cul-
ture” of liberal society, as long as those doctrines are reasonable (which, I have
argued, is a much more significant requirement than political liberals want to
admit). Since Rawls’s work is mainly political philosophy, this indifference is
displayed in his writings. But this does not mean that Rawls as an individual is
indifferent to, as Yglesias puts it, “questions of God and truth and beauty,” or
believes that other intellectuals should not address them in their work.130 The
difference between Rorty and Rawls is that much of Rorty’s work addresses
these latter, nonpolitical questions. On Yglesias’s account,

[Rorty] is a passionate advocate of secular humanism and anti-foundationalism in

the background culture, and also a political liberal in the political domain. If Rorty’s
aspiration that his background views might someday gain universal adherence makes
him a bad liberal [in Linker’s eyes], then we’re going to have to conclude that essentially
every even-vaguely-orthodox Christian and Muslim are also bad liberals. That, however,
clearly can’t be what Rawls was trying to put forward.131

And, indeed, that is not what Rawls is trying to put forward. However, it is
exactly Rorty’s position. If by “vaguely-orthodox” Yglesias means that these
religious believers subscribe to absolutist metaphysical views, then it means
they lack the civic virtue of irony. Rorty writes, “Your devotion to democracy
is unlikely to be whole-hearted if you believe, as monotheists typically do, that

130 Yglesias, “Political Liberalism: Political Not Metaphysical,” online at: www.theatlantic.com/
politics/2007/06/political-liberalism-political-not-metaphysical/42672/
131 Yglesias, “Political Liberalism: Political Not Metaphysical.”
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 123

we can have knowledge of an ‘objective’ ranking of human needs that can

overrule the result of democratic consensus.”132 Yglesias’s attempt to square
the circle by applying the political liberal bifurcation to Rorty’s own project
runs afoul of Rorty’s commitment to the civic virtue of irony. Rorty thinks
that pragmatists will be better democratic citizens, and therefore his efforts to
change the “background culture” are hardly walled off from his liberal politics.
Like Linker’s, Yglesias’s interpretation of Rorty highlights the flimsiness of the
political liberal distinction between the political and ethical.
Indeed, Rorty joins Macedo in noting that Rawls’s use of the word “reason-
ableness,” which is the linchpin of his theory, is suspiciously vague. In analyzing
Rawls’s lecture, “The Law of Peoples,”133 which attempts to extend politi-
cal liberal thinking to the international realm, Rorty concludes that, contrary
to Rawls’s rhetoric, “Rawls’ notion of what is reasonable, in short, confines
membership of the society of peoples to societies whose institutions encompass
most of the hard-won achievements of the West in the two centuries since the
Enlightenment.”134 Rorty’s response to his own observation that Rawls is pack-
ing a full-blown set of liberal values and practices into the purposely innocuous
sounding “reasonableness” is not the minimalist criticism that Rawls thereby
fails to respect pluralism (as John Gray, among others, charges), but rather the
liberal virtue criticism that Rawls should be more forthright about the ethical
substance of his commitment to liberalism (Macedo’s response).
While Rawls’s political liberalism strives to be philosophically minimalist
in order to be ethically minimalist, Rorty’s pragmatic virtue liberalism strives
only to be philosophically minimalist. Despite this irreconcilable difference,
Rorty nevertheless pledges his allegiance to Rawlsian political liberalism. Is
Rorty therefore simply contradicting himself when he attempts to adhere to the
rhetoric of both political liberalism and virtue liberalism? As I have suggested,
we can avoid this conclusion if we recognize that Rorty endorses political
liberalism as a move toward liberal utopia. In other words, if we can get people
to leave their comprehensive metaphysics out of their politics, this would be a
first step toward diluting metaphysical language in the “background culture”
as well, and thus a step toward the cultivation of the civic virtue of irony.
For political liberals, however, the move to Rorty’s thoroughly secularized,
post-metaphysical liberal utopia fails to properly accommodate the fact of

132 PCP, 34. Michael Bacon, whose scholarship on Rorty and pragmatism I greatly admire,
quotes this line but nevertheless appears to side with Yglesias, writing that, “Rorty gives no
indication that he thinks everyone must become pragmatist if one is to be a liberal” (Bacon,
Richard Rorty, 67). If by “pragmatist” he means, narrowly, “ironist intellectual,” he is correct.
But “pragmatist” is a broad enough term to mean someone who possesses the civic virtue of
irony, and I would insist, pace Bacon, that Rorty indeed indicates that all liberals must be
pragmatists.
133 John Rawls, “The Law of Peoples,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures,
1993, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
134 PCP, 48.
124 Defending Rorty

pluralism. Since Rorty encourages liberal society to make it, he is not truly a
political liberal.

Post-Metaphysical Literary Culture and Strong Poets

As we saw in the previous chapter, Rorty conceives of progress toward lib-
eral utopia as involving the emergence of a pragmatically romantic, “literary
culture”:
[This is] a culture which has substituted literature for both religion and philosophy finds
redemption neither in a non-cognitive relation to a non-human person nor in a cognitive
relation to propositions, but in non-cognitive relations to other human beings, relations
mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs. These
artifacts provide a sense of alternative ways of being human. This sort of culture drops
the presupposition common to religion and philosophy – that redemption must come
from one’s relation to something that is not just one more human creation.135

It is a culture, then, that has fully embraced pragmatic anti-authoritarianism. It

accepts the idea that “the point of social organization is to let everybody have
a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities,” and that a virtue
liberal regime is likely the best way to secure this.136 It does not philosophically
privilege any particular cultural endeavor, such as religion or science or moral
philosophy, as uniquely delivering methods or propositions that are true and
necessary. It treats all forms inquiry, from scientific to historical and literary,
as being on the same nonmetaphysical footing, to be privileged only in the
context of how well they are fulfilling our needs and desires.
Thus, for example, literary culture
sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as
needing to be made more “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various
bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics
helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries
come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of
what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what narratives to listen to and
comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or
about what we should want).137

But what are our “needs,” and what should we “desire?” These questions are,
of course, also the subjects of inquiry, with evolving answers that determine
the motivation and direction of all other inquiry. Rorty writes,
We [pragmatists] think that inquiry is just another name for problem-solving, and we
cannot imagine inquiry into how human beings should live, into what we should make of

135 PCP, 93.

136 CIS, 84.
137 CP, xliii.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 125

ourselves, coming to an end. For solutions to old problems will produce fresh problems,
and so on forever. As with the individual, so with both the society and the species:
each stage of maturation will overcome previous dilemmas only by creating new
ones.138

To identify and meet these perpetually emerging dilemmas, the citizens of liter-
ary culture certainly tolerate, and frequently respect and encourage, exper-
imentation with new vocabularies and new ways of living a human life.
They recognize the crucial value of intellectuals, be they scientists, histori-
ans, or art critics, because they know that the progress they desire can only
come through intellectual innovation. Successful intellectuals who warrant the
Bloomian label, “strong poet,” are therefore the heroes of the ideal liberal
polity who expand our imaginations and help us realize new, attractive visions
of human possibility.139 On Bloom’s account, strong poets are literally “poets”
who suffer from an Oedipal “anxiety of influence,” and are thereby driven to
struggle to achieve their own unique artistic identities against the pervasive
influence of their heralded predecessors, literature’s “mighty dead.” Rorty,
however, expands the category to include all successful intellectual innovators:
“I assume that Bloom would be willing to extend the reference of ‘poet’ beyond
those who write in verse, and use it in the large, generic sense in which I am
using it – so that Proust and Nabokov, Newton and Darwin, Hegel and Hei-
degger, also fall under the term.”140 The strong poet identifies the Kuhnian
anomalies in the reigning paradigm of her discipline and offers a new way
of conceiving of the problems that define the discipline (a “new way” that
might well be indistinguishable from simply seeing a previously unrecognized
set of problems). Their novel inquiries significantly change the narrative and
self-image of the discipline.
Rorty enlists Davidson’s theory of metaphor as the “unfamiliar use of old
words” to understand what the strong poet accomplishes. We should not think
of the great inquirers as climbing out of the Platonic cave of mere appearances
to discover the necessary Truth. Rather, they offer their neologisms into a
Darwinian cultural competition of ideas, in which “[o]ld metaphors are con-
stantly dying off into literalness, and then [serve] as a platform and foil for new
metaphors.”141 Rorty writes:

The line between weakness and strength is thus the line between using language which
is familiar and universal and producing language which, though initially unfamiliar and
idiosyncratic, somehow makes tangible the blind impress all one’s behavings bear. With

138 PCP, 89.

139 CIS, 53.
140 CIS, 24, n. 1.
141 CIS, 16; See also, ORT, 162–72.
126 Defending Rorty

luck – the sort of luck which makes the difference between genius and eccentricity –
that language will also strike the next generation as inevitable.142

Another way of putting this is that while rational argument can be beautiful
in the way it coherently fits its propositions, with clarity and rigor, into the
reigning language game, strong poetry is sublime:
[M]aking the acquaintance of Dostoyevsky or Iago, Emma Bovary or Marcel Proust,
Milton’s Satan or St. Luke’s Christ, may well change one’s behavior toward oneself
or toward others, and perhaps even toward things in general. But the change is not a
matter of everything falling nicely into place, fitting together beautifully. It is instead a
matter of finding oneself transported, moved to a place from which a different prospect
is available.143

While intellectuals of all types are afforded the freedom within the bounds
of liberal justice to undertake their experiments, Rorty imagines what he calls
“literary intellectuals” playing an increasingly influential role. Ideally, every
intellectual in liberal utopia is a pragmatist who accepts that her particular
specialty produces one genre of literature among many that attempt to bolster
our practical effectiveness in achieving meaning and happiness. The literary
intellectual, however, is one who is particularly skilled at juxtaposing different
vocabularies in novel and insightful ways. He is an
all-purpose intellectual of a Post-philosophical culture, the philosopher who has aban-
doned pretensions to Philosophy. He passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust to
Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to the present situation in Southeast Asia
to Ghandi to Sophocles. He is a name-dropper who uses names such as these to refer to
sets of descriptions, symbol-systems, ways of seeing. His specialty is seeing similarities
and differences between great big pictures, between attempts to see how things hang
together.144

Rorty’s exaltation of the literary intellectual should not be understood to

demote the vital importance of the more narrowly focused specialist who
can, of course, also achieve strong poet status and on whom the generalist
inevitably relies. Nor is it a plea for simplistic popularization or “dumbing
down” of inherently difficult subjects. Nor is he suggesting that the aim of a
literary intellectual should be to seek fame as a “public intellectual,” though
one imagines that literary culture will undoubtedly contain such. The literary
intellectual does, of course, hope that his work will be read and have influence,
but his immediate reading “public” may be just a handful of academics. Rorty’s

142 CIS, 28–9.

143 Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The
Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 391.
144 CP, xli.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 127

vision is simply of more effective communication between different specialties,

disciplines, and discourses, which will hopefully be aided by the “big picture”
insights and rhetorical gifts of successful literary intellectuals. The rise of the
literary intellectual signals the demise of the traditional Philosophical search for
apodictic Truth, which is replaced by literary intellectual’s métier of cultural
politics and criticism.
Citizens of literary culture who become ironists actively searching for new
narratives of self-identity are especially reliant on literary intellectuals and
critics. Ironists tend to read a lot of books and articles because that is the
easiest way to learn about new ideas and alternative vocabularies. Rorty writes,
“Ironists read literary critics, and take them as moral advisers, simply because
such critics have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance [with different
genres of writing and art].”145 The talented literary critic and novelist possesses
what Milan Kundera calls the “wisdom of uncertainty,” which recognizes and
grapples productively with ethical pluralism.146 The literary critic does not offer
redemptive truth, but rather unique and inspirational weavings of disparate
stories. “For members of literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by
getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why
a literary culture is always in search of novelty, rather than trying to escape
from the temporal to the eternal. It is a premise of this culture that though
the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended
forever.”147
Literary culture produces a dynamic process of ethical fusion and fis-
sion, held together by the gravity of liberal justice, which itself is perpetu-
ally reformed through politics. Its commitment to liberalism is based on an
expansive sentimental solidarity rather than on the acceptance of abstract
Enlightenment principles. The unprecedented pace of its conceptual innova-
tion is exhilarating but risky. To paraphrase Stephen Macedo, liberal utopia
holds out the promise, or the threat, of making all the world like an idealized,
twentieth-century California.

Conclusion
Much of this chapter is based on my reading of the work in which Rorty most
directly attempts to present his vision of liberal utopia: Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity. It is the transitional work in which Rorty makes the flight
from analytic philosophy to literary criticism, and this is what makes reading
it so problematic. When I first read it, I found it Rorty’s most sloppy and

145 CIS, 81.

146 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 6. Rorty endorses
Kundera’s provocative assessment of the novel in EHO, 66–84.
147 PCP, 94.
128 Defending Rorty

unconvincing book. I marked it up with exasperated marginalia, triumphing

(as budding analytic philosophers do) every time I found what appeared to be
a self-contradiction. He writes on page 80, for instance, “We ironists hope,
by this continual redescription, to make the best of ourselves that we can.” I
responded, “How would you know it was ‘best’?” After all, wasn’t Rorty argu-
ing (asserting? Certainly beating to death . . . ) that there was no criterion for
“best”? Years later, when I had achieved what I hope is a better understanding
of Rorty’s work, I recognized the mistake I had made on my first reading of CIS.
Rorty, naturally, provides the key, which is perhaps accepted more smoothly
by readers who are more literary-minded and less rigidly analytical. The key is
Rorty’s theme, found throughout the book, that “[t]he ironist’s preferred form
of argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to
be a vocabulary rather than a proposition.”148
What does this mean? One way to put it is that we should try to capture
the spirit of the work by trying to see it as a whole, rather than obsess about
the letter of it by making sure that each sentence is perfectly consistent with
every other sentence. Reading it holistically convinced me that there are no
particularly egregious logical bloopers or argumentative lacunae in CIS, at least
nothing that substantially undermines Rorty’s intended vision. Approaching
CIS with this sort of hermeneutic generosity does not entail turning off one’s
critical acumen. Indeed, there are elements of CIS that I find problematic, like
Rorty’s discussion of irony. CIS also misleadingly emphasizes the importance
of the creative “making” of new vocabularies, as opposed to “discovering” new
truths. Elsewhere, Rorty properly recognizes that this is a distinction on which
he should not want to place too much weight because it brings the charges of
relativism, decisionism, and linguistic idealism that he has been trying to shake
for most of his career.149 Still, one could argue in Rorty’s defense that this
emphasis is warranted as a corrective to the metaphysical realist language that
dominates the tradition. These quibbles aside, however, I came to see that, taken
as a whole, CIS “hangs together” as bold and edifying new way to understand
liberal politics, culture, and life. Seeing Rorty as a virtue liberal, moreover, who
finds the traditional endeavor to spell out liberalism’s “essential principles”
misguided also explains why Rorty seems to avoid answering questions that
most liberal theorists feel they must address.
Matching Rorty in insouciance, we might say that one way to understand the
meaning of his anti-authoritarian pragmatism is that there is no principled way
to distinguish between “wishful thinking” and creative problem solving (which
is not to say the distinction cannot be pragmatically made in context). For
his tough-minded philosophical critics (as James would call them), of course,
wishful thinking is precisely the sin of irrationality that must be avoided. The

148 CIS, 78.

149 See, e.g., PSH, xvi–xxxii.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Virtue Liberalism 129

upshot of Rorty’s romantic liberalism is that people who exhibit the liberal
virtues and are publicly committed to reducing cruelty and establishing liberal
justice should be encouraged by intellectual culture to engage in more wishful
thinking in the hopes that it will turn out to be deemed creative problem solving
in retrospect.
3

Critics
From Left and Right

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which
is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I
am in good shape. . . . The left’s favorite word for me is ‘complacent,’ just as the
right’s is ‘irresponsible.’1
– Richard Rorty
Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction you need – all the philosoph-
ical advice you are ever going to get about your responsibilities to other human
beings.2
– Richard Rorty

Rorty’s liberalism is a Deweyan, postmodern update of Mill; it endorses

Nietzschean heroic creativity within American liberal constraints. This ideal
pragmatically combines the utilitarian public goal of minimizing unjustified
suffering with a social milieu that allows individuals to freely engage in roman-
tic, Millian life experiments. To effectively navigate and support this thoroughly
anti-authoritarian society, liberal citizens must develop the liberal virtues,
including the civic virtue of irony.

Willingness to accept the liberal goal of maximal room for individual variation . . . is
facilitated by a consensus that there is no source of authority other than the free agree-
ment of human beings. This consensus, in turn, is facilitated by the adoption of philo-
sophical views which are nowadays thought of as symptoms of “postmodern scepticism”
but which I think of as just good old American pragmatism.3

1 PSH, 3–4.
2 PCP, 30.
3 PSH, 237.

130
Critics 131

Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism does not claim to be more rational or more faith-
ful to human nature than its competitors are. “There is no ‘ground’ for such
loyalties and convictions save the fact that the beliefs and desires and emo-
tions which buttress them overlap with those of lots of other members of the
group with which we identify for purposes of moral or political deliberation.”4
Liberalism justifies itself only by claiming “experimental success: we have come
up with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing
human happiness, which looks more promising than any other way which has
been proposed so far.”5 Thus, for Rorty, “[t]he pragmatists’ justification of
toleration, free inquiry, and the quest for undistorted communication can only
take the form of a comparison between societies which exemplify these habits
and those which do not, leading up to the suggestion that nobody who has
experienced both would prefer the latter.”6
In contrast, Philosophical defenses of liberalism typically seek to rationally
identify a set of principles that embody liberalism’s essence and define the limits
of liberal practices. In Rorty’s view, however, such principles run the risk of
becoming dogmatic platitudes that stifle creative thinking in the face of novel
challenges. The thing that keeps us from going off the liberal rails, as it were, is
not a set of foundational principles, but rather our educated possession of the
liberal virtues. Principles can certainly be useful rules of thumb and function
as “reminders for a particular purpose,” in Wittgenstein’s phrase. But they
should not be treated as necessary or sacrosanct, and have no meaning except
as they are interpreted and lived by agents who grapple with and modify them
in particular circumstances. How these agents grapple with them, and what
results, depends on their knowledge and virtue.
Rorty’s pragmatic insistence that we need not attempt to Philosophically
“look behind” our commitment to the “sort of freedom found in the bourgeois
democracies,” but should instead simply focus on refining and extending it,
has raised the ire of not a few critics.7 Of course, Rorty’s preference for liberal
democracy was never the simple caricature that some have sketched of his posi-
tion: “We should be liberals because that’s what we do around here.” Rather,
he argues that through historical study and comparison to other regimes and
cultures, liberalism comes out looking pretty good. But good to whom? Admit-
tedly, to people who already have at least some inclination toward liberal values
and practices because, at the end of the day, there is no non-question-begging
way to justify liberalism to those who lack such inclinations. Fortunately,
empirically, lots of people who have been socialized even in relatively nonlib-
eral cultures have possessed such inclinations, to one degree or another, and

4 ORT, 200.
5 PSH, 273.
6 ORT, 29.
7 PSH, 119.
132 Defending Rorty

have been willing to tolerate liberal pluralism in order to gain liberal peace and
prosperity (and perhaps have been castigated by the conservative guardians of
their home cultures for making such a morally corrupt trade-off). This helps
explain why net immigration has been to the liberal world. But there is nothing
in human nature that guarantees an inclination to liberalism, no necessary inner
voice in the conscience of every human being telling her to respect universal
human rights.
Rorty once notoriously labeled his conception “postmodern bourgeois lib-
eralism,” a title he knew would provoke people across the political spectrum.
He was surprised, however, when not only conservatives and radical Leftists
attacked his political theory but also fellow pragmatic social democrats, such
as Jürgen Habermas and Richard Bernstein. As Bernstein observed in 1990,

By now Rorty has offended and antagonized just about everyone – the political left
and right, traditional liberals, feminists, and both analytic and Continental philoso-
phers. . . . He has been accused of being “smug,” “shallow,” “elitist,” “priggish,”
“voyeuristic,” “insensitive,” and “irresponsible.” “Rorty-bashing” is rapidly becom-
ing a new culture industry.8

Christopher Voparil remarks, “Indeed, the greatest as yet unsolved puzzle

surrounding the Rorty phenomenon may very well be the question of why
so much of the secondary literature is negative or hyper-critical in nature.”9
Rorty, for the most part, appears to have relished the attention, often penning
gracious responses to his assailants.
He expected the slings and arrows from the political Right. After all, when
he expresses his political views (especially in periodicals like Dissent), Rorty
identifies himself as a loyal but typical member of the reformist, pro-labor
Old Left, who also admires and supports the political achievements of the
New Left, especially the increased extension of liberal rights and equality to
women, gays, and members of marginalized racial and ethnic minorities.10
While Rorty’s policy preferences naturally draw the ire of many on the Right,
however, conservative intellectuals are particularly aroused by Rorty’s post-
modernist pragmatism and his attempt to fold the American Experiment into
it. For conservatives, Rorty notes, it is not “enough to just prefer democratic
societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the
institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles.”11 Peter
Augustine Lawler, for example, sums up the reaction to Rorty on behalf of one
conservative intellectual tribe – the Straussians – although it is representative

8 Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Moder-

nity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 260.
9 Christopher Voparil, “On the Idea of Philosophy as Bildungsroman: Rorty and His Critics,”
Contemporary Pragmatism 2 (June 2005), 116.
10 See, e.g., “Back to Class Politics,” in PSH , 255–61, and AOC.
11 PSH, 4.
Critics 133

of the common response of the intellectual Right: “Richard Rorty’s writing is

full of those vices we Straussians (if you will permit me) love to hate – rela-
tivism, historicism, easygoing atheism, anti-philosophic rhetoric, vapid leftist
political opinion, uncritical progressivism, and seemingly a general indifference
to virtue.”12 (Lawler here refers, of course, to more traditional, conservative
virtues, not Rorty’s pragmatic liberal virtues.)
While Rorty considers the Right’s negative reaction to him a badge of
honor, he does at times express frustration and dismay when some of his
fellow-travelers on the political Left accuse him of harboring neoconserva-
tive sympathies. In the face of such charges, he asserts his commitment to
social democracy and seeks to assure his Leftist comrades that his intellectual
project supports such a politics.13 He does, however, distinguish between his
pragmatic reformist perch on the spectrum of Leftist thought, which seeks to
build and strengthen bourgeois social democracy, and the radical theorizing
of what he variously calls, with a characteristic barrage of labels, the post-
Marxist, post-Nietzschean, Foucauldian, Academic, Cultural Left.14 Whereas
pragmatic reformers are hopeful and patriotic in their constructive criticisms
of the Western democracies, the radical Left has given up hope and resorts
to over-theorized attacks on “the system” of bourgeois liberalism with no
practical alternatives in the offing.15 Indeed, Rorty frets about the promi-
nence that the radical Left has gained in the humanities departments of the
academy.
Rorty’s most perceptive critics from the Left include Bernstein and Nancy
Fraser, and we will examine their arguments in the third and fourth sections of
this chapter. Bernstein is also one of Rorty’s oldest friends, having met him in
1949 when they were precocious teens at the University of Chicago. He has not
only his personal relationship with Rorty to his advantage as a critic but also
his expertise in John Dewey and American pragmatism, as well as his scholarly
engagement with many of the same Continental thinkers whom Rorty writes
about, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Haber-
mas. In a 2004 festschrift for Bernstein’s seventieth birthday, Rorty praised
Bernstein’s critique of his work as containing “the most careful, detailed, and
searching criticisms of my writings. He always understands my motives and
intentions perfectly, never distorts or mocks what I say, yet often concludes

12 Peter Augustine Lawler, “Last Man Standing,” Claremont Review of Books 3 (Spring 2003),
39.
13 Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” Political Theory 15 (November
1987), 564–80.
14 Ibid., 568; AOC, 92–107; EHO, 129–39. I speculate that Rorty would have thought highly of
Lane Kenworthy’s recent effort, Social Democratic America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014). Not only does Kenworthy lay out a comprehensive social democratic policy agenda for
the United States; he is pragmatic about it, arguing that a social democratic America can be
achieved by reforming and extending many government programs that are already in place.
15 See, e.g., Richard Rorty, “Intellectuals in Politics,” Dissent 38 (Fall 1991), 483–90.
134 Defending Rorty

that the view I am offering is largely wrong.”16 Indeed, Bernstein, like other
contemporary pragmatists, accuses Rorty of being unfaithful to the pragmatist,
especially Deweyan, tradition of political theory. This is largely because Rorty
fails to do exactly what he himself claims is necessary: offer concrete political
alternatives, instead of abstract theory, for the citizens of liberal democracy to
deliberatively consider. Bernstein concludes that Rorty offers a merely “inspi-
rational” liberal politics that practically does not amount to much. Moreover,
Bernstein finds Rorty’s dismissal of the usefulness of theory premature. To the
contrary, we require theory to effectively think about possible political alter-
natives. Because Rorty denounces theoretical thinking for politics, Bernstein
concludes that “Rorty’s defense of liberalism is little more than an apologia for
the status quo.”17
While Fraser agrees with much of Bernstein’s critique, she also presents a
somewhat more specific line of attack on Rorty from the Left. The pas de
deux between Rorty and Fraser is particularly interesting because, for Rorty,
Fraser seems to hover on the boundary between the pragmatic social demo-
cratic theorists, with whom he identifies, and the resentful radical Leftists,
who imprudently long for “total revolution.” Rorty’s endorsement of social
democratic/welfare liberal politics includes a suspicion of multicultural iden-
tity politics. Rorty’s sense is that the best way to create a just society is to more
fully adopt and deepen the liberal political framework described by thinkers
like Mill, Dewey, and Rawls. This means ensuring that every citizen’s rights
are equally recognized and enforced, and redistributing wealth because, while
Rorty understands that economic inequality is not the source of every injus-
tice, remedying it would go a long and straightforward way toward making
the Western democracies into liberal utopias. On an even deeper level, the
claims of multiculturalists and identity politics proponents clash with Rorty’s
endorsement of the liberal virtues. Whether they reject the liberal virtues as
incompatible with legitimate forms of pluralism or attempt to dismiss their
importance to a just regime, multiculturalists will be at odds with Rortyan lib-
eralism. For Rorty, a politics that emphasizes “cultural recognition” as essential
for justice is likely to be a distraction from the Left-liberal political project and
thus be more trouble than it is worth. Against Rorty, Fraser insists that certain
kinds of cultural recognition are necessary for justice because liberalism leaves
too many important injustices in place.
Since academic philosophers and political theorists tend to lean politically
left, most of the criticism of Rorty from the Right is the work of cultural
critics and religious thinkers. Nevertheless, one conservative political theorist

16 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Pragmatism, Critique, and Judgment:

Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2004), 3. Partially reprinted in PCP, 89–104.
17 Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal
Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (November 1987), 541.
Critics 135

and prominent public intellectual who engaged Rorty’s thought was the late
University of Chicago scholar, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Elshtain’s work is, like
Rorty’s, wide-ranging, although she is especially known for her philosophical
and historical work on the relationship between religion and politics. Elshtain’s
ultimate critique of Rorty is that the sense of irony he recommends for liberal
citizens simply does not treat our moral world with the seriousness that it
requires. Unsurprisingly, as a conservative, Elshtain is more worried about
modern people losing their anchors in traditional values and the moral common
sense based on them, where the pragmatic liberal Rorty urges us to creatively
challenge those values. What is on display in their debate are two very different
philosophical temperaments (parallel to that which we will explore in the next
chapter on Rorty and Charles Taylor), which illustrates Rorty’s assessment
that deep philosophical disagreements are not resolved by reference to fixed
criteria or through the use of a distinct philosophical method. Rather, we have
competing narratives about the human condition that one ultimately chooses
on the basis of one’s own temperament (as James would insist), as much as
anything else.

Rorty and the Left

Rorty draws the suspicion of the intellectual Left because, although he sym-
pathizes with many of their political complaints, his work fails to exhibit
the proper degree of moral outrage, and concomitant political subversiveness,
required for maintaining good standing within the tribe. For all his indigna-
tion and pessimism about the global manipulation of the common folk by the
greedy and powerful elite, Rorty seems far too sanguine about the accomplish-
ments of modern Western civilization, and especially too enamored of his own
native branch of it: the American Experiment. Indeed, he even suggests that
the American Left, which today is comprised mostly of academics and intellec-
tuals, needs to regain its national pride as a first step toward being politically
effective.
One can appreciate the scandal here. Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism
appears to positively encourage subversive thoughts. To the Right’s horror,
he cheerfully proclaims that all that is most established and cherished in
our society is potential fodder for the ironic redescriptions of literary intel-
lectuals. One imagines the soi-disant young radical reading Rorty’s work
and reveling in his deft deconstruction, sprinkled with trendy Gallic names,
of the stodgy Enlightenment’s hubristic pretension to rationally demonstrate
the superiority of the West. The youngster’s enthusiasm, however, is quickly
doused by the anticlimax of Rorty’s surprise conclusion: in spite of its meta-
physical baselessness, we should stick with American liberalism anyway. As
Rorty remarks, “Some postmodernists who initially took my enthusiasm for
Derrida to mean that I must be on their political side decided, after discovering
my politics were pretty much those of Hubert Humphrey, that I must have
136 Defending Rorty

sold out.”18 Rorty effectively and stylishly carries out the radical theorist’s
task of showing that the emperor has no clothes, but then proceeds to tell
us that we should accept this roly-poly, denuded ruler after all, because he is
really doing a pretty good job, all things considered. Hence Bernstein’s disap-
pointed assessment of Rorty’s liberalism: “Rorty’s present position is an odd
mixture of avant-garde ‘radical’ postmodern playfulness and what looks like
old-fashioned cold war liberalism.”19 Rorty has the audacity to suggest that
postmodern critique does not imply a revolt against Enlightenment mores and
politics, and that “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” is not an oxymoron.20
To the contrary, he insists that large-scale, structural social critique of liberal
society is not needful and should be shunned as a waste of time at best and
politically malignant at worst.
Leftist critics, ranging from radical post-Nietzscheans, like William Con-
nolly, to social democratic Deweyans, like Bernstein, point to passages like the
following as damning evidence of Rorty’s complacent conservatism:

I think that contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own
improvement. . . . Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may
have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J.S. Mill’s suggestion that governments
devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone
and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word.21

Thus, when it comes to resolving social issues and conflict arising from the
diversity that liberal societies harbor, Rorty suggests that “we should simply
keep doing what our liberal society is already in the habit of doing: lending an
ear to the specialists in particularity, permitting them to fulfill their function
as agents of love, and hoping that they will continue to expand our moral
imagination.”22 The democratic court of public deliberation is, ideally, open
to hear the claims of any citizen who believes he is suffering an injustice. When
such claims succeed in persuading the public and our institutions that there is a
wrong, and effective action is taken to redress it, the perpetual quest for liberal
justice makes progress.
The intellectual Left, however, has become impatient with and cynical about
this stock understanding of liberal politics. In their view, Rorty is too satisfied
with current political thought and is mistakenly dismissive of the efforts of
radical theorists to foment progressive political change by theoretically expos-
ing and analyzing invidious structures of societal power. Moreover, Rorty goes
further to suggest that philosophers and other social theorists qua theorists

18 PSH, 18.
19 Bernstein, “One Step Forward,” 556.
20 ORT, 199.
21 CIS, 63.
22 ORT, 207.
Critics 137

do not have any special role to play in liberating the politically oppressed.
He maintains that it is not the primary task of philosophy professors to be
the avant-garde of political movements,23 and that “we already have as much
theory as we need” to reform society to be more just.24 Rorty’s allegiance to
Millian social democracy makes him politically a philosophical conservative
who is skeptical of the political use of philosophy, with its claim that it will
liberate us from the “cave” of oppression. While someone who has a day job
as a political philosopher can, of course, moonlight as the leader of a political
movement or run for office, her competence as a philosopher has little directly
to do with these political activities. Rorty thus deflates the revolutionary social
theorist’s heroic self-image.
Hence the shelling from the intellectual Left, with its common themes. Fraser
concludes: “In sum, there is no place in Rorty’s framework for genuinely radi-
cal discourses rooted in oppositional solidarities.”25 Thomas McCarthy echoes:
“[Rorty’s] aim is to keep the liberal public sphere free of radical criticism. This
does not seem to me to be a very good recipe for American politics.”26 Sheldon
Wolin, invoking the baneful “yuppies,” writes: “For Rorty, there is no wrong
to right [in American liberalism], but rather a wish to have more, to have it all,
as the yuppies say, both liberal democracy as it is and more science, technol-
ogy, and personal freedom.”27 Katherine Welton: “Rorty evades the question of
whether procedural justice and liberal institutions might contain biases. . . . The
political consequences of such complacency might be that as long as the pro-
cedural requirements of discussion were taking place, widespread inequali-
ties need not be addressed.”28 Keith Topper: “Rorty’s recommendations not
only fail to help identify pressure points for [social] change, they represent a
flight from that very task.”29 John Tambornino: “Rorty does much to debunk
attempts to defend a particular culture or vocabulary, only to side then with
the dominant political culture and vocabulary. . . . For example, Rorty is nearly
oblivious to the severity of cultural hierarchy and makes few concessions when

23 Richard Rorty, “From Logic to Language to Play,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, 59 (June 1986), 752.
24 Richard Rorty, “Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy,” Critical Inquiry 16
(Spring 1990), 642, passim.
25 Nancy Fraser, “‘Solidarity or Singularity’: Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technoc-
racy,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski, 316.
26 Thomas McCarthy, “Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to Rorty’s Reply,” Critical
Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990), 655.
27 Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Social Research 57, 1 (Spring
1990), 18.
28 Katherine Welton, “Richard Rorty: Postmodernism and a Pragmatic Defence of Democracy,”
in Liberal Democracy and Its Critics, ed. April Carter and Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998), 112.
29 Keith Topper, “Richard Rorty: Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” American Political
Science Review 89 (December 1995), 964.
138 Defending Rorty

asked to incorporate its recognition into his thinking.”30 And finally, William
Connolly: “Rorty adamantly resists any sustained effort to rethink and remodel
the trajectory of the rich, selfish liberal states.”31 One gets the gist.
Rorty’s response to his radical theorist critics is, to put it mildly, not aimed
at rapprochement. He accuses them of being participants in what Jonathan
Yardley calls the “America Sucks Sweepstakes”:

Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United
States. . . . They see ours as what Foucault called a “disciplinary society,” dominated by
an odious ethos of “liberal individualism,” an ethos which produces racism, sexism,
consumerism and Republican presidents. By contrast, I see America pretty much as
Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I
think that our country – despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its
continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office – is a good example of the
best kind of society so far invented.32

As we witness in the dispute with Elshtain, we see rival temperaments at work

here: Rorty’s patriotic support for a reformed American liberalism versus the
radicals’ extreme pessimism about it and indignation at the injustices it fails
to even recognize, much less address. Moreover, the standing charge from
the radical Left that Rorty’s liberalism is oppressive of legitimate pluralism
confirms the reading of Rorty as a robust virtue liberal: it is because his liber-
alism ethically demands so much of liberal citizens that radical critics find it
“hegemonic.”
Upping the rhetorical ante (perhaps in self-conscious mockery of his target),
Rorty accuses the radical Academic Left of going “Gothic” and constructing a
dark world haunted by the pervasive, cunning spectre of Foucauldian “power.”

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of
the original sin – that diabolical stain on every human soul. . . . It is a world in which all
the daylit cheerfulness of Whitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which
“liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naiveté – for an inability to grasp the
full horror of the situation.33

Rorty appreciates the radical Left’s impatience with the slow pace of lib-
eral reform. Nevertheless, by abandoning and denouncing practical reformist
efforts as collaboration with the oppressive “system,” this Left has become
merely spectatorial. Their attempts to “unmask bourgeois ideology” and
“late capitalism” have become self-parodies issued in the “idiot jargon” of

30 John Tambornino, “Philosophy as the Mirror of Liberalism: The Politics of Richard Rorty,”
Polity 30 (Autumn 1997), 74, 69.
31 William E. Connolly, “Review Symposium on Richard Rorty,” History of the Human Sciences,
3, 1 (1990), 107.
32 PSH, 4.
33 AOC, 95–96.
Critics 139

“Leftspeak – a dreadful, pompous, useless, mishmash of Marx, Adorno, Der-

rida, Foucault, and Lacan.”34 Even worse, they attempt to convince students
that liberal reform is a mug’s game and that we need an entirely new, sophis-
ticated, and inevitably meretricious terminology beyond “equal rights” and
“procedural fairness” in order to properly expose “the system.” Rorty writes,
“I regret that a kind of pseudo-sophistication which students are still picking
up from Horkheimer and Adorno on the one hand, and from Foucault on the
other, makes it difficult for these students to share Habermas’s [social demo-
cratic] utopian hopes.”35 Rorty wishes that the radicals would temper their
antiliberal political rhetoric, or at least depoliticize their radicalism (which is
what Rorty generally believes Derrida, as opposed to Foucault, does in spite of
what some of Derrida’s followers think).36 Their insistence that liberalism can-
not be redeemed manifests both a failure to appreciate its liberating, humanist
potential as well as a foolish blindness to the fragility of its hard-won victories
against Hegel’s “slaughter bench of history,” which will likely be evermore
open for business should the liberal project collapse.
While Rorty dismisses his most radical critics for giving up on the liberal
project while failing to offer plausible, attractive alternatives, he is more cir-
cumspect in the face of criticism from thinkers who he believes should, by dint
of their philosophical and political commitments, applaud his efforts rather
than attack them. Bernstein is foremost among these.

Rorty and Bernstein: “Where’s the Beef?”

Although not among the most radical of Rorty’s deriders, Bernstein, because he
is a uniquely generous and insightful reader of Rorty, is one of his most incisive
critics from the Left. He makes three primary and related critiques of Rorty’s
approach to liberal political philosophy: (1) Rorty’s presentation of liberalism
is simplistic and vague, and this lack of nuance renders it deaf to, and therefore
exclusive of, legitimate pluralism; (2) notwithstanding his protestations to the
contrary, Rorty’s philosophical position is relativistic and fails to generate
the commitment to liberalism that he hopes to induce; and (3) Rorty fails to
offer a practical agenda for the political reform he professes to support. These
points support Bernstein’s claim that Rorty’s liberalism, whether he intends it
to or not, bolsters political complacency. Rorty responds, however, that these
criticisms all amount to a disagreement that Bernstein and he have over the use
of political philosophy/theory.37

34 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 569–70. I should note that Rorty wrote this line back in 1987,
and yet more than a quarter of a century later, these same figures, with perhaps some new ones
added, remain go-to thinkers for the radical Left.
35 Richard Rorty, “The Overphilosophication of Politics,” Constellations 7, 1 (2000), 131.
36 CIS, 122–37.
37 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 569.
140 Defending Rorty

According to Bernstein, Rorty’s work blithely assumes an uncomplicated

conception of the liberal tradition, which he foists upon his fellow citizens with
his habit of employing the second-person plural pronoun: “we liberals.”
At times, Rorty writes as if “we” all have common intuitions about what liberal democ-
racy means or should mean, but this is really ingenuous. It is ironical that Rorty, who
in his pragmatic and Wittgensteinian moments argues so effectively against “essential-
ism,” falls into an essentialist mode of speech when he speaks of “liberal democracy”
or “political freedom.”38

Bernstein argues that Rorty’s facile invocation of “liberal democracy” belies

the fact that “‘Liberalism’ itself is a vague term that embraces many diverse and
even incompatible positions.”39 By assuming such an overly general, common
understanding of the liberal tradition, Rorty effectively substitutes a “historical
myth of the given” for the philosophical “epistemological myth of the given”
that he attacks, and is thereby guilty of using a variation on the very type of
argument he seeks to discredit.40 His simple, monolithic liberalism plays an
unjustified foundational role in his work.
Rorty’s discussion of liberalism is thus flawed because he “never faces up
to the hard issue of clarifying what historical standards and criteria ought to
be employed in evaluating the experimental discipline of politics.”41 Instead,
Rorty remains at the metaphilosophical level, extolling Rawlsian “reflective
equilibrium” as all we need when we think about politics, and failing to give
any substantive arguments for any actual political positions. Rorty mistakenly
seems to think that appeals to examples and political exemplars are sufficient
to defend and promote liberalism. But as Socrates teaches in the Euthyphro, we
cannot answer the question “What is piety?” merely by citing examples. We
need to know by virtue of what something qualifies as piety. Likewise, we need
definitive criteria for our goal of social democratic justice. Bernstein insists that
this is where philosophy plays its crucial role. When we have our inevitable
disagreements about justice, we must tackle the hard questions: “[H]ow are
we to resolve these conflicts – what sorts of arguments are appropriate in
evaluating competing intuitions? I fail to see how Rorty’s appeal to ‘reflective
equilibrium’ gives us any clues about the resolution of such conflicts.”42 The
political complacency that results from Rorty’s approach leads Bernstein to
worry that “Rorty seems to be insensitive to the dark side of appealing to

38 Bernstein, “One Step Forward,” 547. C.f., Tambornino, “Philosophy as the Mirror of Liberal-
ism,” 76; Wolin, “Democracy in the Discourse,” 9–10; Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singular-
ity?” 303–21.
39 Bernstein, “One Step Forward,” 546. C.f., Robert Talisse, “A Pragmatist Critique of Richard
Rorty’s Hopeless Politics,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 39 (2001), 621–22.
40 Ibid., 551, 554. See also Charles Hartshorne, “Rorty’s Pragmatism & Farewell to the Age of
Faith & Enlightenment,” in R&P, 16.
41 Ibid., 549.
42 Bernstein, “One Step Forward,” 551.
Critics 141

‘we’ when it is used as an exclusionary tactic – as the rationalization for

fostering intolerance.”43 Tambornino concurs that Rorty’s bald preference for
liberalism is the “equivalent of metaphysics,” exhibiting “excessive confidence
and subtle suppression of dissent.”44 Fraser likewise concludes that “Rorty
ends up supposing there is only one legitimate political vocabulary, thereby
betraying his own professed commitment to a polylogic politics.”45
Bernstein’s second criticism – which is perhaps the most frequently made
against Rorty’s liberalism in the literature – is that Rorty’s insistence on the
completely contingent nature of his commitment to liberalism undermines that
commitment. In the hands of many critics, this charge is made too quickly and is
often based on a less than full appreciation of Rorty’s comprehensive project.
For such critics, Rorty’s anti-foundationalism must mean relativism, Q.E.D.
Bernstein, however, knows better. He fully recognizes that Rorty’s exhortation
to stop using foundationalist rhetoric in defense of liberalism does not mean
that Rorty refuses to give reasons for being committed to liberalism. Rorty does
give reasons and argues for his conception of liberalism, but he self-consciously
insists that the reasons are “historically contingent fallible reasons.”46 Again,
as we have seen in previous chapters, Rorty’s pragmatism is really a plea for
an operative, practical fallibilism about liberal means and ends.
Yet Bernstein goes on to write:

But at times – in his hyperbolic manner – Rorty so radicalizes his claims about con-
tingency, historicism, and nominalism that one wonders if it even makes sense (in his
vocabulary) to speak about human actions, intentions, and projects. If the old idea of
“intentional action” were completely abandoned in favor of a thoroughly contingent
self, then we would never have any reason to suppose that anything we do would even
be likely to have the results we intend.47

For Bernstein, this reductio of Rortyan contingency destroys Rortyan social

hope, “[f]or there is no reason to expect that anything we do is more likely to
bring us closer to [Rorty’s] utopia than to its opposite.”48
Because, on Rorty’s view, our final vocabularies should be seen as sim-
ply random products of history with no neutral standard by which to judge
them, “[d]ebates about our basic values and norms are not rational. They are
only rhetorical strategies for getting others to adopt our attitudes.”49 Bern-
stein argues that this renders Rorty’s commitment to liberalism fideistic and
absolutist, which means that Rorty fails to exhibit the open-minded fallibilism

43 Ibid., 554.
44 Tambornino, “Philosophy as the Mirror of Liberalism,” 76, 78.
45 Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?” 316.
46 Bernstein, New Constellation, 276–7.
47 Ibid, 277.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 278.
142 Defending Rorty

he purports to endorse.50 “There is no evidence that Rorty ever really doubts

his commitment to liberal democracy. He never really questions it and asks
himself whether there are alternatives that should be considered.”51 In other
words, “contingency,” which is just the ironist’s name for “relativism,” results
in close-minded ethnocentrism, which is antithetical to liberalism.52
Indeed, Bernstein invokes Horkheimer’s identification of relativism with
Italian fascist theory to highlight the dangers of Rorty’s position. Horkheimer
writes, “Relativism, which is without philosophical justification, is an element
of a social dynamic which moves toward authoritarian forms. Indifference to
the idea in theory is the precursor of cynicism in practical life.”53 Bernstein
concludes:

It is hard to see any difference that makes a difference between Rorty’s irony and
Mussolini’s cynicism. My main point is to challenge Rorty’s claim that he has given a
more attractive redescription of liberalism. On the contrary, Rorty actually describes
one of the most dangerous and virulent tendencies in liberalism – the conviction that
anything can be made to look good by redescription. For this is just the mentality
that possessed our political leaders during the Vietnam war and the sordid Watergate
affair.54

Lastly, Bernstein argues that, because they are so abstract and ironic, Rorty’s
discussions of liberalism offer us no practical guidance for political reform, a
major omission for someone claiming the pragmatist mantle. Bernstein writes,
“For all Rorty’s manifest concern with liberal democracy, public responsibil-
ities, and utopian politics, it is curious how little politics one finds in [CIS].
Indeed, despite his battle against abstractions and general principles, he tends
to leave us with empty abstractions.”55 Further, “Rorty is frequently brilliant
in calling the bluff of those who believe that their sophisticated theorizing is
required for politics today. But if we apply to Rorty the same tough pragmatic
standards that he applies to others, there is very little concrete payoff. It may
be inspiring and stirring to talk of limiting greed and lessening the gap between
the rich and the poor. But Rorty doesn’t provide us with the foggiest idea of
how this is to be accomplished.”56 Bernstein queries, “Where’s the beef?”57
He concludes that Rorty’s liberalism is merely “inspirational and sentimental,”
which threatens to become a “rhetorical smokescreen that obfuscates the type

50 Ibid., 278–81.
51 Ibid., 280.
52 This criticism is similar to Stout’s charge, discussed in Chapter 1, that Rorty’s pragmatism
results in authoritarian social conformity.
53 Ibid., 283, quoting Max Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” in Critical
Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1936), 165.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 283–84, 289.
56 Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 135.
57 Ibid., 137.
Critics 143

of serious thinking and action required to bring about the liberal reform that
he envisions.”58
Bernstein thus gives Rorty a rough, if respectful, treatment, and it is a tes-
tament to the strength of their nearly sixty-year friendship that their vigorous
philosophical disagreements apparently did nothing to tarnish their affections
for each other. Rorty’s response to the oft-made, “Who’s ‘we’?” criticism is to
reassert his general conception of social democracy that we have seen in pre-
vious chapters.59 Rorty assumes that most non-radical Leftists would accept
his broad outline of the just society, one in which economic inequalities are
not oppressive and all liberal democratic citizens are treated as political equals.
Thus, all who embrace the welfare liberal strand of the liberal tradition –
take Rawlsian egalitarianism as a benchmark – comprise Rorty’s “we,” which
Rorty hopes will expand to encompass all citizens. But Rorty’s description of
and commitment to this Left-liberal/social democratic tradition hardly plays
the role of a metaphysical, “historical given” in his thought. He is well aware
that it is one of many historically contingent and conflicting stories that we
can tell about the development of liberalism, its values and associated prac-
tices. He simply offers it as the best, most attractive one. Why is it the best?
Here, as Bernstein accurately recounts, Rorty concedes that he has no knock-
down philosophical argument to offer. Rather, his pragmatism commits him to
defending his version of liberalism by, in context after context, simply offering
yet another positive narrative about it and hoping his interlocutors will find
it compelling. All he can do is keep presenting the things that he thinks are
good about his liberalism – which includes occasionally citing various, fairly
standard Left liberal policies (though Bernstein is correct that such citations
fall far short of engaged policy analysis; Rorty’s position is that he simply is
not knowledgeable enough render such analysis) – and showing how they hang
together in an attractive normative package.
Accusations that this vision is somehow anti-pluralist either stem from a
rejection of liberalism itself or express a naı̈ve wish for the “social world with-
out loss” that Berlin warns us against. Nancy Fraser, for instance, complains
that, within Rorty’s liberal framework, “there is no place for nonliberal inter-
pretations of social needs and collective concerns.”60 Whether this accusation
is correct depends on what Fraser means by “no place.” If she is implying
that Rorty’s liberal state will censor the expression of nonliberal ideas and dis-
courses, she is, of course, mistaken. Rorty is a devoted Millian on free speech
(though, as a liberal pragmatist, he may be open to arguments about suppress-
ing certain kinds of extreme speech at the margins, depending on an assessment
of the cruelty they cause). Marxists, fascists, anarchists, religious fundamental-
ists, radical democrats, and others are free to publicly air their views and make

58 Ibid.
59 See Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists.”
60 Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?” 316.
144 Defending Rorty

political claims in Rorty’s liberal community. There is simply no guarantee that

they will be heeded, and, as a liberal, Rorty desperately hopes they will not be.
So if nonliberal ideas are not censored in Rorty’s liberal utopia, perhaps
Fraser’s criticism is rather that they will not be accepted or taken seriously
enough. But then her charge amounts to simply accusing Rorty of being a
liberal. Obviously, insofar as Rorty is (contingently) committed to liberalism,
he is going to be against a politics based on nonliberal ideas; he does not want
the citizenry to embrace or the state to implement “nonliberal interpretations of
social needs and collective concerns,” since that would run athwart the public
quest for liberal justice. Moreover, liberals, in contrast to most nonliberals, are
at least willing to put their commitments at risk by hearing and considering
nonliberal ideas, as Rorty does – contra Bernstein, he seriously engages the
thought of many nonliberal thinkers and carefully considers and responds to
their critiques of liberalism. Can we label Rorty an anti-pluralist simply because
he has not yet been convinced by any alternatives to liberalism? If so, then
isn’t everyone who espouses a recognizable set of moral ideas (i.e., everyone)
anti-pluralistic? If Fraser has a positive political ideal, it by necessity excludes
opposed ideals. Is she anti-pluralistic? The charge becomes meaningless, for
any ethical doctrine will “exclude” practices that are incompatible with it.
This interpretation of Rorty’s liberalism also answers Bernstein’s second
criticism that Rorty is, finally, metaphilosophically a relativist, which renders
his practical commitment to liberalism one of unreflective faith. This is a sur-
prisingly unpragmatic accusation for the Deweyan Bernstein to make, with his
suggestion that philosophy can draw an absolute line between rational argu-
ment and “mere” rhetorical persuasion. To support his charge of relativism,
Bernstein, like many of Rorty’s readers (especially conservative ones), makes
particular hay of Rorty’s infamous claim that anything can be made to look
good or bad by redescribing it.61 Disappointingly, Bernstein raises the pre-
dictable “Holocaust objection”: Can one “redescribe” the Holocaust to make
it look “good?” Answer: of course not. Conclusion: Rorty is a relativist for sug-
gesting the possibility. Rorty, however, as a liberal, cannot imagine a plausible
description of the Holocaust as good. The point of his claim is not that there
is some sort of moral imperative to redescribe atrocities as good and justice as
bad. If it were, Rorty would indeed be endorsing an odious relativism, which
is antithetical to his liberalism, and thus unpragmatic as well (if Rorty’s goal is
to attract people to his liberalism).
Rorty’s claim must rather be understood as part of his overall exhortation to
fallibilism. Of course we cannot practically imagine the Holocaust redescribed
as good, but if we are going to be pragmatic liberals, we cannot rule out the
possibility of such a redescription. We know too much about the contingencies
of history to rule it out, even though, given our present sensibilities, we are

61 Bernstein, New Constellation, 274.

Critics 145

not going to waste time exploring the possibility. This is where conceiving of
Rorty as a virtue liberal is helpful: anyone who is educated and socialized for
the liberal virtues will be highly unlikely to attempt or accept a redescription of
the Holocaust as good. While there is no philosophical assurance that it cannot
be done, there is the practical assurance that liberally virtuous people are not
meaningfully at risk of becoming Holocaust fans. And that, for Rorty, is all
you can or should ask of liberalism.
Finally, Bernstein accuses Rorty of offering “merely” liberal inspiration,
rather than practical political ideas, which is what pragmatism demands. This,
for Bernstein, is the damning flaw of Rorty’s project. He notes that Rorty seems
to think that the working out of, for example, the liberty-equality balance in
liberal society should be left up to the policy entrepreneurs and social engineers.
In Rorty’s view, these specialists, ideally, offer their expert findings and rec-
ommendations up for democratic political debate, and the society experiments
and hopefully muddles its way toward a “just” balance, the details of which
are perpetually and deliberatively reconsidered. This is the substance of liberal
politics, and Bernstein basically has Rorty right: this is what Rorty means when
he says that the West has had its “last conceptual revolution,” though not its
last conceptual reform. While much practical work needs to be done (and will
likely always need to be done), not much fundamental, philosophical rethink-
ing is needed because we mostly have the right moral and political concepts,
like individual equality and freedom. We just need to continue to work at fully
implementing them, which includes extending them at the margins in newly
imagined ways. Thus, as Bernstein recognizes, for Rorty, “[t]he primary prob-
lem now is one of motivation and implementation – to get political coalitions
together that are dedicated to reforming institutions, laws, and policies.”62
Bernstein’s critical response to this is that

theory informs concrete programs of action. And such theory is not simply the technical
theory of neutral experts, for it requires specifying the social injustices to be rectified.
Without a modicum of theoretical analysis and debate, liberal reform can too easily
degenerate into mindless activism or the search for quick fixes. There doesn’t seem to
be a place in Rorty’s scheme of things for this type of responsible social and political
theory – theory that is neither foundational nor postmodern but that is intended to
help us understand the complex situations that we confront in order to figure out what
reform is likely to be effective. Sometimes Rorty writes as if this sort of theory is better
off left to social scientists. But I find little evidence that social scientists are carrying
on the type of social theorizing that Dewey thought was necessary for intelligent social
reform.63

This needs unpacking. As Bernstein well knows (and as I just discussed), Rorty
does not think all of the ends of liberal society have been definitively identified

62 Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 131.

63 Ibid., 136.
146 Defending Rorty

and that therefore all we need is “neutral experts” to provide the technical
means. Rorty writes, “If we thought we knew the goals of culture and society
in advance, we would have no use for the humanities – as totalitarian societies
in fact do not. It is characteristic of democratic and pluralistic societies to
continually redefine their goals.”64
Moreover, as suggested by his reference to the humanities Rorty does see
an important role for people trained in philosophy and political theory: they use
their specialized knowledge of history and philosophy to offer literary, cultural
criticism that will hopefully lead to a more liberal culture and politics.65 And
indeed, Bernstein recognizes and even gently compliments Rorty for engaging
in the Deweyan practice of delivering the political “lay sermon,” which Alan
Ryan describes as the middle ground “between pure philosophy and a policy
paper” and “the terrain of intelligent persuasion.”66 Rorty and Dewey are
intellectual essayists who use their erudition to recontextualize problematic
parts of culture, enabling us to see them from new perspectives and thereby
deepen our comprehension and even perhaps resolve conflicts so we can move
forward. Rorty writes, “Dewey construed Hegel’s insistence on historicity as
the claim that philosophers should not try to be the avant-garde of society and
culture, but should be content to mediate between the past and the future. Their
job is to weave together old beliefs and new beliefs, so that these beliefs can
cooperate rather than interfere with one another.”67 Reconciling, for example,
Darwin with liberal morality, or the effects of modern technology on our
conception human dignity, are the sorts of “big view,” but also pragmatic (not
eternal), problems that philosophers are relatively good at dealing with.
Bernstein’s quotation above, however, indicates that he wants something
more than this: theory that helps us “understand the complex situations we
confront in order to figure out what reform is likely to be effective.” This
sounds like Bernstein expects philosophers and other humanities intellectuals
to be centrally involved in policy debates. Indeed, for Bernstein, it seems that
contemporary social science is in desperate need of correction from philoso-
phy and political theory; it cannot be “intelligent” without it. Rorty, however,
is dubious (as are, no doubt, most social scientists). His reply is that, while
certainly he and his fellow democratic citizens must try to intelligently judge
the consequences of the policy experiments undertaken by their government
on the advice of policy experts, neither he nor most intellectuals trained in
the humanities have the expertise to do what Bernstein expects of them. Rorty
would agree that some contemporary social science is conceptually confused,
and that the theories of humanities intellectuals might sometimes be help-
ful to social science, perhaps by reminding it that it, too, involves fallible

64 ORT, 37.
65 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy & the Future,” in R&P, 197–205.
66 Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 137.
67 Rorty, “Philosophy & the Future,” 199.
Critics 147

interpretation in a contingent, historical, inescapably normative context. But

he cannot see how such theories are integrally needed by a social science that
is already broadly informed by liberalism (i.e., social science practiced in the
context of a liberal society, and thus has its means and ends informed by liberal
values). While innovation is needful at the policy level to extend liberal justice
to all people, at the level of political philosophy, there simply is not much more
to add to the basic concept of Left liberal justice. Even Rawls’s work – the
lodestar of contemporary Left-liberal political philosophy – while important
and creative, simply offers an updated “intuition pump” for a welfare liberal
vision that has been around at least since the New Liberalism of the nineteenth
century.
Rorty’s alleged refusal to offer “concrete program[s] of reform” is sim-
ply respect for the much-commented-on division of specialized labor that our
highly complex society has developed and relies on. Indeed, contrary to Bern-
stein, we might applaud Rorty’s modesty in sticking to what he knows best –
the humanities – in contrast to some of his less restrained colleagues who stray
beyond their ken and pontificate ignorantly on technical issues best left to the
relevant experts.68 Opening themselves up to embarrassing variations of the
Sokal Hoax is perhaps the least of the harms they might do.
The role of expertise in politics and government is a contentious issue in
modern democracies, so let me be clear that it is not Rorty’s position (or
mine) that humanities intellectuals should not weigh in on policy debates. It
is merely that they do so as highly educated citizens rather than as policy
experts. Unlike the cultivation of Plato’s philosopher-kings, the training of
humanities intellectuals does not endow them with “special” knowledge about,
for example, the economics or justice of health care reform. While there are
trained experts of the former, knowledge of justice is not the special province of
any class of citizens. As Michael Walzer insists, “philosophers have no special
rights in the [democratic] political community,” but participate as ordinary
citizens.69 They may be able to use their finely honed rhetorical gifts to educate
and persuade others to their (hopefully informed) positions, but rhetorical gifts
are not theirs alone.70
As a literary intellectual, Rorty understands his task as engagement in
“cultural politics or criticism” that attempts to contribute to “humanity’s
ongoing conversation about what to do with itself,” ultimately, if somewhat
grandly, on a world-historical scale.71 Drawing on their humanities-informed

68 Richard A. Posner agrees that this is Rorty’s stated position, but finds that even Rorty some-
times fails to resist the temptation to make erroneous statements about politics, economics,
international relations, psychology, and such, in ignorance of the scientific facts. See Richard
A. Posner, “Richard Rorty’s Politics,” Critical Review 7, 1 (1993), 33–49.
69 Michael Walzer, “Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory 9 (August 1981), 397.
70 Rorty, “Philosophy and the Future.”
71 PCP, ix.
148 Defending Rorty

understandings of our culture and of the human condition, literary intellec-

tuals should see their political role (if they must have one) as one of offer-
ing compelling “vistas” and “lightly-sketched” utopias, as opposed detailed
“blueprints,” of what liberal culture should be. For Rorty, philosophy’s “main
use lies in thinking through our utopian visions,”72 and “expressing our polit-
ical hopes.”73 The discourses of literary intellectuals are normally pitched at a
level that is not focused on immediate policy conundrums, but rather are aimed
at modifying the background fabric of culture and values upon which those
conundrums emerge and make sense. Their scholarship can influence policy
debates, but usually only in an indirect, diffuse way, especially by offering us
richer perspective rather than plans of action. When literary intellectuals are
successful, they influence our moral identities by inducing us to change our
values and self and communal narratives. Rorty’s work, for example, endorses
and exemplifies his liberal ironism, which encourages us to cultivate the civic
virtue of irony that is needed for successful liberal politics. He also urges iro-
nist intellectuals to be ever bolder in their experimental redescriptions while
remaining creatively committed to liberalism.
By contrast, it is the policy experts’ job to try to formulate the various
concrete options that empirically flesh out the detailed practices of liberal
society as it strives to become more just. We can understand how Rorty relates
the two projects – presenting “vistas” and presenting “blueprints” – by his
invocation of Rawlsian “reflective equilibrium” as the paradigm for moral and
political deliberation. “Reflective equilibrium” is really just a fancy term for
scrutinizing one’s normative commitments, formulated as “provisional fixed
points” from which we begin moral deliberation, in light of new experience
and the demands of consistency. Since we are always gaining new experience,
this process of revising our commitments is dynamic and never-ending; we are
always learning as we attempt to maintain our normative balance. Applying
this conception of reflective equilibrium to the respective products of literary
intellectuals and policy experts, we implement a policy with our vista of the just
liberal utopia in mind and we see if the policy moves us toward it, or perhaps
convinces us to shift the vista (or maybe a bit of both). This evolving mutual
adjustment in the face of experimental consequences is, of course, an eminently
Deweyan account of liberal politics.
Both the literary intellectual and policy expert are vital to liberal civilization,
and it is a mistake to think that one must be generally privileged over the other;
they each perform crucial, if normally distinct, political functions. Moreover,
of course, this “big picture, philosophical vista” versus “fine-grained, practical
details” distinction is not a dichotomy but rather exists as a continuum, and we
recognize that we are sometimes blessed with rare geniuses who are able to offer
both inspiring philosophical visions and effective policy recommendations.

72 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 569.

73 Rorty, “From Logic to Language to Play,” 753.
Critics 149

Since most philosophers and political theorists are squarely in the literary
intellectual camp, however, they should refrain from presenting their policy
positions as somehow logically deduced from their fuzzy philosophical vistas,
as if because they have produced a provocative normative account of egali-
tarianism, they are now uniquely qualified to pronounce upon the details of
trade policy or the minimum wage. Rorty confesses that, while he imagines
a Rawlsian distribution of wealth for his liberal utopia, he has no idea what
the best policy instruments are for achieving that. But neither, he would claim,
does Bernstein. Rorty is willing to go with whatever policy agenda that, in his
nonexpert judgment, seems most likely to move society toward his ideal (which
is why, as an American, he is a New Deal-Humphrey-McGovern Democrat).
What is further curious about Bernstein’s demand for the “beef” of Rorty’s
political thought is that one does not find much in the way of detailed policy
analysis in most works of contemporary political philosophy, including Bern-
stein’s. Indeed, if one peruses Bernstein’s work, one finds lots of creative and
enlightening discussions of the work of other important philosophers. One
finds historically informed, critical analyses of the development of modern val-
ues. One finds pleas for a “pragmatic engaged fallibilism,” which entails “a
dialogical response where we genuinely seek to achieve a mutual reciprocal
understanding – an understanding that does not preclude disagreement.”74 In
other words, one finds substance that is quite similar to what one finds in
Rorty’s books.
The same can be said of two of Bernstein’s philosopher exemplars: Haber-
mas and Dewey. Habermas’s theorizing certainly gives us a refined language in
which to discuss, well, discussion: how liberal democratic deliberation should
ideally be carried on. But ultimately, as Rorty puts it, “the cash-value of Haber-
mas’ philosophical notions of ‘communicative reason’ and ‘intersubjectivity’
consists in the familiar political freedoms fashioned by the rich North Atlantic
democracies during the last two centuries.”75 Habermas’s vista is sophisticated
and impressive but still falls short of specific policy analysis.
In the case of Dewey, Bernstein actually seems to be of two minds. On
the one hand, he contrasts Dewey with Rorty by insisting that Dewey held
that philosophy could have immediate practical relevance to political problems
and, further, that Dewey was committed to the “radical” political critique of
liberalism.76 On the other hand, however, Bernstein echoes a common criticism
of Dewey by conceding that the great pragmatist was, like Rorty, “much better
at chiding his fellow intellectuals about their failure to deal with the ‘problems
of men’ than he was in developing concrete ways for solving these problems.”77
Indeed, for example, while Dewey’s critique of capitalism presents a morally

74 Bernstein, New Constellation, 336–37; Bernstein, Pragmatic Turn, 30.

75 EHO, 190.
76 Bernstein, “One Step Forward,” 539–40.
77 Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 135.
150 Defending Rorty

inspiring vista, there is scarcely any detailed theoretical sophistication in it.78

For Rorty, however, this is not a criticism. Dewey is simply doing what literary
intellectuals do.
Bernstein is correct, in a sense, when he claims that Rorty’s intellectual
project is “merely” inspirational. Take away the “merely,” and this is exactly
Rorty’s intention: to stoke the liberal political equivalent of Keynes’s economic
“animal spirits,” for without social hope and optimism, knowledge does us no
good. While Bernstein briefly concedes this point, his predominant character-
ization of Rorty’s work as bordering on emotive cheerleading that obfuscates
“serious political thinking” is hardly fair. The response that Rorty’s work gives
to Bernstein’s “Where’s the beef?” query is that pragmatic, liberally virtuous
citizens situated within Western democratic institutions are likely to determine
over time the best, evolving set of policies.

Rorty and Fraser: Do We Need “Recognition?”

Nancy Fraser’s Leftist critique of Rorty is particularly interesting because of
its evolution. Initially, like others, she broadly accused Rorty’s liberalism of
being too robust and excluding legitimate pluralism, and specifically of failing
to be open to her preferred political ideal of “radical democratic-socialist-
feminism.”79 Later, she supplemented this charge by arguing that Rorty
wrongly dismisses the “politics of recognition” as unnecessary for justice.80
While it is clear that Fraser finds Rorty’s politics insufficiently radical, it is
nevertheless unclear where their practical disagreements lie. Insofar as Fraser is
an egalitarian social democrat, the main difference between them would seem
to be Rorty’s relative optimism about the American project versus Fraser’s
rhetorically radical critique of it.
What is fascinating about Fraser’s early assessment of CIS is that she beau-
tifully describes its admittedly tension-filled plot and yet sees only bugs rather
than features. She sees clearly that Rorty’s liberal utopia is a combination of
pragmatic liberalism and romanticism but finds the amalgam simply unten-
able. She writes, “In the Romantic view, the social world exists for the sake
of the poet. In the pragmatic view, on the other hand, the poet exists for the
sake of the social world. . . . One cannot have it both ways.”81 Rorty can reply:
Why not? Unfortunately, in the wake of her brilliant, if somewhat snarky,
exposition of CIS, she makes the common mistake of over-interpreting Rorty’s

78 Robert Westbrook writes that Dewey was attracted to some sort of decentralized version of
democratic socialism, but that “it was unclear just what he thought such a socialism would
look like or how one went about building it” (Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American
Democracy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991], 439).
79 Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?”
80 Nancy Fraser, “Why Overcoming Prejudice Is Not Enough: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty,”
Critical Horizons 1 (February 2000), 21–28.
81 Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?” 310.
Critics 151

public-private divide, which leads her to conclude that Rorty’s politics cannot
be progressive. She sees the divide – Rorty’s “partition position,” as she puts
it – as stagnant and oppressive, rather than as dynamic and evolving, and thus
inhospitable to radical democratic-socialist-feminism.
Yet when one reads her inspiring, if fuzzy, sketch of the latter politics, it is
unclear that any of its features are theoretically excluded by or incompatible
with Rortyan liberalism. Fraser’s political ideal is “nonindividualist,” “noneli-
tist,” and “nonmasculinist.” She exhorts us to

[a]rticulate this utopian vision in terms of relations among human beings instead of
in terms of individuals considered as separate monads. Imagine new relations of work
and play, citizenship and parenthood, friendship and love. Then, consider what sort of
institutional framework would be needed to foster such relations. Situate these relations
in the institutional framework of a classless, multicultural society without racism, sexism
or heterosexism – an international society of decentralized, democratic, self-managing
collectivities.82

At this level of abstraction, there is nothing here that Rorty must disagree with.
From his perspective, there are likely only three practical differences between
Fraser’s project and his. First, he again appears to have more faith that current
institutions can be reformed to make progress toward liberal utopia, whereas
one suspects Fraser, even more than Bernstein, imagines a more radical insti-
tutional overhaul (though specifics are lacking, making it difficult to identify
exactly where she and Rorty are at odds). Second, also like Bernstein, Fraser
sees the political theorist playing a more important role in the necessary polit-
ical transformation. Lastly, Rorty and Fraser disagree about the utility of the
“politics of recognition.”
The “politics of recognition,” or “identity politics,” of course, involves
claims that the state should grant certain rights or privileges to individuals on
the basis of their membership in a specific cultural group. Such claims appear
prima facie antithetical to the liberal tradition, which holds that all citizens
should have the same rights, regardless of cultural, racial, or gender iden-
tity. Nevertheless, in recent decades, liberal and nonliberal thinkers alike have
argued that justice requires the state to “recognize” membership in certain cul-
tural groups, particularly minority groups that have historically suffered from
societal marginalization, and treat those members differently in order to ensure
genuine political equality. As Charles Taylor puts it, “Not only contemporary
feminism but also race relations and discussions of multiculturalism are under-
girded by the premise that the withholding of recognition can be a form of
oppression.”83

82 Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?” 319–20.

83 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of
Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36.
152 Defending Rorty

Fraser, however, is wary of the New Left support for identity politics for two
reasons. First, she worries that too much emphasis on the harm of cultural “mis-
recognition” can come to “displace” crucial issues of economic injustice that
are essential to fostering democratic equality. Second, she acknowledges the
common concern that identity politics can oppressively “reify” group identity:
“[B]y seeking to consolidate an authentic self-elaborated group culture, this
approach essentialises identity, pressurising individual members to conform,
denying the complexity of their lives, the multiplicity of their identifications,
and the cross-pulls of their various affiliations.”84
Agreeing with Fraser’s criticisms of identity politics, Rorty goes further and
questions whether “cultural recognition” is a useful concept at all for Leftist
politics. He argues that it is a distraction from the task of overcoming preju-
dice, which is achieved by emphasizing commonalities among people, such as
the ability to experience humiliation, rather than the differences between them.
Rorty writes, “Up through the Sixties, ‘prejudice’ was the word leftists used to
signify inability to acknowledge this commonality, and a failure to treat other
people fairly. To say that someone is prejudiced, in this sense, is to say that he
or she prejudges fellow-humans who are members of despised groups.”85 Preju-
dice, along with its associated invidious concepts of “pollution” and “purity,”
is, of course, commonplace in history. Rorty points out that entire societies
have been based on prejudice, like the caste systems of India and Japan. The
Leftist effort to eradicate prejudice is an attempt to create “a society in which
no human being is regarded as anything less than a full-fledged member of
both the species and the local community.” “In the old days,” Rorty tells us,
“American leftists assumed that creating a decent and civilised society was in
part a matter of redistributing money and opportunity, and in part a matter of
erasing stigma by eliminating prejudice.”86
Rorty suggests that the reason that demands for cultural recognition have
come to replace the goal of eliminating prejudice is that “the post-Sixties aca-
demic left knows a lot about [cultural] differences, and thinks that the public as
a whole ought to take an interest in them.”87 But he suspects this new demand –
that good liberal citizens must properly “recognize” and respect cultural differ-
ences in the specific and unique ways that cultural members demand – asks too
much, and thereby exacerbates the challenges of creating a just liberal society.
It undermines liberal solidarity because it results in too many different groups
asking for too many different types of treatment in the name of justice. And
while he concedes that the New Left’s impact on social mores – what some
on the Right sneer at as “political correctness” – has made America a much

84 Fraser, “Why Overcoming Prejudice is Not Enough,” 23.

85 Richard Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics,” Critical Hori-
zons 1 (February 2000), 8.
86 Ibid., 9.
87 Ibid., 13
Critics 153

less sadistic place, Rorty believes that Fraser is right to be concerned that an
overemphasis on recognition of difference is displacing more needful issues of
economic injustice.
Fraser, however, disagrees with Rorty that the politics of recognition should
be abandoned. Despite her reservations, Fraser argues that issues of recogni-
tion can be reconceived to avoid the problems of displacement and reification.
She proposes what she calls the “status model” of recognition, which con-
ceives of the harm of misrecognition as “institutionalized status subordination”
rather than as simply the distortion of identity. The practical upshot of Fraser’s
approach is a focus on institutional practices that result in the unfair treat-
ment of certain groups, rather than on invidious “free-floating discourses.” For
Fraser, pertinent examples of institutional practices of subordination include:
marriage laws that exclude same-sex partnerships as illegitimate and perverse; social-
welfare policies that stigmatize single mothers as sexually irresponsible scroungers;
and policing practices, such as ‘racial profiling’, that associate racialized persons with
criminality. In each of these cases, interaction is regulated by an institutionalized pattern
of cultural value that constitutes some categories of social actors as normative and others
as deficient or inferior: ‘straight’ is normal, ‘gay’ is perverse; ‘male-headed households’
are proper, ‘female-headed households’ are not; ‘whites’ are law-abiding, ‘blacks’ are
dangerous. In each case, the result is to deny some members of society the status of full
partners in interaction, capable of participating on a par with the rest.88

Fraser concludes:
On the status model, then, misrecognition constitutes a form of institutionalized sub-
ordination, and thus a serious violation of justice. Wherever and however it occurs, a
claim for recognition is in order. But note precisely what this means: aimed not at val-
orizing group identity but rather at overcoming subordination, in this approach claims
for recognition seek to establish the subordinated party as a full partner in social life,
able to interact with others as a peer.89

Unsurprisingly, Fraser’s “non-identitarian” politics of recognition has been

subject to pushback from proponents of identity politics, who deny that their
theories suffer from the twin flaws of displacement and reification.90 Moreover,
of course, proponents insist that (at least some sort of) “valorization” of group
identity is required for justice – that’s kind of the point. Fraser appears to have
taken the identity out of identity politics. For our purposes here, however,
the question is: How is Fraser’s politics of recognition different from Rorty’s
liberalism with its traditional, theoretically quotidian but still crucial project
of “overcoming prejudice?” Perhaps agreeing with Fraser’s critics from the
identity politics camp, I suggest that there are no obvious practical differences.

88 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (May–June 2000), 114.
89 Ibid.
90 See, e.g., Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems
Theory,” New Left Review 1 (March–April 1997), 147–60.
154 Defending Rorty

Fraser, for instance, suggests that redressing the injustices produced by the
“institutionalization in law of a heterosexist pattern of cultural value” might
include either legalizing gay marriage or decoupling entitlements, like health
insurance, and other privileges from marital status.91 Such measures, along
with the necessary redistribution of economic resources, will create the “parity
of participation in social life” that justice requires. Yet such policies are, of
course, exactly what Leftist liberals like Rorty have been championing for
decades. Rorty wonders “why in order to overcome homophobia we had to
‘accord positive recognition to gay and lesbian sexual specificity’ rather than
just raising children to think that being gay or lesbian is no big deal.”92 He
thus seems to be at one with Fraser that “valorization” of identity, which
risks reification, can be distinguished from the pursuit of political equality by
historically marginalized groups.
Fraser tries to drive a wedge between her approach and Rorty’s by claim-
ing that his liberal emphasis on human commonality rather than difference is
insufficient because, “[i]n some cases, injustice arises from a failure to acknowl-
edge group differences.”93 She then goes on to give examples of when this is
the case, including: U.S. court rulings holding that employers’ failure to grant
pregnancy leave is not sex discrimination because men are not granted such
leave; firefighter job applications that involve climbing ladders designed for
people of average male height, thereby disadvantaging female applicants; and
regulations mandating uniform headgear for the Canadian Mounties, which
effectively excludes Sikhs from the force. In each of these cases, group differ-
ences must be taken into account in order for justice to be done. But none
of these examples are uniquely problematic for Rortyan liberalism. It is Rorty
who argues that a liberally educated imagination is a crucial virtue for liberal
citizenship because it helps citizens see a practice from the perspective of those
who claim that it treats them unequally. Rorty can reply to Fraser that the
success of the political claims of those who are being treated unjustly in her
examples depends on their fellow democratic citizens recognizing that they
themselves would not want to be treated that way if they were in a similar
position. Thus, the recognition of commonality remains integral to seeing how
difference should be justly treated, and it is more likely to motivate people to
address such injustice than the rhetoric of the “politics of recognition.”
Since they ostensibly agree about where justice lies in the concrete examples
that Fraser gives, is the disagreement between Rorty and Fraser just one of
tactics? Their exchange underscores that “equality” (like “pluralism”) is an
essentially contested concept that means different things to different people
in different contexts. Equality, in some sense, is necessary for justice in both
Rorty’s and Fraser’s respective politics. While they likely agree that equality

91 Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” 115.

92 Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept,” 16.
93 Fraser, “Why Overcoming Prejudice Is Not Enough,” 26.
Critics 155

requires that, for example, same-sex couples should have marriage equality,
women should have a right to pregnancy leave, and Sikh turbans should gen-
erally be accommodated in the uniformed forces, they might disagree about
whether some other policies are integral to equality. Rorty’s point, however,
is that theory, like Fraser’s “politics of recognition,” is of limited help when it
comes to resolving debates about what equality is and about when accommo-
dation of difference is justified and when it is not. Fraser’s confident rhetoric
suggests that the answers that she believes her theory provides for the exam-
ples she considers are indubitable. While he agrees with those answers, Rorty’s
position is more circumspect because he recognizes that pluralistic liberally vir-
tuous citizens may come to different conclusions about equality. Their demo-
cratic deliberation may conclude that, for instance, it is just to require Sikhs
to conform to the Mountie uniform policy, same as everyone else. Rather than
insist that he has a political theory that gives all the right answers to specific
questions, it is Rorty’s faith that liberally virtuous citizens, situated in rea-
sonably liberal democratic institutions, will, over the long haul, likely create a
progressively just society. Theorists, like Fraser and Bernstein, who believe that
their theories are crucial to achieving justice presume far too much, offering
vague rhetorical challenges that tend to distract us from the task of making
liberal progress.

Conservatives and Rorty

Political theorists from both the Left and Right understand their vocation to
be one of constructing arguments for how our politics should go and how,
consequently, our social world should look. Typically, they invoke things such
as human nature, rationality, the nature of democracy, the nature of rights and
equality, the nature of communication, and so forth to justify their positions. It
is thus not surprising that they are roundly frustrated with Rorty when he tells
them that the essentialist premises on which they base their positions should be
jettisoned as tending toward authoritarianism. His recommendation to focus on
cultivating liberally virtuous citizens in our extant democracies mostly evades
specifying, and certainly does not guarantee, the various social and political
features that theorists insist a just society must possess. The Left and Right thus
dovetail in their assessment that Rorty does not give them enough, that he fails
to be serious as a political thinker (as if his clarion call to bolster the pragmatic
liberal virtues and change our understanding of knowledge and authority is
not challenge enough!).
The radical Left, with its postmodern suspicion of metaphysics and grand
narratives, places itself in a bind, however, because it purports to agree with
Rorty that essentialist conceptions of things like human nature are authoritar-
ian. How does one escape recommending one more exercise of Foucauldian
power if one offers a positive vision of politics? Foucault appeared to concede
that one cannot, but that response seems to land us in the lap of relativism
156 Defending Rorty

(unless we can determine that some manifestations of Foucauldian power are

better than others). In any case, this bind tends to incapacitate radical theorists
from offering anything very concrete, which leaves them hinting cryptically at
vague promises of liberation. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are more
likely to articulate substantive political and ethical ideals based on the mostly
familiar traditional beliefs and practices to which they are partial.
Christian realist political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain’s critique of Rorty’s
liberalism, for example, is saturated with the conventional wisdom of the Amer-
ican intellectual Right. Indeed, Elshtain’s reflective commonsense view about
reality, ethics, and politics plays a strong ontological role in her thought, which
makes her project similar in certain ways to Charles Taylor’s (as we will see
in the next chapter), who happens to be an important influence on her. Her
allegiance to common sense leaves her incredulous before Rorty’s Nietzschean
liberalism, unable to take it seriously as an ethical option. She is acutely aware,
however, that because she lives in an unraveling civilization that is losing its
grasp on important elements of traditional common sense, her fellow citizens
might be tempted by Rorty’s dystopian fantasies. Contra Rorty, what modern
people need is not a heightened sense of the contingency of our values, which
will issue in nihilism and further cultural decline, but rather a better ground-
ing in the reality of our values and the claims they make upon us. We need a
strengthened appreciation of our indebtedness to the past, our obligations to
future generations, and, ultimately, of our dependence on the divine, which sets
limits on the human condition and its possibilities that are reasonably identi-
fiable; we ignore these limits only at our profound peril.94 Compared to this
traditional view of Man’s place in the cosmos, Rorty’s hope for liberal utopia is
weak tea, and perhaps even a poisonous draught. While Elshtain sympathizes
with Rorty’s denunciations of cruelty – what moral person isn’t against cru-
elty? – she queries, “But how robust is his stance? With the don’t-be-cruel rule
in mind, he poses alternatives that, I fear, make us dumber than we may have
any right to be at this late stage.”95
Elshtain wields her self-assured common sense like a cudgel against Rorty,
filling several pages with anecdotes that illustrate its obvious, grounded certi-
tude. Among them she includes descriptions of religiously motivated Holocaust
rescuers and a tale of Nazi atrocity from Camus to demonstrate how Rorty’s
ironic liberalism risks enervating our moral instincts. The anecdote that is per-
haps most revealing of Elshtain’s reaction to Rorty, however, takes the form
of a rather homely obiter dicta recounting a cab ride she once took:

I thought of Rorty’s “all is metaphor” during a van ride a few years back in a driving rain
down Route 91 headed from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Bradley Airport in Windsor

94 These views are powerfully developed in Elshtain’s last major work, based on her Gifford
Lectures: Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
95 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyan Liberalism,” in RR, 151.
Critics 157

Locks, Connecticut. My pony-tailed, perpetually grinning van driver decided to strike

up a postmetaphysical conversation. “For me, life is one big metaphor,” he said. And
then he spelled out his general philosophy of life. It was a brief story. My only concern
was whether or not the rain-slick pavement, with low visibility, and the presence of
other vehicles were to be construed metaphorically as well. I thought this might be the
case because he insisted on turning to me – seated opposite him in the passenger seat up
front – as he celebrated the basic unreality of existence.96

See what happens when irresponsible views like Rorty’s get promulgated?
Rorty’s ironist intellectual, in her superficial and naı̈ve belief that she can ignore
or overcome certain permanent Facts about the human condition, fails to real-
istically “confront the thicker reality of lived life, the densities and intractabil-
ities of a world I did not create and do not control.”97 Irony cannot change
the moral and empirical Facts, and as amiable as Elshtain’s hippie cabbie may
have seemed, if he tries to live by his “philosophy,” he and intransigent reality
are on a collision course that will inevitably end badly for him and others.
Elshtain goes on to express her relief upon her arrival back to her hometown
of Nashville, Tennessee, “where cabbies are unlikely to describe life as one big
metaphor as they drive you home.” Score one for common sense.
Like others, Elshtain also suggests Rorty’s liberalism is elitist because of its
valorization of the ironist intellectual; she concurs with George Will’s assess-
ment that Rorty “seems to despise most Americans,” unironic rubes that they
are.98 Yet we might ask who is actually being condescending toward nonin-
tellectuals when Elsthain, challenging Rorty’s insistence that the civic virtue
of irony is ideally universal in liberal society, quips, “Somehow I don’t think
historicist nominalism is going to fly with Joe Six-Pack.”99 Rorty, like Dewey,
has more faith in the intellectual capacities of the common man. Indeed, Rorty
expresses his anti-elitism by agreeing with Philip Rieff that “Freud democra-
tized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.”100 There is no reason
to think that most citizens are somehow incapable of being educated to pos-
sess the civic virtue of irony. He points out that, after all, atheism used to be
“the exclusive property of intellectuals,” and so, we might add, was literacy.101
Thus, Elsthain misses the point when she notes that most Americans are reli-
gious believers who reject historicism and nominalism. She knows that Rorty is
well aware of this fact; he never suggests that achieving his fragile liberal utopia
will not be an uphill battle. Nevertheless, the goal is to educate Elshtain’s Joe
Six-Packs to be liberally virtuous citizens in order to improve our politics and
culture.

96 Elsthain, “Don’t Be Cruel,” 142.

97 Ibid., 145.
98 George F. Will, “Still Waiting For Lefty,” Newsweek 121 (May 25, 1998), 86.
99 Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel,” 142.
100 Philip Rieff, The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 36, quoted in
EHO, 149.
101 CIS, 87.
158 Defending Rorty

Elshtain’s real beef with Rorty is, of course, not over whether citizens have
the capacity for his pragmatic liberal virtues, but whether they should develop
these traits. Like so many others, she is deeply disturbed by Rorty’s claims
about the power of ironic redescription, which she believes are a recipe for
moral confusion and disarray.102 This follows naturally from her belief in
moral absolutes. She thus challenges Rorty with Camus’s horrifying World
War II account of a German officer who sadistically makes an old Greek
mother choose one of her three sons to be spared execution. Elshtain simply
cannot imagine this scenario being redescribed as anything but evil. Rorty,
however, takes up the challenge: suppose the officer was a true Nazi fanatic
and later proudly related the story to his fellow fanatics as proof of the purity
of his commitment. They congratulate him and hope that they, too, would
have the strength of spirit to carry out such a feat, and avoid succumbing to
any weak sentimentalism in the face of a wailing parent. Rorty writes that this
redescription is, of course, all the more abhorrent to Elshtain and him, but the
point is the contingency of what any community calls good or evil.103 This is
unsettling, to say the least, as life without metaphysical comfort will be. But
Rorty’s hope is that recognition of such contingency, cultivated in a liberal
context, will make us less likely to be fanatical. As he puts it,
The price we paid for this gradual decosmologization, for playing down the claim that
the very structure of the universe (or of the human soul) is our ally, has been (just as
Nietzsche is always complaining) a loss in robustness. The gains include a decrease in
fanaticism – in willingness to go out and save Christian civilization by killing lots of
non-Christians, or borderline Christians. Unquestionably, however, this shift has meant
that it has become harder and harder to answer the obstreperous child who asks “Why
should I be good, if nothing bad is ever going to happen to me if I am not?”104

Elshtain attempts to demonstrate that Rorty’s position fails on its own terms
by attacking his use of Freud as the harbinger of the thoroughly contingent self
with its thoroughly contingent moral sense. She argues, contrary to Rorty, that
Freud did indeed recognize commonsense limits to human nature, which is why
he agreed with Plato that doing evil is psychologically unhealthy for us: one
cannot be, for example, a happy or well-integrated torturer.105 At the very least,
this suggests that we do have the beginnings of an answer to Rorty’s skeptical,
obstreperous child, which can then be rationally expanded into something like
Elshtain’s religious, teleological view of human existence: Is it just coincidence
that doing evil makes us miserable and insane, or is there a design at work? If
the latter, then mustn’t there be a Designer? And so on.

102 Elsthain, “Don’t Be Cruel,” 147.

103 Richard Rorty, “Robustness: A Reply to Jean Bethke Elshtain,” in The Politics of Irony:
Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992), 219–20.
104 Ibid., 222.
105 Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel,” 150.
Critics 159

In response, Rorty hastens to agree with Elsthain and Freud that “we have
a biology, a morphology, and a neurophysiology ‘definatory of the human.”’
But these general “facts of human nature” do not tell us what we should do
with ourselves, what the Good Life is. “History suggests that human neuro-
physiology is as compatible with different (often antithetical) consciences as the
structure of a random access memory is with different programs.”106 It might
be psychologically difficult for a successfully socialized person to do “evil,” but
what constitutes “evil” for a person is very much a matter of what the com-
munity that socialized her says it is, and different communities obviously have
disagreements about this. In light of human history, Rorty cannot bring himself
to buy the Platonic argument that is so convincing to Elshtain’s common sense:
I suspect that the souls of the Aztec priests painstakingly gouging out their prisoners’
hearts and, for that matter, those of the Catholic bureaucrats whose mission civilatrice
made the Congo so profitable to King Leopold, and of the Unitarian captains of the
slave ships, were as harmonious as most. I suspect that all it takes to let you feel at
peace with yourself is the thought that those whom you were raised to respect would
approve of what you are doing.107

Bernard Williams makes a related observation, memorably describing “the

figure, rarer than Callicles supposed, but real, who is horrible enough and
not miserable at all but, by any ethological standard of the bright eye and
the gleaming coat, dangerously flourishing.”108 For Rorty, Orwell creates the
unsurpassed archetype of this terrifying figure in Ninenteen Eighty-Four: the
unforgettable Inner Party member, O’Brien.
Here I will add some more horrific anecdote in support of Rorty’s view,
taken from Jean Hatzfeld’s chilling interviews with Hutu perpetrators of the
Rwandan genocide:
We overflowed with life for this new job. We were not afraid of wearing ourselves out
running around in the swamps. And if we turned lucky at work, we became happy. We
abandoned the crops, the hoes, and the like. We talked no more among ourselves about
farming. Worries let go of us.109

The “new job” referred to by this interviewee, of course, is the hunting down
and butchering of fellow human beings who happened to be Tutsi. Another
interviewee reflects:
The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked
about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it. And the more we told
ourselves, deep inside, that since we knew how to do it, we really should do it down to

106 Rorty, “Robustness,” 221.

107 Ibid., 220.
108 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 47.
109 Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, trans. Linda Coverdale (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 61.
160 Defending Rorty

the very last one. This final viewpoint seemed natural amid the uproar and the shouting,
but it went without saying.110

A third adds: “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on.”111
We want to believe that something deep inside of us will necessarily revolt
against our commission of evil acts (“evil” from the liberal perspective), but
this unfortunately does not seem to be the case. Elshtain embraces Vaclav
Havel’s ethical view, which she interprets as insisting that “there is an absolute
horizon of being; that the world is possible only because we are grounded; that
there is such a thing as ‘metaphysical offence,’ an assault on the mystery of the
absolute.”112 She further cites Hannah Arendt to argue that there is a “human
condition” that dictates the “horizon of thought and action that makes possible
freedom and responsibility.”113 This is in stark contrast to Rorty’s view that
our sense of the moral is contingent on the moral norms of the community
that has our normative allegiance, and that those moral norms are contingent
on the history of the community. This does not mean, of course, that we
cannot criticize our community’s norms. It just means that the criteria we use
to criticize them come from our own historical tradition, or perhaps from
another community’s tradition, but not from some noncontingent, universal
touchstone – for example, the “human condition” – that is not a product of
history.
Rorty unnecessarily takes the bait and admits that his ethics is not as
“robust” as Elsthain’s. He makes this rhetorical concession because he follows
Elshtain in accepting that a “robust” worldview must include metaphysical
necessities; since he rejects the latter, he says he can do without “robustness.”
And yet I hope it is clear that Rorty’s vision of liberal utopia is robust in
the sense that it is a substantive worldview that prescribes a distinctive sort
of community and way of life. Describing Rorty as a virtue liberal clarifies
this robustness: the liberally virtuous person is an ethically robust product of
arduous liberal education and socialization. Rorty juxtaposes his version of
moral education to Elshtain’s. His includes teaching stories that show how
good things can be if people are more generous, tolerant, and sensitive, and
also stories about “the pain endured by people who seem quite strange to us,
the humiliation and agony they suffer when we treat them as badly as we are
often tempted to treat them.”114 Elshtain’s version, of course, includes teach-
ing traditional religion, involving stories of sin and redemption in the eyes of a
loving, omnipotent Creator. While Elsthain is right that many people, like the
Holocaust rescuers she discusses, have been motivated by such stories to do
heroic things, many have also been motivated by them to do horrible things.

110 Ibid., 226.

111 Ibid., 49.
112 Elsthtain, “Don’t Be Cruel,” 155.
113 Ibid.
114 Rorty, “Robustness,” 222.
Critics 161

Trying to tally up the balance is pointless. The question, as Rorty sees it, is: Is
his stance sufficiently robust to do the job of moral education, and hopefully
do it better than Elsthain’s version? I agree with Rorty that the answer is yes,
but also agree that it is an “experiment”:
Sometimes nothing will help except a hazardous experiment. Elshtain sees more hazards
than promise in the experiment I propose, and she may be right. But we shall never
know until we give a totally decosmologized ethics more of a chance than it has had so
far. It is not the smallest advantage of such an ethics that it helps a child realize that,
had Lady Luck given him or her the wrong parents in the wrong country at the wrong
time, he or she might have been that German officer. Making such ironies vivid is, it
seems to me, important for the inculcation of tolerance and sensitivity.115
The debate between Rorty and Elshtain goes according to script. As James
would say, it is a classic clash of temperaments: the risk-averse Christian con-
servative versus the experimentalist pragmatic liberal. It is Niebuhr vs. Dewey
redux, and it is no surprise that Elshtain deeply admires the influential Christian
realist theologian.
Elshtain cites Arendt in support of absolute, commonsense limits on human
activity, but Arendt also writes that “[w]hat runs counter to common sense
is not the nihilistic principle that ‘everything is permitted,’ which was already
contained in the nineteenth-century utilitarian conception of common sense.
What common sense and ‘normal people’ refuse to believe is that everything is
possible.”116 Arendt paraphrases the latter sentence from one of her preferred
Holocaust authorities, French intellectual and death camp survivor, David
Rousset. He writes in his L’Univers Concentrationnaire: “Normal men don’t
know that everything is possible. Even if evidence forces their minds to admit
it, their muscles will not believe. The concentration camp inmates know.”117
Rorty recognizes that the romantic imagination that is perpetually trying to
think beyond the “possible” can be a dangerous thing. What is at issue between
Elshtain and him is whether we try to manage the risk by liberalizing the
romantic imagination and its context, or try to stifle that imagination in the
name of allegedly necessary, traditional limits on what should be thought.
Which strategy of moral education is more likely to prevent the next Holocaust?
Elshtain, of course, recognizes that even if her preferred version of moral
education were established, it would not completely prevent the existence of
moral monsters like O’Brien and the Nazis. In her ideal political community,
however, she imagines that they will be swimming against a very robust moral
current, one that Rorty’s liberal utopia will not feature. But the fact that she
believes that they are acting not merely against society’s norms but also against

115 Ibid., 223.

116 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Publishers, 1973), 440–41.
117 David Rousset, L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavios, 1946), 181 (my
trans.).
162 Defending Rorty

something deep in human nature gives her a comfort that, Rorty fears, makes
“us dumber than we may have any right to be at this late stage.” (“The concen-
tration camp inmates know.”) Better to face up to the possibility that nothing
but liberal human solidarity can prevent another Holocaust. In Rorty’s words,
To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our inheritance from, and our
conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance. To attempt to
evade this contingency is to hope to become a properly-programmed machine. This was
the hope which Plato thought might be fulfilled at the top of the divided line, when
we passed beyond hypotheses. Christians have hoped it might be attained by becoming
attuned to the voice of God in the heart, and Cartesians that it might be fulfilled by
emptying the mind and seeking the indubitable. Since Kant, philosophers have hoped
that it might be fulfilled by finding the a priori structure of any possible inquiry, or
language, or form of social life. If we give up this hope, we shall lose what Nietzsche
called “metaphysical comfort,” but we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our
identification with our community – our society, our political tradition, our intellectual
heritage – is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped
rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists
tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the
dark, not out hope of getting things right.118

Whether one agrees with this passage that a deeper appreciation of contingency
can actually enhance our sense of human solidarity, or believes it will undermine
solidarity and leave us in a moral abyss, determines whether one will side with
Rorty or Elshtain.

Conclusion: Irony and Liberal Democracy

The criticism that echoes across the political spectrum is the charge that Rorty’s
insistence on an ironist citizenry, if achievable, will produce a cynicism that
will undermine liberal solidarity. If, for the pragmatist, practical consequences
are what matters, Rorty’s project will be a failure because there is no reason
to believe that it will generate the social democratic politics that is his ultimate
goal. As Thomas McCarthy puts it, “One would expect a self-professed prag-
matist to consider carefully the possibility that [replacing metaphysics with
social solidarity] could weaken the glue holding our institutions together and
thus might not be ‘good in the way of belief’ after all.”119 John Horton like-
wise wonders, “Are deep moral and political commitments compatible with
an ironical disposition? . . . Here it seems that being told that we should view
those commitments simply as the result of some mixture of causes (such as
socialization) and choices seems to undermine the claim they have on us.”120
“The real point here,” avers Melvin Rogers, “is that in a world where irony is

118 CP, 166.

119 Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency,” 366.
120 Horton, “Irony and Commitment,” 17, 27.
Critics 163

held up as a source of admiration and imitation, deliberation as the framework

through which the moral foundations of democracy are put in place becomes
impossible.”121 Christopher Duncan goes so far as to suggest that if Rorty were
truly pragmatic, he would quit preaching ironic anti-essentialism and instead
use the traditional rhetoric of American democratic politics, with its mixture of
Enlightenment philosophy and Christianity, because that is what the American
citizenry is committed to. Rorty needs to heed his own pragmatic exhortation:
start arguing from where “we” are. Duncan writes, “The truth is that, in the
right hands, the American political religious tradition has the necessary tools
within it to get to the social ends that Rorty believes are desirable if only he
would be willing to use them.”122
These criticisms, of course, bring us back again to Rorty’s solution of keeping
radical ironism in the private spheres of life, while insisting that our politics be
liberal reformist rather than radical. What these criticisms have in common is
that they fail to distinguish between the fallibilist, civic virtue of irony and the
more active, radical irony of the intellectuals. To reiterate: the civic virtue of
irony, ideally possessed by all citizens, does not “erode the moral resources of
democracy.”123 To the contrary, it is rather the capacity that enables citizens to
navigate the dynamic liberal culture as they seek individual meaning, sometimes
eccentric and sometimes conventional, in their private endeavors, while also
living up to their public duty to treat their fellow citizens as free and equal. The
nonintellectuals who possess this virtue are generally not engaging in radically
novel life experiments, and certainly not ones that issue in wholesale critiques
of liberal democracy. But if this is the case, why does Rorty bother calling the
virtue “irony,” which, as he well knows, suggests radicalism and alienation and
is commonly seen as an enemy of liberalism? Why didn’t he just call the virtue
“fallibilism” or even “democratic humility,” and avoid the confusion?124
The reason, as I suggested in the last chapter, is that Rorty wants to empha-
size the requisite creative aspect of the virtue. Those possessing it are not
merely moderately skeptical or humble about their final vocabularies. Rather,
they have the ability, when the need arises, to abandon tenets of their final
vocabularies and rework those vocabularies to “work better.” Why might they
need to abandon tenets of their final vocabularies? Maybe practices based on
those tenets have come to be seen as unjust by a consensus of the political com-
munity, or maybe other evolving currents of culture simply make holding onto
those tenets more trouble than they are worth. The citizen who has the civic

121 Melvin Rogers, “Rorty’s Straussianism; Or, Irony Against Democracy,” Contemporary Prag-
matism 1, 2 (Dec. 2004), 114.
122 Christopher Duncan, “A Question for Richard Rorty,” Review of Politics 66 (Summer 2004),
410.
123 Rogers, “Rorty’s Straussianism,” 112.
124 See, Mark Button, “A Monkish Kind of Virtue: For and Against Humility,” Political Theory
33 (December 2005).
164 Defending Rorty

virtue of irony can adapt and hopefully more successfully pursue happiness
and the Good Life (whatever that may be for her) in the liberal society.
Those who find irony and commitment antithetical fail to see that Rorty’s
endorsement of irony is more complex and subtle than it appears at first glance.
As we have seen, the possession of irony exists on a continuum. At one end,
we have the nonintellectual liberal citizen who does not have many doubts
about his final vocabulary but still has the ability to change it if he must. On
the other end, we have the alienated (from culture, not liberalism) intellectual
who is actively experimenting in order to create a unique and novel self, and
perhaps shift the paradigm of a particular field of endeavor. The threshold
amount of irony that one must possess to qualify as an intellectual rather
than a nonintellectual is immaterial. Moreover, we might imagine that most
adequately educated people are probably relatively intellectual at least in some
periods of their lives: they experience existentialist doubts about some of their
beliefs and, to some extent, seek answers and edification in books, art, music,
hobbies, philosophical conversation, a new job or a new place of residence, and
so forth. Furthermore, citizens who are educated for the civic virtue of irony
gain the ability to scrutinize liberal values, which they recognize are contingent.
But it does not follow that this must weaken their commitment to liberalism
(even if it unfortunately does for some intellectuals). Indeed, Rorty bets that the
more citizens study history and the humanities and appreciate the contingency
of modern thought, the more likely they will join him in the conclusion that
liberalism is the best thing we have developed yet. Moreover, their increased
ability to critically distance themselves from specific liberal practices will bolster
our reform efforts. Thus, our commitment to liberalism and to making it better
is enhanced, not subverted, by the cultivation of irony. Rorty’s critics from
the Left and Right are wrong: his virtue liberalism is neither complacent nor
irresponsible, but rather pragmatically balances the useful past with a hopeful
future.
4

Rorty versus Taylor

Ontology, Pluralism, and Authoritarianism

People go on feeling a sense of unease at the world of [religious] unbelief: some

sense that that something big, something important has been left out, some level
of profound desire has been ignored, some greater reality outside of us has been
closed off.1
– Charles Taylor
It is certainly not enough for my side to appeal to Darwin and ask our opponents
how they can avoid an appeal to the supernatural. That way of stating the issue
begs too many questions. It is certainly not enough for my opponents to say that
a biologistic view strips human beings of their dignity and their self-respect. That
too begs most of the questions. I suspect that all either side can do is to restate
its case over and over again, in context after context. The controversy between
those who see both our species and our society as a lucky accident, and those
who find an immanent teleology in both, is too radical to permit of being judged
from some neutral standpoint.2
– Richard Rorty

Despite the stark philosophical contrast presented by these epigraphs, parsing

the disagreements between Rorty and Taylor is a delicate business. Even they
seem somewhat uncertain about what exactly divides them. Taylor writes, “It
seems so hard to get a final, clear fix on just what is at stake between us.
There are passages [in Rorty’s work] where I find myself nodding along in
agreement, but then suddenly the text veers off on to a terrain where I cannot

1 Charles Taylor, “What Is Pragmatism?” in Pragmatism, Critique, and Judgment, ed. Seyla
Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 89.
2 PSH, xxxii.

165
166 Defending Rorty

follow.”3 Rorty, for his part, cannot understand why Taylor, who is “as fervent
an anti-Cartesian” as he is, insists on a dualistic, metaphysical realism in both
science and ethics.4 In Rorty’s view, this unavoidably commits Taylor to the
Cartesian (and anti-pragmatic) distinction between “for us” and “intrinsically
in-itself,” which produces the modern philosophical skepticism that they both
want to escape. Since their respective intellectual projects resonate in so many
ways, and yet they both nevertheless detect serious differences between them,
Rorty and Taylor approach each other warily, as if each were encountering a
doppelgänger.
Rorty, with typical flamboyance, suggests that the philosophical disagree-
ment between them is really over how to read poetry! Rorty thinks poetry
should “be seen as ‘a means of arranging the order of our internal lives by
making an harmonious pattern of extremely complex attitudes, once thought
to refer to an external order of metaphysics but now seen to be a symbolic
ordering of our inner selves.’”5 Taylor, by contrast, resists this metaphysical
deflation, maintaining that modern poetry at its best is an “interweaving of the
subjective and the transcendent.”6 Taylor writes, “We know that the poet, if
he is serious, is pointing to something – God, the tradition – which he believes
to be there for all of us.”7 Upon recovering from the shock of seeing two
analytic philosophers professionally referring to poetry, we can glean that this
difference does indeed suggest a deep, existential rift. Unfortunately, Rorty
and Taylor never had this intriguing literary debate (at least not in print). We
must instead content ourselves with their provocative philosophical debate,
which illuminates some of the most profound issues of modern philosophy and
politics.
One way to conceive of the ultimate issue between them is to see it as a dis-
pute over whether we need transcendent sources of normativity to adequately
explain and motivate ethical life. “Transcendent source” here means “some-
thing which is not made or decided by human beings, and which shows a certain
way of being good and admirable.”8 Taylor calls such sources “constitutive
goods,” which are “features of some reality – it can be God, or the universe,
or human nature – which make sense of the goodness of the goals and norms

3 Charles Taylor, “Reply and Re-Articulation,” in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Phi-
losophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed. James Tully and Daniel M. Weinstock (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 219.
4 TP, 94.
5 Ibid., 84, quoting Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1963), 17, which is quoted in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 490–91.
6 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 493.
7 Ibid., 492.
8 Charles Taylor, “Reply to Commentators,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54
(March 1994), 212.
Rorty versus Taylor 167

we adopt, and the better understanding of which may inspire us to encompass

these goals, or fulfill these norms, more fully and heartily.”9
Presented in this fashion, their disagreement may appear to be a bona fide
philosophers’ (or even theologians’) debate in the pejorative sense: abstract and
utterly removed from the more practical concerns of politics and modern life.
Both thinkers, however, insist that their difference has crucial implications for
how we approach a problem at the heart of contemporary liberal politics: how
to understand and cope with ethical pluralism. Indeed, each accuses the other
of failing to adequately understand the sources of our values and, therefore, the
nature of normative authority: that which demands and constrains our moral
and epistemic judgments. Only a proper understanding of normative authority
will enable liberals to grapple successfully with the political challenge of deter-
mining what liberal toleration requires in the face of diverse and competing
ways of life.
Taylor answers the question of whether we need transcendent sources of
value affirmatively. He argues that the “best account” of our experience of
normativity involves something that is, as he puts it, “beyond life”; normativ-
ity cannot be merely contingent on human beliefs and desires.10 Indeed, Taylor
suggests that the “most illusion-free moral sources . . . seem to me to involve
a God,” although he generally shies away from making straightforward argu-
ments for the necessity of theism or Christianity for authentic ethical life.11 He
maintains that recognition of a transcendent authority makes us more likely
to appreciate our own finitude and consequently open ourselves to the reality
and depth of the Otherness and Difference presented by ethical pluralism. He
worries that pragmatic secular humanism, like Rorty’s, exhibits a dangerous
tendency to flatten deep pluralism by characterizing all cultural diversity as
the (merely) contingent product of historical vicissitudes. This flattening pro-
duces a temptation to ethnocentrism: Why care about the traditions of other
cultures if they are merely random accidents of history that refer to nothing
beyond themselves? In recent work, Taylor labels this secular view “exclusive
humanism,” because it excludes any role for the transcendent.12 He argues
that the philosophical naturalism and anthropocentrism inherent in Rorty’s
exclusive humanism leaves it ontologically myopic: it fails to make sense of
both our moral experience and of the rational progress of morality and mod-
ern science, both of which must refer to a determinate reality beyond our
practices of justification. Taylor therefore concludes that Rorty’s pragmatism,

9 Ibid., 211–12.
10 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 683. See
also, Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?, ed. J.L. Heft (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 20.
11 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 342.
12 Taylor, A Secular Age, 84–99, 228–69, 624–57; Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?, 19–36.
168 Defending Rorty

which expressly embraces a post-metaphysical “liberal ethnocentrism,” does

not provide a plausible account of ethics or an attractive politics for dealing
with pluralism.
Rorty, on the other hand, is wary of what he sees as Taylor’s essentialism,
which stems from Taylor’s commitment to a realist ontology. Rorty’s problem
with essentialism, we know, is that it is authoritarian, insisting that there is
only one correct way to describe the world. It thereby commits Rorty’s worst
secular sin: it exhibits a lack of imagination concerning human freedom and
possibility. Indeed, Rorty believes that “[o]ntology remains popular because
we are still reluctant to yield to the Romantic’s argument that the imagination
sets the bounds of thought.”13 Rorty’s pragmatism seeks to rid liberal society
of any conception of a transcendent authority that demands our moral and
epistemic obedience. For Rorty, the only public authority we should recognize
is the evolving, practical consensus that emerges through ongoing democratic
deliberation. Taylor’s essentialism, which grounds a correspondence theory of
truth, invites (like Cartesianism) both claims of (1) epistemological certainty
and moral rigidity, which threaten the toleration of pluralism and cultural
innovation, as well as (2) an unpragmatic, skeptical despair about whether
one’s concepts fail to correspond to “the true essence of reality.” Liberal society
would do better to avoid these problems by embracing Rorty’s anti-essentialist
pragmatism.
I argue here that Rorty gets the best of their fascinating exchanges. Rorty’s
project is more consistent and fully articulated than Taylor’s, and ultimately
offers a more attractive understanding of liberal ethics and politics. Rorty’s con-
ception of a pragmatic virtue liberalism that eschews essentialist philosophical
foundations is more hospitable to the evolving, flexible freedom and toleration
to which liberals aspire, and is therefore better suited to late modern intellec-
tual sensibilities. He insists that liberals adopt the fallibilistic, yet still morally
serious, position of Schumpeter’s “civilized man,” who acknowledges the rel-
ative validity of his convictions and yet stands for them unflinchingly, absent
good reasons to change them.14 If this position has a whiff of paradox about
it, it also strikes the elusive but required virtuous balance of open-mindedness
and moral fortitude in the face of ethical pluralism.
Although Taylor might respond to the charge of inconsistency with Emer-
son’s famous quip, the charge of inarticulacy stings because of the importance of
articulation to Taylor’s project. Taylor’s work equivocates at key points, which
tellingly leads his interpreters to fall into two opposing camps: those who under-
stand him as a “strong ontologist,” and those who understand him as a “weak
ontologist.” The former camp, which includes Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Skin-
ner, Michael Rosen, and Paul Saurette, take Taylor to be claiming to identify

13 PCP, 106.
14 CIS, 46.
Rorty versus Taylor 169

inescapable, metaphysical (and perhaps theistic) foundations for ethics.15 The

latter camp, which includes Ruth Abbey, Stephen K. White, and Nicholas H.
Smith, presents a more historicist, postmodern Taylor whose articulation of our
moral sources is tentative and thoroughly fallibilistic.16 As Saurette observes,
“Taylor’s thinking gives sustenance to both interpretations.”17 Indeed, Mark
Oppenheimer accuses Taylor of habitually appearing to promise more than he
philosophically delivers, which leads to the confusion.18
If Taylor is more plausibly interpreted as a weak ontologist, then perhaps
the gap between Rorty and him is not so wide (and this in spite of Taylor’s
insistence that there is indeed a chasm). Ruth Abbey, from the weak ontologist
camp, for instance, maintains that Taylor is best read as a “falsifiable realist”:
sources of value do exist independently of our beliefs and desires, but what they
are remains perpetually up for debate and further discovery.19 If we emphasize
the modifier, “falsifiable,” we might infer that Taylor’s position is not much
different in practice than Rorty’s ironic fallibilism. It is further significant that
although Taylor hesitates to adopt the label of “pragmatist,” others, including
Robert Brandom and Alan Ryan, confidently apply it to Taylor’s work.20
Nevertheless, one can appreciate Rorty’s frustration with Taylor’s mixing of
holistic, pragmatic sentiments, which Rorty can endorse, with language of
essentialism and transcendence that he wants to avoid. If Rorty is right to
suggest that liberal culture would best be served by embracing its historical
contingency and eschewing claims for transcendent authorities, then Taylor’s
waffling is certainly problematic. Indeed, Taylor’s equivocations lead those who
deem him to be a strong ontologist to question whether his position is actually

15 See: Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. Tully and Wein-
stock, 1–3; Quentin Skinner, “Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections,”
in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. Tully and Weinstock, 37–48; Paul Saurette, The
Kantian Imperative: Humiliation, Common Sense, Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2005).
16 Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Nicholas White,
Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Stephen K.
White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 42–74.
17 Saurette, The Kantian Imperative, 98. Arto Laitinen likewise notes the divide among Taylor
interpreters: “Some interpreters have taken Taylor for a full-fledged historicist, while oth-
ers have stressed the role of human constants and transcendental arguments in his work”
(“‘Today and Tomorrow,’ Review of Charles Taylor, by Ruth Abbey,” Radical Philosophy
108 [July/August 2001], 53).
18 Mark Oppenheimer, “Sentimentality or Honesty?” The Nation 293 (August 10, 2011), 33.
19 Abbey, Charles Taylor (2000), 27–31.
20 Robert Brandom, “Reply to Charles Taylor’s ‘Language Not Mysterious?’,” in Reading Bran-
dom: On Making It Explicit, ed. Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer (New York: Routledge,
2010), 301; Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 1995), 361. Indulging in a little ad hominem, one senses that perhaps Taylor’s neglect of
(disdain for?) pragmatism might have ultimate roots in his deep Canadian ambivalence about
what he refers to as “that great republic to the south.”
170 Defending Rorty

hostile to ethical pluralism.21 This is ironic because Taylor’s sympathizers, in

contrast, hold him to be a political theorist uniquely respectful of pluralism and
a seminal thinker about its challenges.22 The present interpretation of Taylor
self-consciously emphasizes the themes in Taylor’s work that clash with Rorty’s
views.
What is particularly fascinating about looking at Taylor’s work in this way
is that it illuminates two inclinations to essentialism that are actually in tension
with one another (and neither of which Rorty can abide): (1) Taylor’s attempt
to educe a universalist ontology of human agency based on the phenomenolo-
gies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; and (2) his particularist discussions of
cultural and ethical pluralism, which draw especially on the work of Herder,
and which Taylor couches in the nonironic, essentialist language of “authen-
ticity.” Taylor’s work thus presents an important challenge to Rorty because it
rejects contingency from two different but traditional angles. The first bolsters
Taylor’s embrace of both scientific and moral realism: there are universal sci-
entific and moral truths independent of human belief and desire that we must
recognize if we are to properly comprehend our world. The second suggests
that, in spite of the contingency that Taylor agrees is inevitable in the historical
development of plural cultures, one’s identity is essentially constituted by one’s
own culture in ways that cannot be subjected to individualistic ironic play
without doing damage to this identity in ways that threaten one’s ability to be
a functional human agent. Another way to put this is that irony threatens to
destroy authenticity, which results in a breakdown of moral identity. In Taylor’s
view, we cannot be ironic about the transcendent sources of normativity that
ultimately motivate the moral orientation and practices that lie at the heart of
the particular way of life that is constitutive of our identity. It is this thread in
Taylor’s thought that earned him a label that he himself never fully accepted:
the communitarian critic of liberalism.
Taylor’s suspicions about Rorty’s liberalism are thus reminiscent of Elsh-
tain’s: the pragmatic liberal citizen who embraces irony and contingency
is inevitably ethically shallow, fickle, and lost. This shallowness results in

21 See, e.g., Joel Anderson, “The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators: Identity, Pluralism, and
Ontology in Charles Taylor’s Value Theory,” Constellations 3, 1 (1996), 17–18; William E.
Connolly, “Catholicism and Philosophy: A Nontheistic Appreciation,” in Charles Taylor, ed.
Ruth Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166–86; Andrew Lamey, “Fran-
cophonia forever: the contradictions in Charles Taylor’s ‘Politics of Recognition,’” Times Lit-
erary Supplement (July 23, 1999), 14; Steven C. Rockefeller, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism:
Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 87–98; William M. Curtis, “Liberals and Pluralists: Charles Taylor vs. John Gray,”
Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007), 86–107; Ian Fraser, “Charles Taylor’s Catholicism,”
Contemporary Political Theory 4, 3 (2005), 231–52; Daniel M. Weinstock, “The Political
Theory of Strong Evaluation,” in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. Tully and Weinstock,
191–93.
22 Taylor’s most influential discussion of pluralism and liberalism is his essay, “The Politics of
Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, 25–73.
Rorty versus Taylor 171

meaninglessness and anomie and thwarts the teleological development of our

authentic nature. It is socially dangerous: Rorty’s shallow ironist citizens, lack-
ing in genuine moral anchors, are more likely to commit moral offenses. Yet
from Rorty’s point of view, Taylor’s insinuation that our inherited communal
identities must be respected in our thinking about ethics constitutes a con-
servative a failure of imagination. Despite all of his philosophical creativity
and originality, Taylor’s essentialist thinking leads him to underestimate and
unjustifiably reduce the range of human possibility. Moreover, this limitation
is problematic for Taylor’s own attempt to ethically engage with pluralism.
In the next section of this chapter, I canvass some of the striking similarities
between Rorty’s and Taylor’s respective bodies of work, showing why they are
two of the most indispensible contemporary philosophers and setting the stage
for discussion of their important disagreements. While both thinkers famously
attack the Cartesian epistemological tradition, they do so with different ethical
intents, which are connected to differences in their respective approaches to
liberalism and pluralism. The third section summarizes the broader lines of
Taylor’s work, distinguishing it from Rorty’s. The fourth section discusses
Taylor’s criticisms of Rorty in several writings over the course of twenty-
five years, and the fifth section shows why these criticisms miss their mark
because Taylor misunderstands Rorty. In the sixth section of this chapter, I
suggest that underlying their ongoing debate about modern epistemology is
the deeper, implicit disagreement over whether pragmatic secular humanism
provides the best approach to liberal modernity, or if realist, transcendent
sources are necessary to sustain modern moral life.
The seventh section provides the Rortyan response to Taylor, examining
how Taylor’s conception of ontology leads to the unfortunate failure of imag-
ination that hinders his philosophy’s ability to deal with ethical pluralism.
Despite his paeans to the importance of pluralism to the human experience,
Taylor embraces three essentialist ideas that subvert his commitment to plural-
ism: Hegelian supersession, Heideggerian philosophy of language, and cultural
essentialism. I conclude that Rorty’s pragmatic approach is more realistic about
Difference and is more subtly tolerant of it, and is therefore more useful to lib-
erals as we struggle with the ethical and political challenges of pluralism.

Separated at Birth, or By Existential Anxieties?

Juxtaposing the respective intellectual projects of Rorty and Taylor is as chal-
lenging as it is enlightening, because their profound dissensions are housed
in philosophical efforts that share broad similarities. The two thinkers are
both notable for producing works, rare in contemporary academic philosophy,
that are based on wide humanistic learning and are striking in their world-
historical ambitions. Eschewing the narrow specialization that is endemic to
the contemporary academy, Rorty’s and Taylor’s respective writings span the
philosophical gamut, ranging from analytical epistemology and philosophy of
172 Defending Rorty

mind and language, to the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history,
to social and political theory. As disciples of Hegel, they are both committed
to an historical understanding of philosophy and culture, and thus prefer and
produce narrative Geistgeschichten that explore the historical roots of our cur-
rent philosophical predicament. In ways that are reminiscent of psychoanalysis,
they both attempt to diagnose and cure our philosophical, moral, and political
maladies by recovering the historical origins of the conceptual frameworks in
which these maladies arise.
Like Rorty, Taylor is just as comfortable with twentieth-century Continental
philosophy as he is with Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Both philoso-
phers draw freely and heavily on Continental figures like Hegel, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Gadamer, as well as on the crossover figure of Wittgenstein.
Like many of their Continental inspirations, Rorty and Taylor also share the
penchant of veering into perspicuous ruminations on art, poetry, and literature
in their philosophical writings. Indeed, their flirtations with Continental phi-
losophy and literature highlight a shared Romantic streak that is déplacé in the
hard-nosed, science-inspired discipline of analytic philosophy.
In addition to these general features, their respective bodies of work also
share many of the same themes, including a deep commitment to humanism,
which emerges in their attempts to grapple with the core modern intellec-
tual conundrum, presented so starkly by Kant: How can we reconcile modern
science’s value-free, non-teleological understanding of the universe with the
normativity of human ethical life? These efforts produce similar critiques of
the Cartesian tradition of epistemology – which Rorty and Taylor jointly des-
ignate “representationalism” – that they believe still plagues much of analytic
philosophy. They also similarly attack scientific positivism (or scientism) –
the view that only natural science delivers genuine truths – as problematically
reductionist, and worry that the modern fetish with the “scientific method”
weakens our commitment to the humanities and thus leads to impoverished
thinking about moral life.
In political philosophy, they both challenge neo-Kantian, proceduralist theo-
ries of liberalism for treating human beings as atomistic, rights-bearing agents
and erroneously neglecting the fact that individuality is a social product of
communal life. They both hold, in Taylor’s felicitous phrase, that “the self is
dialogical,” formed through learning a value-laden language in conversation
with others.23 In this vein, Rorty famously claims Dewey’s liberal communitari-
anism as his inspiration. Although Taylor’s work regrettably evinces no interest
in Dewey, Alan Ryan insists that Taylor is “a Deweyan without knowing it”:
Taylor and Dewey share important intellectual roots in Hegel as well as the
philosophical project of articulating the communal and historical sources of

23 Charles Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture,
ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 304–14; Rorty, “In a flattened world,” 3; ORT, 178–79.
Rorty versus Taylor 173

the modern self.24 Indeed, both Taylor and Rorty are pragmatists in that they
understand human agents to be in the first instance, as Taylor puts it, “embod-
ied” actors in the world, who have action-oriented cares and concerns that are
prior to our attempts to theorize knowledge. Our theories of epistemological
authority are thus, in an important sense, secondary to and dependent on what
we value and what we are trying to do. Like Dewey and James, Taylor and
Rorty scrutinize epistemological theory with an eye for ethical and political
motivations and consequences.
When it comes to politics, moreover, again we find broad agreement. While
they would no doubt disagree about specific policies, both Taylor and Rorty
identify with progressive, social democratic politics. In contrast to the neo-
Kantian liberal theories they criticize, they are also both concerned with issues
of culture, national identity, and patriotism beyond individual rights and dis-
tributive justice. Lastly, and perhaps most curiously, their respective combi-
nations of interests and their unique philosophical approaches have arguably
rendered both thinkers “marginal” to academic philosophy.25 This is in no
small part because analytic philosophy eschews the voluptuous Hegelian nar-
ratives of modernity in which Rorty and Taylor indulge, preferring instead to
stick to more narrowly defined, technical problems.
And yet, despite all these similarities, both thinkers believe that they are at
loggerheads over some very fundamental philosophical issues. The exchanges
that Rorty and Taylor have had over the years mainly focus on narrow epis-
temological puzzles, with each thinker accusing the other of being in thrall to
the error of representationalism. This choice of topic is unfortunate for those
of us who are interested in moral and political philosophy; their exchanges
barely touch on their disagreements in these areas. Nevertheless, because both
thinkers pragmatically link their arguments about epistemology to their nor-
mative concerns, we can derive potential points of contention in moral and
political philosophy from their epistemological debate.
In addition to the narrow scope of their written exchanges, however, the
challenge of comparing their philosophies is exacerbated by the fact that,
despite the myriad themes and important philosophical figures that Rorty and
Taylor take dueling positions on, their explorations of one another’s work
is surprisingly limited. This claim may ring false to those familiar with their
debates: Rorty and Taylor addressed each other in multiple forums over the
course of three decades. Nevertheless, these engagements are always in the

24 Ryan, John Dewey, 361. Ryan also compares the two thinkers in his review of Taylor’s The
Ethics of Authenticity: “Don’t Think For Yourself Unless You Can,” New York Times Book
Review, Sept. 27, 1992. Matthew Festenstein even suggests that Dewey is more properly seen as
a forerunner of Taylor than of Rorty (“Dewey’s Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-political/).
25 Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 5.
174 Defending Rorty

contexts of invited book reviews, symposia, or contributions to edited vol-

umes on the other’s work; Rorty and Taylor otherwise almost never refer to
one another in their respective, voluminous bodies of writing. In other words,
when they are directly advancing their own philosophical visions, they rarely
mention one another (this is more true of Taylor than of Rorty, who mentions
Taylor a few more times; Taylor’s relative neglect of Rorty is curious because
Rorty’s position seemingly presents such a deep and striking challenge to
Taylor). Furthermore, we are both blessed and cursed that their direct engage-
ments have typically been in the form of comment and response. On one hand,
we have these intellectual giants in direct combat, parsing each other’s work
and elucidating what they believe are their philosophical differences. On the
other hand, these exhilarating tête-à-têtes tempt one mightily to join either
thinker in what might be a provocative misunderstanding of his interlocutor.
Indeed, as I argue in in the fifth section of this chapter, Taylor badly misreads
Rorty, which obviates his critique of Rorty’s ideas.

Taylor: Retrieving Authenticity from the Distortions of Naturalism

Like Rorty, Taylor attacks representationalist epistemology because its mundus
absconditus generates skepticism and relativism. His fears concerning represen-
tationalism are not, strictly speaking, the authoritarian reflex that Rorty worries
about, but rather that influential but distortive cultural tropes are bolstered by
it, which alienate us from authentic sources of value. Where Rorty’s pragmatic
conception of knowledge-as-social-practice seeks to render the metaphysical
realism-nonrealism debate moot, Taylor seeks to subvert what he sees as the
artificiality of representationalist theories in order to disclose an “uncompro-
mising realism.”26 On Taylor’s account of the provenance of modern episte-
mology, Descartes’s momentous move was to turn away from the “external”
world on the misguided and faulty premise of radical doubt, and then insist
that knowledge is something the individual mind constructs for itself by log-
ically ordering “internal” representations.27 Descartes’s philosophical ploy is
motivated not only by his quest for apodictic knowledge of the nonteleologi-
cal, Galilean universe but additionally by a Baconian will to power: Descartes’s
method underwrites the new science that enables us to become “masters and
possessors of nature” by manipulating it to our ends, since it no longer has a
telos of its own.28
Cartesian methodological individualism, however, becomes problemati-
cally reflected in modern ethics and politics. Taylor identifies three connected

26 Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Mala-
chowski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 258.
27 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 143–58.
28 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 3rd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1998), 35.
Rorty versus Taylor 175

modern self-conceptions, supported by representationalism, which are at the

roots of our most dire ethico-political shortcomings: (1) the “disengaged”
rational subject, who stands back from and objectifies the natural and social
worlds; this subject is (2) a “punctual self,” who conceives of himself as self-
determining and “free” from those worlds and can thus treat nature and cul-
ture instrumentally, which leads to (3) an atomistic understanding of political
community, which is manifest in modern social contract theories: because indi-
viduals and their goals are seen as prior to community, politics and communal
life become merely a means to those individualistic, pre-social ends.29 These
self-conceptions not only lead to ethical inauthenticity and anomie, political
selfishness, communal strife, and environmental devastation but also spawn
wrongheaded reductionist attempts in social science to apply mechanistic the-
ories to human behavior. These latter theories comprise what Taylor calls
“naturalism”: the idea that reality consists solely of matter in motion and that
human behavior can therefore be reductively analyzed as merely a part of this
mechanistic nature. Taylor has been railing naturalism since the beginning of
his career in the early 1960s because he believes it to be an important underlying
source of the ethical problems just listed.30
Against this social scientific trend, Taylor argues for a sharp, ontological
divide between the natural world, which can be successfully understood as
mechanism, and the human world, which requires interpretive, “hermeneutic”
approaches to understanding human behavior because it is intrinsically tele-
ological.31 Taylor’s goal is thus reminiscent of Kant’s: he wants to limit the
pretensions of natural science in order to preserve our recognition of transcen-
dent sources of normativity. While a disengaged, value-neutral, and “absolute”
lens may be warranted when we attempt to explain the causal regularities of
the nonhuman world, it is insufficient when turned on the value-laden, inten-
tional, non-neutral human world. Human agents cannot avoid acting within
moral frameworks of “strong evaluation,” which entails that we make qual-
itative distinctions between values and goods because we understand some
to be of higher intrinsic worth than others.32 Moreover, we cannot authen-
tically conceive of these evaluative distinctions between higher and lower
as simply matters of subjective desire or taste; the normative ontology that
grounds our value judgments objectively exists for us whether we recognize it
or not. Naturalistic social science, however, because its methods cannot verify
or measure normative ontology, is unable to take strong evaluation seriously;

29 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995),
7; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 43–198.
30 See, Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
31 Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985), 15–57; Charles Taylor, “Understanding in Human Sciences,”
Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 25–38.
32 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 19–20.
176 Defending Rorty

through naturalism’s mechanistic lens, all values become merely subjective

preferences.33
Indeed, for naturalism, the very idea of objective “moral facts” is, as J.L.
Mackie famously puts it, “queer.”34 Naturalism thus alienates us from our
moral experience, which depends on the recognition of such facts, and thereby
confuses and undermines moral motivation. Because it denies the objective
bases of our moral experience, naturalistic social science inevitably produces
false and morally questionable theories of human behavior, like Skinnerean psy-
chological behaviorism and other “wildly reductivist” theories, like that which
attempts to explain Aztec human sacrifice in terms of their need for protein.35
Our linguistic ability renders us “self-interpreting animals”; we constitute our-
selves through linguistic self-interpretation. The human sciences are therefore
irreducibly hermeneutic, and any genuine understanding of human behavior
must take seriously our self-understandings; we cannot start from the “disen-
gaged” viewpoint that we do when we study nonlinguistic phenomena.36 More-
over, the interpretations by which we attempt to understand human behavior
can be taken into account by human agents themselves, thereby changing the
very object of our study. Human behavior is thus essentially a moving target
that cannot be successfully examined through formalized methods with fixed
criteria that aim at establishing general laws of behavior.
The attempt to understand human behavior as mechanistic is not only
doomed to fail as science but also leads to distortive practical self-conceptions.
For instance, if economics attempts to explain our behavior as the result of
a theoretically imputed drive to rationally maximize the satisfaction of our
materialistic preferences, this description may actually start to make us mistak-
enly conceive of ourselves as such maximizers, leading to misguided and even
destructive behavior. Naturalism, because it is so powerful for explaining and
controlling the natural world, unfortunately has an odious effect on ethical life.
Naturalism’s influence in ethics has resulted in action-oriented (as opposed
to goods-oriented), proceduralist views of morality – particularly utilitarianism
and deontological views – that are profoundly inarticulate about the substantive
background goods they must presuppose. Because naturalism cannot square the
idea of the Good with its assumption of a value-neutral reality, proceduralist
moral theories seek to avoid the question of the Good by asking only what
it is right to do rather than what it is good to be or to love. Utilitarianism

33 For a relatively recent discussion by Taylor of these issues, see Charles Taylor, “Ethics and
Ontology,” The Journal of Philosophy 100 (June 2003), 305–20. Hobbes’s Leviathan is, of
course, the locus classicus for this naturalistic, mechanistic view of human existence.
34 J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1991 [1977]),
38–41.
35 Charles Taylor, “Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction,” in Reading McDowell:
On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 118.
36 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 45–76.
Rorty versus Taylor 177

naturalistically reduces moral justification and motivation to brute empirical

considerations of pleasure and pain, thereby flattening our ethical world beyond
recognition, while neglecting the fact that it implicitly relies on certain ethically
loaded conceptions of rationality and benevolence.37 Deontological theories
of rights also tend to be blind to the fact that they assume a background of
strong evaluation: the Right cannot be prior to the Good, because the whole
point of rights is to protect interests and capacities that are inextricably bound
up with what we think is a good human life. Because of this blindness, rights
advocates are prone to push their moral claims without regard for whether
they are, ironically, undermining the very goods that the rights are meant to
protect, and the very background social conditions that the rights presuppose.38
Taylor’s claim with regard to these preeminent modern moral philosophies is
thus that they rely on moral ontologies of the human Good that they attempt
to suppress or deny, resulting in faulty and even self-defeating moral theory.
Taylor’s corrective is to pursue a path he sees opened by the phenomenolog-
ical philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as by Wittgenstein’s
later work.39 These philosophies begin with the premise that a person’s “being-
in-the-world,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, is primordially that of an embodied
actor dealing with relevant features of the world. Because we are purposeful
actors, we find ourselves “thrown into” a world that we experience as having
normativity built into it.40 A value-laden reality is basic to human experience;
Mackie has it exactly wrong: it is not “queer” at all to think that reality
possesses normative features. Indeed, as purposeful embodied actors, we can-
not avoid it. It is rather the naturalist assumption of a value-neutral reality
that is the novel and “queer” perspective for human agents (it is, dare I say,
“unnatural?”). Taylor attacks the reigning metaphor that depicts the naturalist

37 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 31–32.

38 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 187–210. Examples of rights claims being pushed
too far might include the protection of hate speech in the name of free speech rights, and of
deep economic inequalities in the name of property rights. For Taylor, meaningful freedom
and equality for all citizens can only be achieved in a communal environment of trust and civil
respect, which will be eroded if a community permits virulent hate speech or vast inequalities
of wealth. Hence, the blind, rigid protection of rights tends to undermine the very goods that
they are supposed to be furthering.
39 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 1–19.
40 In a reply to Michael Rosen, Taylor insists that this sort of moral realism must be distinguished
from a Platonism, which holds that reality has a normative structure of its own, regardless
of whether agents like us exist. For Taylor, there are no human-independent moral objects in
the way that there are human-independent physical objects. Once we do exist, however, our
experience of the world is normative through and through – that is, the normative structure
inescapably exists for us, and the values that constitute that structure do not depend on our
beliefs and desires (see Charles Taylor, “Comments and Replies,” Inquiry 34, no. 2 [1991],
245–46). For Rorty, of course, this distinction between Platonism and Taylor’s moral realism is
a difference that does not make a difference; the realist idea that there is a necessary normative
structure to human experience that is independent of belief and desire is still authoritarian.
178 Defending Rorty

perspective as bringing into view the hard, “real” reality that exists after we
strip away the vanities of human culture. This perspective, though it delivers
truths about the nonhuman world, must be properly kept to its side of the
ontological divide between the human and nonhuman.
Concepts, language, and theoretical thought, including naturalism, all pre-
suppose and are based on the normative background activity of purposeful
dealing. Indeed, theory is our attempt to make explicit parts of this back-
ground, though we can never explicate it as a complete whole because it forms
the context in which we are able to focus on and theorize about particulars.
Taylor argues that this more authentic understanding of the human epistemo-
logical situation rescues us from the flawed representationalist, “Inside/Outside
(I/O)” accounts of knowledge, because it makes clear that we already have
unmediated, preconceptual access to the world before we begin to concep-
tually understand it – indeed, we must have that access in order to theorize
coherently. In Taylor’s words,

We are able to form conceptual beliefs guided by our surroundings, because we live in
preconceptual engagement with these that involves understanding. Transactions in this
space are not causal processes among neutral elements, but the sensing or response to
relevance. The very idea of an inner zone with an external boundary can’t get started
here, because our living things in a certain relevance can’t be situated “within” the
agent; it is in the interaction itself.41

This phenomenological approach to human experience enables us to “over-

come representationalist epistemology” and avoid its associated ethical distor-
tions. “A proper following through of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments would, if
they were valid, show a wide range of approaches in [the human] sciences to
be mistaken – those which involve applying mechanistic or dualistic categories
to thought or experience, as Merleau-Ponty himself clearly saw.”42 Moreover,
Heidegger’s argument that “Dasein’s way of life is essentially that of a col-
lectivity” puts paid to the atomistic view of the self and instead shows us the
“priority of society as the locus of the individual’s identity.”43 Social contract
theories of liberalism are thus nonstarters because they erroneously assume
that individuals have pre-communal values and that political community is
merely an instrument for pursuing those values. What Taylor’s phenomeno-
logical approach shows, in contrast, is that there are “irreducibly social goods”
that constitute a necessary normative context for individually identified concep-
tions of the Good.44 The myopia that afflicts atomistic theories of liberalism,
which emphasize negative liberty, leads them to neglect communal goods in the
name of individual freedom without recognizing that such goods are necessary

41 Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” in RR, 166–67.

42 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 27.
43 Ibid., 13.
44 Ibid., 127–45.
Rorty versus Taylor 179

for a healthy, meaningful, and effective exercise of that freedom.45 Indeed,

this is why Taylor’s conception of freedom leads to a civic republican, par-
ticipatory democratic politics: since individual freedom depends on communal
goods, only by politically helping identify and promote such goods that support
communal relations and identity can one achieve authentic individual freedom.
Taylor’s masterful historical narratives of Western intellectual develop-
ment are an attempt to retrieve the moral sources that comprise the authen-
tic ontology that grounds the positive features of Western ethical life that
Taylor endorses. These features include the Enlightenment values of equal-
ity and reducing needless human suffering, and also the Romantic ideal
of self-expression. Unfortunately, in Taylor’s view, the sources of these
values have been obscured by the encroachment of naturalism (also pro-
moted by the Enlightenment) upon our understanding of human behavior.
Taylor insists that his normative ontology of human agency is more likely to
be a “best account” of our ethical lives because it explains so much more
of our phenomenological experience than does naturalism.46 Taylor writes,
“We have to fight uphill to rediscover the obvious [which phenomenological
attentiveness shows us], to counteract layers of suppression of modern moral
consciousness.”47
We can see the difference between the historical projects of Rorty and Taylor.
Rorty’s historical narratives are meant to show us the contingency of our cur-
rent final vocabularies, thereby freeing us to try to innovate and change parts
of them if we find them problematic in some way (judged according to other
parts, of course). Moreover, the past can also serve as a repository of ideas or
simply inspiration for new experiments. But Rorty eschews the idea of a nor-
mative ontology that is the necessary source of our values. In his view, positing
such an ontology creates an obstacle to free, ethical experimentation. Taylor’s
search for authenticity, by contrast, is ultimately a stand against the contin-
gency of our values. While he recognizes that historical conceptual change is
deeply shot through with contingency, he insists that members of the Western
moral community all mutually face a similar set of ethical issues by virtue of
their inherited, shared moral language, which is a product of inescapable onto-
logical normativity.48 Taylor hopes to clarify this set of issues through his use
of history, which will better enable us to address them.

Taylor’s Critique of Rorty

Taylor’s critique of Rorty is complex, but there are three primary lines of crit-
icism: (1) Rorty’s attempt to escape representationalism is a failure because he

45 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 211–39.

46 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 58.
47 Ibid., 90.
48 See, e.g., Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” 222–26.
180 Defending Rorty

is a linguistic idealist (although Taylor does not use this term); (2) Rorty’s
Davidsonian rejection of the epistemological scheme-content distinction
deprives us of a concept that is crucial for understanding and ethically relating
to different cultures, religions, and value schemes; and (3) Rorty’s “nonreal-
ism” about truth and rationality cannot make sense of critical judgment or
progress in either science or morality. That is to say, Rorty cannot account for
the “rational supersession” of inferior conceptual schemes by superior ones,
and thus has no rational grounds for his commitments to liberalism and modern
science.
Ultimately, however, the true target of Taylor’s critique is Rorty’s commit-
ment to Taylor’s long-time foe, naturalism, and the sense of contingency that
accompanies it. While Rorty agrees wholeheartedly with Taylor that norma-
tivity is inescapable for purposeful human agents – indeed, this is a main point
of pragmatism – he does not think that the naturalistic perspective is neces-
sarily antagonistic toward normativity. For Rorty, the naturalistic perspective
should be pragmatically deployed within our contingent, normative view of
things whenever it helps us accomplish our goals (goals, of course, that are
compatible with liberalism, and are ideally conceived of by liberally virtuous
agents). Naturalism, for Rorty, is “the claim that (a) there is no occupant of
space-time that is not linked in a single web of causal relations to all other
occupants and (b) that any explanation of the behavior of any such spatiotem-
poral object must consist in placing that object within that single web.”49 In
another formulation that illustrates the connection between naturalism and
contingency, Rorty writes that naturalism is “the view that anything might
have been otherwise, that there can be no conditionless conditions.”50 Because
Taylor does not believe either that our normative beliefs and practices can
be properly understood naturalistically, or that we will be properly motivated
by a “merely” naturalistic ethics based on contingent normative vocabularies,
Taylor repudiates Rorty’s pragmatism.
Despite Rorty’s express denunciations of representationalism and nonreal-
ism, Taylor insists that Rorty is still trapped by the representationalist picture,
which explains his alleged nonrealism about ethics and science. Rorty’s capture
is illustrated by his commitment to the idea that only a belief can justify another
belief. Taylor insists that this is a nonrealist response to the representationalist
dilemma because the “real world” apparently plays no role in the justification
of knowledge: we cannot get outside of language to see if our beliefs corre-
spond to external reality, so instead the best we can do is try to make our
beliefs internally coherent. This Rorty-Davidson picture of knowledge is there-
fore one more version of an I/O theory: our propositional beliefs are “inside”
our heads and have no epistemic relation to the mysterious world “outside.”
Against this construal of knowledge, Taylor argues:

49 TP, 94.
50 EHO, 55.
Rorty versus Taylor 181

Of course, we check our claims against reality. “Johnny, go into the room and tell
me whether the picture is crooked.” Johnny does as he is told. He doesn’t check the
(problematized) belief that the picture is crooked against his own belief. He emerges
from the room with a view of the matter, but checking isn’t comparing the problematized
belief with his view of the matter; checking is forming a belief about the matter, in this
case by going and looking. What is assumed when we give the order is that Johnny
knows, as most of us do, how to form a reliable view of this kind of matter. He knows
how to go and stand at the right distance and in the right orientation, to get what
Merleau-Ponty calls “maximum prise” on the object. What justifies Johnny’s belief is
his knowing how to do this, his being able to deal with objects in this way, which is, of
course, inseparable from the other ways he is able to use them, manipulate, get around
among them, and so on.51

Taylor thus returns us to a robust, commonsensical realism from Rorty’s

alleged flight into linguistic idealism. Rorty makes this mistake because he
is still bewitched by representationalism.
Rorty goes further wrong in his insistence that we drop the scheme-content
distinction. Taylor insists that we cannot avoid using it. “Trivially: yesterday
there were twelve chairs in this room, today there are only ten. The language of
classification is the same; what has changed is the reality described. Less triv-
ially: Aristotle: the sun is a planet; us: the sun is not a planet. What brings this
change about is not reality, but our adopting a different scheme.”52 Moreover,
contra Rorty, the conception of different schemes categorizing the world in dif-
ferent ways is crucial for an accurate and ethical understanding of pluralism.
His rejection of the scheme-content distinction makes ethnocentric misunder-
standing more likely because it blinds us to the possibility that the Other is using
a different scheme than ours. As Taylor illustrates, the ethnocentric conquista-
dores lacked a proper conception of plural schemes and thus chauvinistically
imposed their own on the Aztecs, who “had to be seen as worshipping the
devil. It’s simple, compadres, you either worship God or the devil. Ripping out
hearts, is that worshipping God? It follows. . . . ”53 The conquistadores’ inabil-
ity to contemplate an alternative conceptual scheme left them utterly unable to
comprehend Aztec behavior. Taylor further asserts that Davidson’s “principle
of charity,” which insists that we make the best sense of the Other in terms
of what we take to be sense, is inadequate. It prevents us from “coming to
understand that there is a very different way of understanding human life, the
cosmos, the holy, and so on.” We need to be able to distinguish between the
“Aztec way of seeing things” and “our way of seeing things”; “To fail to make
this distinction can be, literally, lethal.”54

51 Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 170.

52 Ibid., 173.
53 Ibid., 174.
54 Ibid.
182 Defending Rorty

Lastly, Taylor holds that some schemes can be ranked in terms of whether
they permit us to grasp features of reality that other schemes do not – “This
is the nub of what I call realism.”55 This leads to Taylor’s insistence on the
rational supersession of superior schemes over previous, inferior ones: “Our
description is better, because it is part of a scheme that allows us to describe real-
ity better.”56 That is to say, the superior scheme more accurately corresponds
to reality. For example, in Taylor’s view, it is clear that Galilean-Newtonian
science is superior to Aristotelian science, simpliciter:
[I]t is not that pre-Galilean science didn’t perform well enough by its own standards, or
that it doesn’t have grounds within itself to downgrade the standards of its rivals. If we
imagine the debate between the two theories being carried on timelessly on Olympus,
before any actual results are obtained by one or the other, then it is indeed a standoff.
But what the earlier science can’t explain is the very success of the later on the later’s
own terms. Beyond a certain point, you just can’t pretend any longer that manipulation
and control are not relevant criteria of scientific success. Pre-Galilean science died of its
inability to explain/assimilate the actual success of post-Galilean science, where there
was no corresponding symmetrical problem. And this death was rationally motivated.
On Olympus the grounds would have been insufficient; but faced with the actual tran-
sition, you are ultimately forced to read it as a gain. Once again, what looks like a
standoff when two independent, closed theories are confronted with the facts turns out
to be conclusively arbitrable in reason when you consider the transition.57

Taylor chides Rorty for maintaining the nonrealist presumption that the differ-
ences between schemes are “unarbitrable by reason” because for Rorty what
counts as “reason” is always internal to a scheme. This internalism, which is
the product of Rorty’s I/O representationalism, leads to Rorty’s untenable eth-
nocentrism: the relativistic conclusion that the only justification one can give
for one’s beliefs is to say that “that’s just the way we do things around here.”
For Taylor, Rorty’s commitment to the anti-empiricist idea that we only ever
have understanding of the world through our descriptions of it, couched in
our own provincial, contingent vocabularies, subverts any ethical motivation
to legitimately understand the Other in the Other’s terms.
Taylor concludes his critique by returning to the fundamental epistemolog-
ical issue that divides Rorty and him – realism – and connects it to the ethical
issue of freedom:
I cannot see how we are somehow freer, more self-responsible, if there isn’t an arbitrable
answer to the question, who’s right, us or the Aztecs, about human sacrifice? Or who’s
right, Aristotle or Galileo, about mechanics? Am I less emancipated as a human being
because I can see no alternative to believing that 2+2 = 4? Such a view would indeed
remind us of the teenager racing down the highway as though he were invulnerable to
wounds or death. In my lexicon, the ideally emancipated subject would be as free from

55 Ibid., 174.
56 Ibid., 173.
57 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 47.
Rorty versus Taylor 183

illusion as possible. . . . This is the sense in which a certain realism is at the very heart of
freedom.58

For Taylor, the realist truth will set you free, whereas for Rorty, it is likely to
make you dogmatic and authoritarian.

Taylor’s Misreading of Rorty

Rorty can promptly dispose of two of Taylor’s criticisms: (1) that he remains
in the thrall of a representationalist picture of our relation to the world; and
(2) that his dismissal of scheme-content distinction prevents him in principle
from ethically negotiating pluralism. As we saw in Chapter 1, Rorty does not
see a Cartesian epistemological barrier between the Inner and Outer; we do
know the real world through our descriptions, which stand in causal relation
to the world and inferential relations to each other. Because we are always in
causal contact with the world as embodied agents, the skeptical worry that our
beliefs in toto might be internally “spinning in a void,” and fail utterly to be
reliable guides to action, simply dissolves.59 Depending on our purposes and
values, there may be infinite ways to describe reality, although any particular
vocabulary will be restrained by the causal world: “[W]e can never be more
arbitrary than the world lets us be.”60
Drawing on Peirce, Rorty insists that our beliefs do not “represent” any-
thing, but are rather “habits of action”61 or, in updated philosophy of language
jargon, “‘sentential attitudes’ – that is to say, dispositions on the part of organ-
isms, or of computers, to assert or deny certain sentences” or act in certain
ways.62 Beliefs, and the language that constitutes them, are just sophisticated
coping tools that emerged naturalistically in our evolutionary past and continue
to evolve as liberal culture (hopefully) progresses.
Taylor argues that the proposition that “only a belief can justify another
belief” entails a closed-off, internal system, which, because it allegedly drops

58 Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 180.

59 In one of his most recent essays, Taylor seems to express this exact, Davidsonian view when he
offers what he calls a “contact theory” of knowledge, to be contrasted with the “mediational”
representationalist view: “We treat our beliefs, theories, as over against reality, to be related to it.
But all this goes on within a larger context of presumed contact with reality. The presumptions
can be erroneous, but never totally [cf. Davidson’s “veridical nature of belief”]. That is the
aspect which contact theories grasp, and meditational accounts lose from view” (Charles Taylor,
“Retrieving Realism,” in Mind, Reasons, and Being-In-The World, ed. Joseph K Shearer [New
York: Routledge, 2013], 76). And yet, despite this, Taylor still falls prey to the Myth of the
Given: “You know your there – in contact with the really real – because you’ve climbed out of
error” (77). This sort of confidence that the world has delivered to you apodictic truth is what
provokes Rorty’s worries about authoritarianism.
60 PSH, 33.
61 TP, 20, 116.
62 PSH, xxiii–xxvi.
184 Defending Rorty

the “world” out of the equation, is a species of nonrealism (it is, once more,
an accusation of linguistic idealism). It is Taylor’s essentialist contention that
we must have an objective, definitive reality to refer to in order to avoid being
imprisoned within our parochial perspectives. Rorty can reply, however, that
when he and Davidson assert that we cannot “get outside of language” to
check our beliefs against the world, all they mean is that there is no context-
free, language-free, God’s-eye view of the world that represents it “objectively”
and “neutrally” as it “truly” is. There is no description that is not a description
(a point with which Taylor agrees).63 While all of our descriptions of the world
emerge through our efforts to cope with it, Rorty’s point is that we should
consider no particular description necessary or inescapable (as far as we can
tell), which we must therefore privilege (as we will see, Taylor disputes this).
Again, which description is most useful depends on what we are trying to do,
and our different purposes will likely make different descriptions relatively
more or less useful.
The “Johnny story” that Taylor uses to show how common sense under-
mines Rorty’s pragmatism is easily explained Rortyan in terms: when Johnny
goes to check the picture, the causal interaction between his sensory apparatus
and the environment noninferentially causes him to be disposed to assert that
the picture is crooked, or not, depending on how Johnny was socialized to
make such judgments. Rorty completely agrees with Taylor that the subject
“Johnny” is not just a free-floating set of beliefs, but is involved in the world in
a physical, nonconceptual way. It is just that insofar as Johnny has knowledge –
can pick out an X as an X and not a Y, or judge that a picture is hanging at
an extreme angle – his awareness is linguistic, as Sellars would say, and he is a
participant in the social language game of justification.
Taylor also misunderstands the import of Rorty’s dismissal of the scheme-
content distinction. As we saw in Chapter 1, the distinction, which is Kantian-
inspired in contemporary philosophy, is a philosophical picture about how we
fundamentally encounter reality: that we confront it with conceptual schemes
that may or may not fit the “actual” content of reality, the formless Ding-an
sich. This picture thus continues to generate skepticism and relativism because
one must worry whether or not one’s scheme is adequate to the content, and
about what one might be subjectively adding to the “objective” input of the
world. Understood this way, it is the scheme-content distinction itself that
generates the very nonrealism that Taylor worries about: schemes that could
possibly be totally detached from reality. Taylor’s commonsense “twelve chairs
in the room” example therefore does not invoke the philosophically loaded
distinction that Rorty rejects; Aristotle and the modern scientist, although
they disagree about certain descriptions and purposes, do not possess different

63 Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 173.

Rorty versus Taylor 185

“schemes” in the philosophical sense.64 As Taylor’s long-time philosophical

ally, Hubert Dreyfus, points out, the “knowledge of reality” or “content” in
Taylor’s example is not so straightforward as Taylor makes it sound, because
it takes for granted – that is, leaves unarticulated – the purposes involved
in counting the chairs. If, for instance, I am asking how many chairs are in
the room because I want to hold a class there now, then any chairs that are
still in boxes waiting to be assembled should not be counted. Dreyfus thus
agrees with Rorty’s pragmatic position that correspondence between scheme
and content is always relative to our interests, which strips “correspondence”
of its epistemological significance.65
When Taylor argues that maintaining the scheme-content distinction is cru-
cial for appreciating the fact that different cultures have different ways of
viewing the world, he again misses the point: Rorty drops the idea of “con-
ceptual schemes” to follow Davidson in emphasizing that there cannot be any
different “schemes” that are radically incommensurable and mutually incom-
prehensible in principle (or, if there are, they cannot be recognized by us as the
schemes of other agents). Davidson’s argument hinges on the premise that if
we can recognize something as a conceptual scheme, which we can only do by
applying the concepts of our own conceptual scheme, then it cannot actually be
a different conceptual scheme. This means that we can in principle always come
to understand other cultures; there are no hermetically sealed-off “schemes.”
Davidson and Rorty present the paradigm case of intercultural understand-
ing as that of the pragmatic field linguist trying to learn the language and way
of life of a native people without the aid of a dictionary. Davidson says that the
linguist must employ the “principle of charity”: to make sense of the natives’
behavior, she must assume that they are basically “rational,” employing, of
course, her own understanding of rationality.66 As other commentators have
noted, calling this a principle of “charity” is misleading because it seems to
suggest that it is optional. It is not. We can only ever begin the process of
understanding from our own fallible assumptions; the principle of charity is
hence a precondition of interpretation and understanding.67 To try to under-
stand the natives, the linguist must assume that they hold mostly the same
beliefs about the world that she does, even if it turns out that their most inter-
esting beliefs are those few but important ones she does not share (e.g., that

64 Gary Gutting confirms: “But the issue between the realist and Rorty is whether the scheme-
content distinction applies ‘all the way down’ – that is, whether all our descriptions of the
world must involve a distinguishable scheme and content. Taylor’s examples say nothing on
this issue” (Gary Gutting, “Rorty’s Critique of Epistemology,” in RR, 57).
65 Hubert Dreyfus, “Taylor’s (Anti-)Epistemology),” in Charles Taylor, ed. Abbey (2004), 72.
66 Donald Davidson, Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984), 133.
67 Bjorn Ramberg, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988),
77.
186 Defending Rorty

human sacrifice must be performed to ensure that the sun rises). According to
Davidson, if the natives’ language and thus, as Wittgenstein shows us, “form
of life” could not in principle be translated or made intelligible to the field
linguist, then the linguist could not even see the natives as purposefully acting
agents. Davidson fully acknowledges, however, that just because mutual under-
standing is not barred by philosophical incommensurability, it comes quickly
or easily or without error.
Taylor, however, remains suspicious that the principle of charity and the
refusal to talk in terms of “alternative schemes” runs the risk of miring the
would-be field linguist in her own point of view and preventing her from
achieving “undistortive” understanding of the native culture. The problem,
Taylor elaborates, “is that the standing ethnocentric temptation is to make too
quick sense of the stranger, that is, sense in my own terms.”68 Taylor argues
that Gadamer’s hermeneutic “fusion of horizons” between different language
games is ethically and epistemically superior to Davidson’s principle of charity.
Gadamer’s approach to engaging with pluralism, which always entails dialog-
ically putting one’s own self-understanding at risk of modification, properly
appreciates the Otherness of the Other and the difficulty of overcoming differ-
ence. Taylor thinks that Davidson’s principle suggests that when we encounter
another worldview, our own worldview necessarily permits us to understand it.
The Gadamerian, by contrast, does not presume that her initial set of concepts
will be adequate to properly understanding the Other’s worldview, and rec-
ognizes that undistorted understanding requires much patient, generous, and
open-minded communication.
It is not clear, however, that Taylor’s assessment of Davidson’s position is
fair and accurate. Rorty rejoins by insisting that “it is very hard to see [David-
son’s’] radical interpreter as doing anything different from the Gadamerian
‘expressivist’ who goes round and round the hermeneutic circle until he has
fused his own self-interpretive and self-constitutive horizons with those of the
natives (‘bickering with the natives like a brother,’ as Quine puts it).”69 John
McDowell, a thinker whom Taylor admires, agrees with Rorty that Taylor
misunderstands the principle of charity, asserting that “Davidson’s principle,
properly understood, surely requires looking for common ground – if nec-
essary engaging in conceptual innovation for the purpose – with candidates
for understanding whom we initially find unintelligible.”70 And even Taylor
concedes that bolstering ethnocentrism is the farthest thing from Davidson’s

68 Charles Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes,”

in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich
Arnswald, and Jens Kerscher (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 292.
69 Richard Rorty, “Absolutely Non-Absolute,” Times Literary Supplement (December 6, 1985),
1379.
70 John McDowell, “Responses,” in Reading McDowell, ed. Smith, 284.
Rorty versus Taylor 187

intent.71 Thus, Taylor is mistaken that the principle of charity presumes that we
rigidly stick with our first impressions of Difference, as opposed to dialogically
working toward a deeper, more useful comprehension of it.
Moreover, Rorty does have an instrument, curiously ignored by Taylor,
to make exactly the sorts of cultural distinctions that Taylor insists must be
acknowledged: Rorty’s concept of the “vocabulary,” his term for the Wittgen-
steinian language game. Although there are no cultures that are in principle
unintelligible to each other, different cultures have different vocabularies and
practices associated with them that can indeed clash in important ways. It
thus is far from clear that Rorty’s rejection of the scheme-content distinction
compromises his ability to properly appreciate and approach cultural differ-
ence. Taylor mistakenly believes that Rorty holds the philosophical view that
different vocabularies are incommensurable and are thus “unarbitrable in rea-
son,” which tempts us to ethnocentrism since there is no hope of bridging
the gaps between vocabularies and achieving mutual understanding. All Rorty
actually claims is that different forms of life may be practically incompatible,
and that negotiation and persuasion may resolve such conflicts, but also may
fail to do so, even indefinitely: “The spirit of [liberal] accommodation and
tolerance certainly suggests that we should seek common ground with Niet-
zsche and Loyola, but there is no predicting where, or whether, such common
ground will be found.”72 For Rorty, although there are no languages that are
untranslatable or cultures that are simply incomprehensible, there are also no
guarantees that the practices of different cultures can be reconciled – certainly
not by an idea that there is a necessary, common “rationality” that will lead us
to a consensus about the nature of the “real world.” But this does not mean that
we should not try to reach practical agreement when we find it needful. Indeed,
it is the idea of universal Reason as the authoritative arbiter between different
cultures and which Taylor appears to invoke, which leads to ethnocentrism.
For what culture won’t take its own conception of reason as universal Reason,
and thus attempt to impose it on intercultural negotiation? Better to try to
convince people that rationality is contingent, and thereby alert them to the
possibility that their conception of Reason is not absolute and might need to
be modified on pragmatic grounds as they negotiate the ethical pluralism of the
world.

71 Taylor, “Understanding the Other,” 292. Putting his own gloss on this debate, Nicholas H.
Smith suggests that “Taylor’s view has always been that if the interpreter is to find the other’s
self-understanding intelligible it must fall within certain limits – the ‘limits of intelligibility’ the
interpreter brings to the encounter. But there is nothing ethnocentric, at least nothing malignly
ethnocentric, about this starting point” (Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2002), 136). Unless there is an important difference here between Taylor’s “limits of
intelligibility” and Davidson’s presumption of rationality, then Taylor’s approach doesn’t seem
any different than the “principle of charity.”
72 ORT, 191.
188 Defending Rorty

Lastly, Taylor criticizes Rorty for being unable to account for supersession:
the claim that different schemes can sometimes be shown to be rationally
superior or inferior to one another. On Taylor’s account, again, this is because
Rorty maintains that rationality is relative to scheme (or vocabulary): there are
no non-question-begging standards by which to make a philosophical judgment
of superiority. Rorty, of course, insists that he is not a relativist; he gladly agrees
that some vocabularies are superior to others, but only in light of specific
purposes. He thus agrees that the development of Galilean-Newtonian physics
is a clear advance over Aristotle. But this is a contingent practical claim, not
a philosophical claim. The disagreement is over whether Galilean-Newtonian
physics accurately maps the world in an absolute sense, whether it supersedes
Aristotle not because it better serves our contingent needs, but because it is
simply true, which for Taylor is demonstrated by the fact that no “rational”
person would prefer Aristotelian science over it if he is exposed to both.73
As an admirer of modern science, Rorty accepts its superiority, but only
because he values the superior prediction and control that it affords. One need
not go further and add, as Taylor does, that it is “rationally” superior in
an absolute sense regardless of contingent human purposes. Rorty argues, for
example, that Cardinal Bellarmine’s position in his dispute with Galileo is not
“irrational” if it makes plausible sense to us that he held that his theology was
a superior source of truth to Galileo’s telescope.74 And this seems an eminently
reasonable position: Why would one give up one’s deeply held belief about a
divinely revealed truth concerning God’s relationship to man and world for an
increased ability to control and predict nature, or (alleged) increased theoretical
elegance? Clearly, a newfangled optical device that purports to negate a divinely
revealed truth must be in error, at best, and a tool sent straight from the Prince
of Lies to tempt us, at worst.
Rorty similarly insists that it would be pointless for a Galilean to tell an
Aristotelian
that she will gradually become willing to settle for a world without final and formal
causes, a world of atoms and the void, a world with only nominal essences, as she learns
more about the elegant explanations of eclipses, parallax, and so on that a heliocentric
model makes possible. Maybe she will, but it is not clear that she should – that there

73 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 161. As we saw above, part of Taylor’s evidence for supers-
ession is that the later, superior scheme can explain the superseded scheme (and where it goes
wrong), while the converse is not true. Rorty agrees that we can, “retrospectively, describe the
problems and data of all earlier epochs in a single, up-to-date, commensurating vocabulary,”
but he worries that exercises in commensuration – which must assume a preexisting common
measure – can mislead us into projecting our priorities onto our ancestors’ endeavors. He
prefers Dewey’s description of moral and scientific progress, which suggests that it is more like
“somebody’s description of how he or she managed to get from the age of twelve to thirty (that
paradigm case of muddling through) than like a series of choices between alternative theories
on the basis of observational results” (ORT, 68–9).
74 PMN, 328–31.
Rorty versus Taylor 189

is any compelling reason for her to do so. This is because it is hardly clear when and
whether to change one’s mind about how paradoxical science has a right to be, how
far it can go in substituting explanations of X-talk for explanations of X. There is
no general way of answering the question. . . . For there is no overarching, ahistorical,
context-free criterion to which one can appeal when asked to shift from one paradigm
of explanation to another.75

Such shifts typically are made pragmatically, based on whether the new
paradigm helps us achieve our contingent and variable purposes.
Taylor understands this argument but, finally, despite his deep respect for
plural ways of seeing the world, does not buy it. He writes, “The basic point
is that given the kind of beings we are, embodied and active in the world, and
given the way that scientific knowledge extends and supersedes our ordinary
understanding of things, it is impossible to see how it could fail to yield further
and more far-reaching recipes for action.”76 Taylor believes that all human
agents must, by their nature, share the common purposes that modern science
advances. This universalist essentialism is, of course, bound to conflict with a
commitment to ethical pluralism.

The Deeper Disagreement: Must We Believe in Transcendence?

Underlying Taylor’s critique of Rorty’s epistemological position is his deeper
concern with Rorty’s naturalistic dismissal of normative ontology, and the nor-
mative contingency that this dismissal entails. This concern is most apparent
not in Taylor’s full-length articles on Rorty, but rather in a brief “Reply” writ-
ten in response to Rorty’s published comments on Sources of the Self.77 In these
comments, Rorty observes that Taylor is concerned with two modern moral
vocabularies that obscure authentic sources of morality: Enlightenment natural-
ism and a problematic, postmodern conception of Romantic expressivism. As
we have seen, Taylor’s criticism of naturalistic vocabularies is that they reduce
everything to physical “matter in motion,” and therefore cannot account for
genuine moral sources, that is, constitutive goods. Taylor’s criticism of post-
modern Romantic expressivism is that its conception of a constitutive good is
radically individualized and blind to needful social and collective goods, and
therefore amounts to merely shallow self-celebration. Rorty asks why Taylor
cannot accept the Deweyan solution to these problems: a pragmatic combina-
tion of nonreductive naturalism with a communitarian conception of liberal
social democracy?

75 TP, 104.
76 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 147–48. This position is reminiscent of Dewey’s
most “non-Rortyan” writings.
77 Rorty, “Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 54 (March 1994), 197–201.
190 Defending Rorty

Pragmatic, nonreductive naturalism maintains that the vocabulary of values

and intentionality need not conflict with the causal vocabulary of natural sci-
ence, as Taylor presumes. There is no reason to think that one vocabulary is
“closer to reality” than the other; neither is prima facie epistemologically priv-
ileged. “From a Wittgensteinian or Davidsonian or Deweyan angle, there is no
such thing as ‘the best explanation’ of anything; there is just the explanation
which best suits the purposes of some given explainer.”78 Rorty sums up:
What I have been urging is that holism takes the curse off naturalism, and that one can
be as naturalistic as Davidson if one remains as holistic as Taylor. To be a naturalist,
in this sense, is to be the kind of anti-essentialist who, like Dewey, sees no [ontological]
breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation – the
hierarchy which has amoebae adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at
the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people
fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top.79

Rorty’s anti-essentialism, of course, has completely dropped any trace of the

classic, metaphysical Great Chain of Being consisting of a rational order of
essences. He wants to dismiss Taylor’s “Diltheyan dualism” that insists on
an ontological dichotomy between the mechanistic natural world, which can
be “explained” using the scientific method, and the normative human world,
which must be “understood” using the hermeneutic method.
Rorty writes in a particularly important passage for his debate with Taylor:
What do we [pragmatists] hope to gain? Oddly enough, it is pretty much what Taylor
wants to gain from deploying his Diltheyan dualisms: a safeguard against reductionism,
against the idea that human beings are “nothing but” something subhuman. . . . By
getting rid of the idea of “different methods appropriate to the natures of different
objects” (e.g., one for language-constituted and another for non-language constituted
objects), one switches attention from “the demands of the object” to the demands of
the purpose which a particular inquiry is supposed to serve. The effect is to modulate
philosophical debate from a methodologico-ontological key to an ethico-political key.
For now one is debating what purposes are worth bothering to fulfill, which are more
worthwhile than others, rather than which purposes the nature of humanity or of reality
obliges us to have.80

For instance, whereas Taylor objects to Skinnerean behaviorism on the grounds

that it cannot possibly be an accurate way to describe human behavior because
it is based on a false, naturalistic ontology, Rorty suspects that it might be a
very effective understanding depending on what one is trying to do. If you limit
a human being’s environment to a Skinner box, you can probably measure,
predict, and control his behavior fairly effectively. Rorty, nevertheless, rejects
Skinner’s reduction of human agency to mechanism on moral, not ontological,

78 ORT, 60.
79 Ibid., 109.
80 Ibid., 109–10 (emphasis added).
Rorty versus Taylor 191

grounds: “In order to predict and control human behavior in Skinnerean ways,
you have to do some very unpleasant things to your subjects.”81 Through
torture, O’Brien is able to cause Winston to say and believe that 2+2=5.
Nonreductive naturalism enables us to conceive of human behavior as an
ordinary, if extremely complex, phenomenon of the material universe. While we
can often mathematize, measure, and thereby predict the movements of nonhu-
man objects very effectively, the social sciences have been much less successful
at doing this with human intentional behavior because the brain-cum-body,
as the source of this behavior, is such a relatively complex system. Indeed,
Rorty concedes that a neuro-social science that enables us to usefully predict
human behavior in pertinent contexts (e.g., market responses to subtle eco-
nomic policy) might never be forthcoming, and that hermeneutical approaches
to understanding human behavior may just about always prove more useful
than more mechanistic approaches. But this confounding complexity does not
require us to accept Taylor’s dualist ontology. Rorty’s pragmatism thus avoids
Taylor’s problematic dualism between the natural world and human agency.
Furthermore, it does not a priori rule out tools (e.g., mathematical model-
ing) for understanding some aspects of human behavior, as Taylor ontological
pronouncements would have us do.82
Ironically, Taylor’s ontological divide between human behavior and the
nonhuman world has the baneful effect, contra his intentions, of bolstering
scientism and creating a metaphysical mystery about normativity (à la Kant).
By insisting, as a scientific realist, that natural science discovers absolute truths
about the nonhuman world, Taylor simply enhances the epistemological laurels
that scientism claims for it, thereby increasing the temptation to claim that it
is the bellwether for “real” knowledge. Such temptations put vocabularies
that are on the noncausal, intentionalist end of the Diltheyan continuum (not
dichotomy) at a cultural disadvantage. Taylor thus arguably deepens, rather
than resolves, the modern philosophical conundrum.
Lastly, Dewey’s communitarian, virtue liberal conception of social democ-
racy supplies a historical, communal context that both creates the possibility
for, and restrains, Romantic self-expression. This rescues ethics and politics

81 Richard Rorty, “Rorty, Taylor, and Dreyfus: A Discussion,” Review of Metaphysics 34

(September 1980), 50.
82 Cf. Keith Topper, “In Defense of Disunity: Pragmatism, Hermeneutics, and the Social Sciences,”
Political Theory 28, 4 (August 2000), 509–39. Topper sides with Taylor against Rorty in
this debate, arguing that the track record of the naturalist, “Galilean” social science is so
abysmal that Rorty is guilty of being nonpragmatic when he leaves open the possibility of its
success. I would argue, however, that Rorty judiciously takes the middle ground in this debate,
criticizing the scientistic hubris of those who insist that social science must mimic the methods
of natural science in order to qualify as knowledge, on the one hand, while not writing off
Galilean approaches as inevitably useless, on the other (and, moreover, the distinction between
hermeneutic and Galilean approaches is itself a pragmatic one, since the Galilean approach,
like all theorizing, is also inevitably a hermeneutic practice).
192 Defending Rorty

from the self-indulgent, radical individualism that Taylor deplores. Rorty thus
submits that Dewey adequately addresses Taylor’s concerns about modern eth-
ical identity. He also, however, recognizes that Taylor still wants something
more.
In his response to Rorty, Taylor essentially affirms Rorty’s succinct interpre-
tation of Sources of the Self.83 Taylor goes on to give perhaps the most clear
and provocative description of “constitutive goods” found anywhere in his
voluminous body of work. The two features of constitutive goods that Taylor
emphasizes are that (1) they are independent of human beliefs and desires, and
(2) they motivate or “inspire” us to pursue and achieve them.84 “A constitutive
good can show itself as such by its capacity to empower us morally.”85 Taylor
asserts that Rorty’s “naturalist mind tends to want to slither away from the
recognition of constitutive goods; it smacks too much of theology and Plato.”
He says, however, that this is a “continuing self-delusion” on the part of
naturalists.86 Indeed, “Even in the most anti-theological and anti-metaphysical
ethic there is such a moment of the recognition of something which is not made
or decided by human beings, and which shows a certain way of being to be
good and admirable.”87 (For example, we have already seen this contention
in Taylor’s analysis of utilitarianism in an earlier section.) In his direct, telling
reply to Rorty’s query about Dewey, Taylor writes:
Why am I not happy to make my peace with Deweyan social-democracy, plus a sense
of the importance of expressive creativity? Because I’m not yet satisfied with Deweyan
constitutive goods. Worse, I’m not even sure that Dewey saw the issue that I’m trying to
delineate about constitutive goods. It seems to me that anthropocentrism pays a terrible
price in impoverishment in this regard. Deep ecologists tend to concur from one point
of view; theists from another. And I am driven to this position from both.88

Taylor’s problem with Rorty’s Dewey-inspired vision of liberal modernity is

that it is “anthropocentric” because it fails to offer transcendent – “beyond
human life” – constitutive goods. It thus fails to be motivated by an adequate
normative source, and is therefore uninspired, misguided, and, ultimately,
dangerous.
This highlights an important theme in Taylor’s work that deserves greater
discussion than it typically receives: “Taylor’s continual stress on the demand-
ing nature of the moral values that he takes to be definitive of modernity.”89
According to Taylor, “the civilization which grew out of western Europe in

83 Taylor, “Reply to Commentators,” 212.

84 Ibid., 211–12.
85 Ibid., 212.
86 Ibid., 213.
87 Ibid., 212.
88 Ibid., 213.
89 Stephen Mulhall, “Sources of the Self’s Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity,” in
Can Religion Be Explained Away? ed. D.Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 144.
Rorty versus Taylor 193

modern times (certain aspects of which now extend well beyond Europe) has
given exceptional value to equality, rights, freedom, and the relief of suffer-
ing. We have somehow saddled ourselves with very high demands of universal
justice and benevolence.”90 For Taylor, this is a double edged-sword. On the
one hand, he cherishes the modern commitment to benevolence, respect for
human rights, and ideal of tolerating and constructively engaging with plural-
ism. Indeed, he suggests that these ideals owe their emergence in the West to the
working through of the Christian notion of agape.91 On the other hand, with
these normative advancements came the encroachment of naturalism and its
corollary, secular anthropocentric humanism, into our theoretical attempts to
explain and justify modern morality. These have rendered us unable to provide
a clear, satisfactory, or, literally, compelling ground for our lofty normative
commitments. Instead, modern moral philosophy, particularly in its dominant
utilitarian and Kantian strains, fails to adequately articulate the goods that
must explain and motivate moral action in the modern evaluative framework.
For Taylor, the historically unprecedented demands of modern morality pro-
duce an urgent question that is at the heart of his work: What can sustain
our commitment to live up to these demands? After all, “High standards need
strong sources.”92
This is why Taylor insists that adequate sources of normativity must be
transcendent, constitutive goods that are not the naturalistic products of human
belief and desire. Humanisms like Rorty’s are “exclusive” because they “see
the good exclusively in terms of human flourishing, without any demand to
give allegiance or worship to anything higher.”93 In his recent tome, A Secular
Age, Taylor explains why “exclusive humanism” cannot be part of a “best
account” of our ethical lives:

Exclusive humanism closes the transcendent window, as though there were nothing
beyond. More, as though it weren’t an irrepressible need of the human heart to open that
window, and first look, then go beyond. As though feeling this need were the result of a
mistake, an erroneous world-view, bad conditioning, or worse, some pathology. . . . If
the transcendental view is right, then human beings have an ineradicable bent to respond
to something beyond life. Denying this stifles. And, in fact, even for those who accept
the metaphysical primacy of life, this outlook can itself come to seem imprisoning. It
is in this sense, rather than in the rather smug, self-satisfied view that unbelief must
destroy itself, that the religious outlook finds anti-humanism unsurprising.94

Taylor’s position is reminiscent of Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar who, in con-

trast to Hobbesian secularizing, maintains that moral experience is only fully

90 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 397.

91 Ibid., 517; Taylor, A Secular Age, 247–48.
92 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 516.
93 Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?, 121.
94 Taylor, A Secular Age, 638 (my emphasis); cf., Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?, 26–27.
194 Defending Rorty

explicable through religion. As Mark Lilla puts it in his own popular Geist-
geschichte, A Stillborn God: “Rousseau tried to show that man needs religion,
at the very core of his being, because that core is moral. It turns out that
having a view about the divine nexus [between God, man, and world] is not
optional . . . because human beings living in society cannot remain moral for
long without understanding how their actions relate to something higher than
themselves.”95
Taylor goes on to suggest that our perennial fascination with horror and
violence, which extreme antihumanism gives expression to, is actually a dark
manifestation of this “ineradicable bent” toward the transcendent.96 He stops
short of concluding that our natural yearning for the transcendent presents us
with a stark, unavoidable choice between religion or violent antihumanism.
Moreover, he duly acknowledges that many religions, too, have historically
produced terrible violence (but only because they were “imperfectly oriented
to the beyond”). But he nevertheless suggests that “the only way fully to escape
the draw towards violence lies somewhere in the turn to transcendence, that is,
through the full-hearted love of some good beyond life.”97 If we fail to orient
ourselves properly toward transcendent sources of good, we run the risk that
our thirst for transcendence will take the antihuman turn.
This idea is perhaps the crucial thread that enables us to navigate Tay-
lor’s fascinating and sprawling labyrinth of thought: while he admires many
of the moral accomplishments of modernity – he claims that he is neither a
“booster” nor a “knocker” of it98 – he finds that the ethical self-conception
common among modern people is dangerously confused and leads to the sub-
version of these accomplishments. Taylor believes that in order to preserve,
refine, and properly extend them, we must turn to and cultivate modern reli-
gious conceptions of the human condition. Michael L. Morgan thus observes
that “Taylor’s account of articulacy, historical examination and practical rea-
soning serves as a vehicle of retrieval for religious discourse and religious
commitment. . . . Taylor’s account re-establishes the plausibility of the human-
divine relationship as primary for our moral experience.”99 Indeed, William E.
Connolly, who is a sympathetic interpreter of Taylor, finds that, “[a]lthough
evincing some respect for alternative orientations, [Taylor] suggests that the
grace of a Christian God is the strongest source to appeal to in western life.”100

95 Mark Lilla, A Stillborn God (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 2007), 131.
96 After suggesting that Karl Barth’s neo-orthodox rejection of liberal Protestant theology can be
linked to the messianic rise of Hitler, Lilla likewise wonders, “Could there be a deep connection
between the religious and political violence?” (Ibid., 297.)
97 Taylor, A Secular Age, 639.
98 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),
22.
99 Michael L. Morgan, “Religion, History and Moral Discourse,” in Philosophy in an Age of
Pluralism, ed. Tully and Weinstock, 54.
100 Connolly, “Catholicism and Philosophy,” 172.
Rorty versus Taylor 195

Taylor’s ultimate criticism of Rorty’s Deweyan project, then, is that, despite

its robust humanistic aspirations, it is likely to provide fertile ground for the
seeds of destructive antihumanism because it dismisses normative sources that
transcend humanity. Rorty’s rejection of a normative ontology that features
constitutive goods in the name of an exclusive humanism that embraces nat-
uralism and contingency leads to exactly the horrifying disease to which it
purports to be the cure: authoritarian oppression. By denying transcendent
sources, exclusive humanism undermines the necessary metaphysical anchors
that are deep and inspiring enough to ground the arduous moral commitments
that modern ethical life demands. A life stripped of such anchors and based
on the pragmatic liberal virtues will inevitably leave us yearning for some-
thing more, making us susceptible to, in Lilla’s words, “messianic political
theologies” that “inflame the mind with destructive apocalyptic fantasies of
immediate redemption.”101
Only a transcendent normative ontology, which is illuminated and estab-
lished by Taylor’s phenomenology and articulated through historical retrieval,
will pull us back from the brink of antihumanism. What is fascinating about
Taylor’s solution to what he calls the “malaise of modernity” is that his univer-
sal phenomenology, which leads to his realist normative ontology, also grounds
his commitment to pluralism. The problem with these two commitments is that
former appears to vitiate the latter: if realism insists that there are necessary (if
distinct, in Taylor’s case) ways to understand the natural and human worlds,
then alternate, plural understandings simply cannot be rational, respectable
options. As Nicholas H. Smith observes, “it might seem that Taylor’s plural-
ist aspiration clashes with his desire to rehabilitate ontology.”102 Is this the
case?
Both the pluralist and universalist aspirations are motivated by Taylor’s
refusal to accept Rorty’s embrace of the utter contingency of human experi-
ence. In other words, Taylor rejects contingency in two broad ways: (1) the
articulation of his necessary, universal phenomenology of human agency and
moral ontology, and (2) his embrace of an essentialist, expressivist conception
of cultural authenticity. The first produces Taylor’s conception of supersession,
and permeates his work with language of “ontology,” the idea of transcul-
tural “human constants” against which plural vocabularies can be judged,103
and the suggestion that transcendental arguments can establish noncontingent
ontological conclusions applicable to all human agents.104 The second leads
Taylor to support the survival of particular cultures against what he sees as the
homogenizing effect of prominent versions of liberalism, thus marking him as
a “pluralist” in the contemporary debate over pluralism and liberalism.

101 Lilla, Stillborn God, 260.

102 Smith, Charles Taylor, 239; cf., Anderson, “Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators,”18, 22–23.
103 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 125–26.
104 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 20–33; cf., Abbey, Charles Taylor (2000), 28.
196 Defending Rorty

While both (1) and (2) are joined in their denial of Rortyan contingency,
Taylor’s universalistic and pluralistic aspirations nevertheless still seem at odds
with one another. For example, clearly Taylor cannot accept pluralism that
denies his universal moral ontology. We can attempt to reconcile the two aspi-
rations by seeing (1) as the basis of (2): human agents all experience a deep
normativity in our dealings with the world that is necessarily couched in a par-
ticular cultural language. Put like this, however, we are still at a loss for what
it means for practice. When exactly can we say that certain normative con-
ceptions are unfaithful to the universal ontology, as Taylor says of naturalism
and postmodern individualism? When can we say that a certain understanding
of a culture (or of a self) is “inauthentic,” a judgment Taylor certainly thinks
can be made? Taylor self-consciously does not give us standing criteria for
making such judgments. Rather, they must be made in media res, when we are
actively negotiating the boundaries of different moral languages and ways of
life. Needless to say, many commentators find Taylor’s philosophical coyness
at this crucial point in his argument fatally dissatisfying.105

A Rortyan Critique of Taylor’s Essentialism

From Rorty’s point of view, Taylor’s rejection of contingency amounts to
close-mindedness with regard to human possibility. Taylor’s effort to resusci-
tate normative ontology results in limiting the range of conceivable, legitimate
pluralism. Furthermore, his insistence on cultural and ethical authenticity polit-
ically favors existing, traditional cultures against groups and individuals who
want cultural innovation (perhaps even in the name of justice). Taylor’s failure
of imagination follows from his insistence on transcendent, and thus in some
sense “fixed,” sources of value. Whereas Rorty argues that recognition of con-
tingency frees us to invent novel vocabularies with which to describe ourselves
and the world in order to solve our (contingent) problems, Taylor believes that
this position leaves us ethically unmotivated and out of touch with our own
experience of reality and value. If all is contingent, then why care? Utilizing a
Kantian-like transcendental argument, Taylor suggests that since we are fated
to care (we cannot not care – it is ineluctably part of our experience), then
there must actually exist sources of value that we must care about.106 To the
Mackie-scientistic response that caring is just our subjective human projection
onto a truly value-free universe, Taylor replies that this “objective” view can

105 Indeed, one cannot help but sympathize with Mark Oppenheimer’s remark that Taylor is
“master of the philosopher’s tease” because he “is the kind of writer so fearful of simplifying
a complex truth, or flattening out nuances, that he runs out of space (or courage or stamina)
just when he seems about to say what he is trying to say” (Oppenheimer, “Sentimentality or
Honesty?” 33).
106 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 20–33.
Rorty versus Taylor 197

only be theorized from a more primordial, normative position of caring and

coping.
But Rorty fully endorses this latter pragmatic point and, moreover, Taylor
is wrong to think that Rortyan contingency must lead us to an impossible and,
therefore, specious “neutrality” or moral apathy. Rorty’s response to “Why
care?” is that, of course, we seem to be fated to care as self-interpreting agents,
but we should see what we care about as finally contingent and thus potentially
optional: we could legitimately care about other things. This position does not
result in a standard-less, ethical free-for-all or in moral paralysis. (Indeed,
contra Taylor, this recognition of contingency is actually the first step toward
ethically engaging with pluralism.) We always begin moral reasoning from the
vocabulary we have been socialized to speak, even if we ultimately end up
rejecting key elements of it and attempt to create a different moral vocabulary
and set of practices. The problem of ethical motivation only arises if one shares
Taylor’s conviction that contingent human desires and ethical traditions are
not enough to motivate us. While Rorty recognizes that it may ultimately be
an empirical question whether conceiving of our ethical concepts as contingent
saps us of moral motivation, he suggests that Taylor’s worry is akin to the
traditional worry that the rise of atheism will destroy ethical motivation. Rorty
points out that, to the contrary, the Western societies, many of which have
relatively high levels of religious unbelief, are among the most humane history
has ever seen.
From Rorty’s viewpoint, Taylor, like most of the Western philosophical
and theological tradition, still seeks metaphysical comfort in an authoritative
Given, which Taylor attempts to identify through his universal phenomenology
and his culturally-specific historical retrievals. If Taylor would adopt Rorty’s
pragmatism, he would enjoy a better, less philosophically fraught, commitment
to pluralism. Taylor’s language of ontology, no matter how sincere, should be
identified for what it is: a rhetorical ploy in the realm of cultural politics. Rorty
writes, “I want to argue that cultural politics should replace ontology, and
also that whether it should or not is itself a matter of cultural politics.”107
The “downgrading” of ontological debates to the status of cultural politics,
Rorty believes, will make for a more open, tolerant, and pragmatically inclined
discussion. The next three subsections show how, from Rorty’s perspective,
key Taylorian concepts militate against openness to ethical pluralism.

Supersession versus Pluralism

The tension in Taylor’s thought between his realism/essentialism and his open-
ness to pluralism is on acute display in his discussions of supersession. As I
have argued, supersession presumes there are universally shared purposes, and

107 PCP, 5.
198 Defending Rorty

this presumption enables us to judge concepts according to how well they help
us achieve those purposes. Rorty questions this. He can accept that there may
contingently, at any particular point in time, be shared purposes among the
many different human cultures (e.g., access to drinkable water). Indeed, he
hopes that they will all universally come to accept his pragmatic liberalism.
But there are no necessary, built-in purposes that unite all humanity. Assuming
that there are risks bolstering antiliberal ethnocentrism as well as perpetuating
a misunderstanding of the depth of pluralism.
We will start with supersession in science, since this is where the idea of
common purposes seems most plausible to the modern mindset. Despite his
anti-scientism, Taylor’s phenomenology, as we have seen, endorses an empiri-
cism that makes him a metaphysical realist with regard to the discoveries
of natural science. He joins Bernard Williams’s position that natural science
involves leaving the context of human interests behind and adopting what
Williams calls an “absolute conception” of the world. On this conception,
the scientific “view from nowhere” reveals the uniquely true structure of the
natural world that cannot be rationally denied.108 Now this is an interesting
position for Taylor to endorse, considering that his deepest phenomenological
commitment, to which pragmatists in their way also adhere, is that we are
primordially embodied agents who first and foremost experience the world as
normatively structured – that is, shot through with interests and values. It is
difficult to understand how this fundamental perspective gets suppressed when
we adopt the naturalistic-scientific viewpoint. If the normative perspective is
inescapable, how does it seemingly get shoved aside by the latter perspective?
Hubert Dreyfus notes the tension and asks, “If the engaged experience is pri-
mordial and the disengaged [scientific] mode is derivative from the engaged one,
what sort of view from nowhere can we hope to achieve or even approach?”109
In other words, the “disengaged,” unbiased perspective that Taylor attributes
to science appears impossible on his own account, because human agents are
ineradicably engaged.
Indeed, this is Rorty’s pragmatic position, which understands science as
saturated, like all of our activities, with human interests and concerns. Contra
Taylor and Williams, there is no neutral, context-less perspective we can adopt.
Rorty can agree that most cultures do harbor purposes that may be more
easily achieved by adopting the powerful practices of modern science, but he
accepts the possibility that a culture may “rationally” find science implausible
because it is contrary to its value system, on which its alternative epistemology
is built. And yet Taylor insists that “[t]here is an inner connection between
understanding the world and achieving technological control which rightly
commands everyone’s attention, and doesn’t just justify our practices in our

108 Taylor, “Understanding in Human Science,” 33.

109 Dreyfus, “Taylor’s (Anti-) Epistemology,” 65.
Rorty versus Taylor 199

own eyes.”110 But does it “rightly command” the attention of, say, a religious
sect that seeks a simple harmony with nature rather than control of it? Isn’t
Taylor unjustifiably universalizing the modern Baconian will to power and
imposing it on pluralism?
Dreyfus suggests that Taylor’s scientific realism indicates that he accepts
some sort of conception of “natural kinds” and “essential properties,” of the
kind that Saul Kripke argues for and Rorty attacks as anti-pragmatic and
authoritarian.111 As such, Taylor holds that these essences just cannot be
ignored by fully rational agents. As Taylor puts it in correspondence with Drey-
fus, “the understanding that our claims to truth are grounded in our epistemic
skills for getting a grip on reality is an implicit part of the background under-
standing that underlies our pursuit of science.”112 This, again, is the upshot of
Taylor’s universal phenomenology: at a preconceptual level, all human agents
are, in some general sense, normatively doing the same thing when coping with
the world, and thus the world is, at this level, experienced in the same way.
Taylor writes to Dreyfus, “If we see that our grasp of things is primordially
one of bodily engagement with them, then we can see that we are in contact
with the reality which surrounds us at a deeper level than any description or
significance-attribution we might make of this reality, and that this dissolves the
temptation to anti-realism.”113 This “deeper” level constrains our descriptions
of the world by providing the touchstone by which to judge our descriptions as
more or less, in Taylor’s idiom, “clairvoyant,” “less distorted,” or true. More-
over, our interaction at this preconceptual level is something more than Rorty’s
mere causal interaction. Taylor rejects the idea that our preconceptual involve-
ment with the world is merely causal because that suggests that this interaction
is ethically neutral. To the contrary, Taylor insists that our preconceptual cop-
ing/experience of reality is essentially normative. Dreyfus understands Taylor
to be saying that, “In general, the universe solicits us to get a better and better
grip on its causal structure, and rewards us with more and more successful
coping. Our coping skills thus put us in touch with the structure of the causal
powers of nature, not just its brute impinging.”114
For all this clarification, however, it is difficult not to see this as just another
argument for empiricism, which falls directly afoul of Sellars’s critique of the
empiricist “Myth of the Given.” What else can a universal preconceptual expe-
rience that opens us to the causal structure of nature be? Taylor’s position thus
courts the same criticisms that empiricism always does: it treats whatever can
be identified as “basic” experience as real and thus privileged, and all other

110 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 147 (emphasis added); Taylor, Philosophical
Arguments, 47.
111 Dreyfus, “Taylor’s (Anti-) Epistemology,” 75–79.
112 Ibid., 73.
113 Ibid., 66.
114 Ibid., 68.
200 Defending Rorty

concepts as subjective window dressing, added by culture, to the objective

core of sense impressions. Taylor, at this point, almost begins to look like a
logical positivist (!), but with a radical twist: while the fundamental (sensory)
experience that is the basis of genuine knowledge for the logical positivist is
value-neutral, for Taylor it is value-laden because we are not just neutrally
describing, but are instead coping with purpose. Yet if at this primordial level,
as Taylor suggests, all human beings have the same purposes, the anti-pluralist
upshot is the same: if we are rational, we experience the world in the same,
“given” way, just as the logical positivists would claim.
Rorty, of course, finds this essentialist retrieval of empiricism scientistic and
politically retrograde because it still attempts to privilege a description of the
world without a consideration of specific purposes (and “coping” is simply too
general to fit the bill). The very idea of the universe “soliciting” us is exactly the
sort of anthropomorphic description of Nature that makes Rorty bristle. More-
over, even Dreyfus, who writes in support of Taylor against Rorty, undermines
Taylor’s essentialism by contrasting modern science’s “disengaged” perspective
on gold (“its atomic number is 79”) with the ancient Egyptians’ “engaged” con-
ception of gold as sacred. Dreyfus, after entertaining Taylor’s position that the
scientific view is intrinsically privileged for our dealings with the nonhuman
world, eventually comes to the pragmatic conclusion:

[A]lthough according to our disenchanted science it is true everywhere, whether of

not anyone knows or cares about it, that gold has an atomic number of 79 since this
property explains all the causal properties our science can see, it is only relative to our
disenchanted way of questioning natural events that having an atomic weight of 79 is
taken to be the essential property of gold. More generally, there is no single essential
property of gold.115

After all, no doubt an ancient Egyptian would likewise, relative to his religious
purposes, insist that gold is objectively sacred, regardless of whether we agree
with him. Taylor has to impute a whole host of purposes to the ancient Egyptian
that he may not have in order to argue that the scientific view compels him to
accept it beyond his religious view.
In his article, “A World Without Substances or Essences,” Rorty rehearses
a back-and-forth between essentialists and anti-essentialists. Although he does
not identify Taylor, much of the discussion addresses Taylor’s position.116
Toward the end, Rorty writes, “The last line of defence for essentialist philoso-
phers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our
language and our needs and our purposes to something splendidly nonhuman
and nonrelational.”117 Ironically, when Rorty makes the Taylorian move of

115 Ibid., 78 (my emphasis).

116 See also, ORT, 99–103, for a similar, earlier rehearsal of this debate.
117 PSH, 59.
Rorty versus Taylor 201

identifying the motives behind this position, he concludes that it is just the sort
of authoritarian will to power that Taylor denounces in naturalism:
When we think of the universe in terms of the dispersion and interaction of particles,
we seem to rise above human needs and look down on them. We seem to have become
slightly more than human, to have distanced ourselves from our own humanity and seen
ourselves from nowhere. For us antiessentialists, this temptation to think that we have
eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles
is just one more attempt to create a divinity and then claim a share in the divine life.118

Indeed, this resonates with Dreyfus’s description of Taylor’s position as hold-

ing that the anthropomorphized universe “solicits” us as a nonhuman (divine?)
authority to conceive of it in a particular, privileged way. This is why Taylor’s
scientific realism is not the “very heart of freedom,” but rather promotes sci-
entism and its cultural authoritarianism.
Taylor’s claim that modern science rationally supersedes other ways of
understanding the natural world seems to rest on a premise that, at the deepest
level, all human agents have common purposes. Thus, he presumes that the
technological success of modern science is necessarily practically relevant to
any culture that is exposed to it, because “it commands attention and demands
explanation.”119 It does so not just because it enabled the West to militarily
dominate the globe, but for “good intellectual reasons” that other cultures
cannot fail to see if they are properly self-aware.120 There is no human form
of life that would not practically gain by accepting modern science, which is
why Taylor asserts that it can “surely lay claim to a higher, or fuller, or more
effective rationality” when compared to traditionalist, atheoretical cultures.121
For Taylor, underneath the claims of different cultural standards for success
and rationality, there is a common “pre-understanding” – a Heideggerian phe-
nomenology – that is a “human constant” that belies these claims of legitimate
difference.122 Every traditionalist, atheoretical culture that comes into contact
with a modern scientific culture on some deep level knows that, at least in
practical terms, it is inferior.
Even more controversially, Taylor suggests that supersession happens in
morality as well, although he is also cagier about this claim. For example,
Taylor appears to agree with Rorty when he writes, “The notion that we might
have to convince people of an ultimate value premise they undividedly and
unconfusedly reject is, indeed, a ground for despair. Such radical gaps may
exist, particularly between people from very different cultures; in this case,
practical reason is certainly powerless.”123 It is powerless because, as Rorty

118 Ibid., 60
119 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 103.
120 Ibid., 150.
121 Ibid.
122 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 48.
123 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 53.
202 Defending Rorty

illustrates by imagining a debate with a sophisticated Nazi philosopher, “That

Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions,
arguing in circles.”124 They cannot reach agreement, of course, because they
each maintain such different premises.
But despite his disclaimer, Taylor insists that practical reason is effective in
demonstrating that the Nazi is confused because it is so clear that the Nazi
is engaging in “special pleading” in his arguments for racial superiority and
genocide. It is special pleading because even the Nazi accepts “some version of
the principle ‘thou shalt not kill.’” Taylor argues that, from this shared premise,
we can demonstrate that the Nazi’s position “[d]oesn’t stand up very long to
rational scrutiny. It was really mob hysteria masquerading as thought.”125
Taylor goes on to suggest that it is a “basic human reaction, which seems
present in some form everywhere: that humans are especially important and
demand special treatment.”126 From this universal premise he urges that the
idea of “disencapsulated respect” – respect based on one’s humanity rather than
on one’s “encapsulated,” culturally relative, social identity – “draws us because
it articulates in a striking and far-reaching form what we already acknowledge
in that vague term ‘human importance.’ Once you grasp this possibility, it can’t
but seem prima facie right.”127
Rorty would counter, however, that the Nazi comprehends the liberal idea
of “disencapsulated respect” well enough; the Nazi just deems it wrong. Indeed,
the faithful Nazi is offended at the idea that he should treat Jews as if they were
of equal moral worth to Aryan Germans. When liberal philosophers try to
convince him otherwise, the Nazi judges “that these philosophers seem obliv-
ious to blatantly obvious distinctions, distinctions any decent person would
draw.” Rorty argues that “[t]his rejoinder is not just a rhetorical device, nor is
it irrational. It is heartfelt.”128 The ethical identity of the Nazi is inextricably
bound up with his sense that he is not morally similar to Jews, Slavs, Roma, and
other “subhumans.” Taylor’s position, however, seems to suggest that he does
not believe that the Nazi could really, authentically identify with the tenets of
National Socialism. Why, for Taylor, is there apparently an authentic “Aztec
way of seeing things,” but not an authentic “Nazi way of seeing things?”
Why is the Nazi guilty of “special pleading,” but not the Aztec priest who is
equally, by liberal lights, a mass murderer?129 Indeed, Taylor seems to suggest

124 PSH, 15.

125 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 54.
126 Ibid., 56.
127 Ibid., 57.
128 TP, 178.
129 One might suggest that the Nazi, but not the Aztec, should “know better” because he’s
a member of post-Enlightenment European culture. But that is a claim that rests on the
historically contingent differences between the respective cultures of the Nazi and the Aztec
(and is thus a claim that a pragmatist could make). Taylor’s claim is that there is an objective
normative ontology that the Nazi is evilly rejecting. But isn’t the Aztec priest doing this as
well?
Rorty versus Taylor 203

that the bloody religious worldview of the Aztec Empire was pluralism to be
understood by the conquistadores, while the (admittedly even more horrific)
Nazi worldview can be dismissed as merely irrational “mob hysteria.” This
demonstrates what I mean by a failure of imagination.
Rorty argues that one of the lessons we learn from Orwell’s 1984 is that
“there is nothing deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built-in
human solidarity, to use as a moral reference point.”130 Rorty’s contention that
there is no objective structure of reason that can ultimately demonstrate to the
Nazi that he is wrong does not mean, contra Taylor’s accusation, that Rorty
simply gives up on dialogue with this sort of dangerous, antiliberal pluralism.
Rorty writes:

If I were assigned to the task not of refuting or answering but of converting a Nazi . . . I
would have some idea of how to set to work. I could show him how nice things can
be in free societies, how horrible things are in the Nazi camps, how his Führer can
plausibly be redescribed as an ignorant paranoid rather than as an inspired prophet,
how the Treaty of Versailles can be redescribed as a reasonable compromise rather than
as a vendetta, and so on. These tactics may or may not work. . . . They would be the
sort of thing that sometimes actually changes people’s minds. By contrast, attempts at
showing the philosophically sophisticated Nazi that he is caught in a logical or pragmatic
self-contradiction will simply impel him to construct invidious redescriptions of the
presuppositions of the charge of contradiction (the sort of redescriptions Heidegger put
at the Nazis’ disposal).131

Curiously, Taylor again appears to agree when he writes that “it may be virtu-
ally impossible, and certainly hazardous, to try to argue people” into accepting
the disencapsulated view of Others. Nevertheless, he insists, this fact “doesn’t
show in any way that it isn’t a more rational stance.” Indeed, accepting the dis-
encapsulated view requires appreciating pluralism, which means that we must
understand at least “some small subset of the range of cultures, and realize that
we ought to understand more [which] is to have a truer grasp of the human con-
dition than those for whom alternative ways are utterly inconceivable.”132 In
other words, adopting the liberal appreciation of pluralism is not merely prac-
tically attractive for all sorts concrete, purpose-relative reasons that a Rortyan
pragmatist might cite, but it is also more rational and “true” than nonlib-
eral traditions that do not encourage open-minded engagement with pluralism.
For Rorty, Taylor here makes the mistake that “Santayana called ‘supernat-
uralism,’ the confusion of ideals and power, [which] lies behind the Kantian
claim that it is not only nicer, but more rational, to include strangers within
our moral community than to exclude them.”133 Again, Taylor’s faith in the

130 CIS, 177; cf. CP, xlii.

131 Richard Rorty, “Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy,” Critical Inquiry 16
(Spring 1990), 637.
132 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 58–59.
133 TP, 182.
204 Defending Rorty

universal pull of “rationality” sounds reminiscent of the monistic Enlighten-

ment conception of universal Reason.
We can see that from Rorty’s point of view, there is still too much Hegelian
and Heideggerian metaphysics in Taylor’s thought. There is a Hegelian arc
to historical supersessions: our universal phenomenological nature as human
agents predisposes us to find some ideas intrinsically more rational and true
than others. This position is apparent in Taylor’s response to Quentin Skinner’s
critique that Taylor’s historical narrative of the emergence of the modern self
fails to take into account the contingent causal factors that render modern
values attractive enough to achieve their currently dominant position.134 Taylor
replies,
Now contingency there undoubtedly was. But is the invocation of “sheer contingency”
meant to suggest that if the struggle around absolutism had turned out differently in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or if Henry had been stopped from dissolving the
monasteries, we might still be living in the world we have lost, under, e.g., “the feudal
conception of a well-ordered society of as a structure of ranks and privileges?” If so,
I profoundly disagree. One doesn’t have to go to the Hegelian extreme of attributing
a necessary direction to history to acknowledge that certain moral ideas have a force
which is not simply a function of who won a battle.135

For Taylor, certain ideas “have a force” – an “intrinsic” and even “spiritual
power” – that is independent of historical and cultural context.136 While these
ideas may be more or less easily accepted by people depending on context –
contingency does play a role – Taylor’s universal phenomenology of human
agency renders these ideas innately attractive to us. We can contrast this argu-
ment with Skinner’s and Rorty’s position that whether a culture (or person)
feels the “force” of an idea depends completely on the historically contingent
web of beliefs and practices that constitute the culture (or person).
Taylor further insists that “[h]istory seems to exhibit some irreversible devel-
opments. . . . [I]rreverisble because those who go through them can’t envisage
reversing them.”137 To the contrary, however, Robert Brandom suggests that
[w]e can all too easily imagine our scientific institutions falling into the hands of theolog-
ical fanatics who can describe in excruciating detail just how the revolutionary change
from present day science to their loopy theories represent decisive progress along the
essential dimension of pleasingness to God – a purpose unfortunately and pitiably no
more available from within the impoverished vocabulary of TwenCen natural science
than that of measuring the charge of electrons was from within Aristotle’s vocabulary.138

134 Quentin Skinner, “Who Are ‘We’? Ambiguities of the Modern Self,” Inquiry 34, 2 (1991),
133–53.
135 Taylor, “Comments and Replies,” 239.
136 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 203.
137 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 161.
138 Robert Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,”
in RC, 171.
Rorty versus Taylor 205

Taylor’s Hegelianism safely renders this unsettling scenario an impossibility.

For him, the aspirations of modern science and Western rationality become
“permanent and inescapable.”139
In Rorty’s view, Taylor’s Hegelian faith that there exist Gadamerian hori-
zons possessing a gravitational effect that pulls us toward a fused consensus on
certain ideas means that Taylor fails to comprehend the recalcitrance and depth
of pluralism. Where Rorty simply hopes that careful, conversational engage-
ment with the Other will result in a lucky fusion on liberal ideas, Taylor argues
that, “[b]aldly put, teleologically: we are meant to understand each other. This
mutual understanding is growth and completion.”140 Taylor’s accusation that
Rorty’s endorsement of Davidson’s principle of charity risks a too quick dis-
missal of deep pluralism can thus be turned around and aimed at him. Ian
Fraser, for instance, finds that Taylor’s appreciative discussion of Buddhism
from the viewpoint of Taylor’s allegedly pluralistic Catholicism is an example
of exactly the sort of “flattening” and co-optation of pluralism that Taylor
condemns.141 Taylor’s essentialist ontology causes him to fail to see important
differences between Catholicism and Buddhism. Indeed, Taylor manifests a
faith in an underlying commonality – a telos – to our moral experience that
seems overly sanguine. He sometimes appears to deny the hard fact that, as
Rorty puts it, “moral choice is sometimes a matter of deciding who is going to
get hurt.”142 Taylor’s insistence that the Nazi philosopher can be shown that
he is irrational on his own beliefs demonstrates Taylor’s misunderstanding of
pluralism. His insistence that natural science is more rational than other ways
of understanding the world, regardless of purpose, likewise fails to appreciate
pluralism.

Heidegger versus Pluralism

While Taylor’s Hegelian conception of supersession is problematic for plural-
ism, Taylor’s allegiance to Heideggerian phenomenology and philosophy of
language exhibits exactly the sort of authoritarian rhetoric that sounds alarms
for Rorty. As we have noted, Taylor’s phenomenology proposes two distinct,
but universally common, ontologies: one for natural science, which is valid
for all cultures even though it is not recognized by all; and a second (more
fundamental) ontology for morality that, though refracted through contingent
cultural language games, still manifests certain moral commitments (e.g., an
acknowledgment of the “specialness of human beings”) if the language game

139 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 160–61.

140 Charles Taylor, “Living with Difference,” in Debating Democracy’s Discontent: Essays on
American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy, ed. Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 216.
141 Fraser, “Charles Taylor’s Catholicism,” 234–35, 250. Cf. Jeffrey Stout, “Review” of Charles
Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?, ed. James L. Heft, Philosophy in Review 21 (2001), 425–27.
142 Rorty, “In a flattened world,” 3.
206 Defending Rorty

is authentically faithful to human agency. Some commentators have even sug-

gested that Taylor posits what amounts to a universal moral “common sense,”
which he is trying to recover from the distortions of modern normative the-
ory. Paul Saurette, for example, argues that Taylor’s ethics relies on a “com-
mon sense ontology”: “According to Taylor, we must see common sense as
an authoritative ground itself, even if it isn’t independently and apodictically
verifiable as in the model of the natural sciences. . . . Practically, we are inex-
tricably bound by the contours of our common identity.”143 Similarly, Fergus
Kerr writes that Taylor “insists that there are everyday moral reactions that
articulate and display what it is like to be a human being, whatever the cultural
and historical differences. For Taylor, however, the most intractable problem is
that the very idea of a moral ontology grounded in our natural moral reaction
lies, as he says, under a ‘great epistemological cloud.’”144
This way of framing Taylor’s project helps us contrast it further with Rorty’s.
Rorty insists that, “[t]he opposite of irony is common sense. . . . To be com-
monsensical is to take for granted that statements formulated in [one’s] final
vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions and lives of those
who employ alternative final vocabularies.”145 Applied to Taylor’s conception,
this description of common sense is somewhat unfair: Taylor does not take any-
thing for granted, but rather painstakingly creates a powerful and elaborate
philosophical vision around his phenomenological “common sense.” Neverthe-
less, Taylor’s reliance on common sense still problematically limits this vision,
as we saw in the discussion of supersession. As Rorty puts it, the issue between
the pragmatic ironist and commonsensical metaphysical realist is, “once again,
about the contingency of language – about whether what the common sense of
our own culture shares with Plato and Kant is a tip-off to the way the world is,
or whether it is just the characteristic mark of the discourse of people inhab-
iting a certain chunk of space-time.”146 Seeing it as the latter, Rorty argues,
enables us to better appreciate the challenge of pluralism. Different cultures
have different understandings of “common sense” – they take different things
for granted – and these differences often matter deeply for ethics and politics.
Failure to appreciate this fatally compromises the liberal effort to cope with
pluralism.
Taylor’s adoption of Heideggerian philosophy of language is similarly prob-
lematic in Rorty’s view. Taylor writes that language
has a telos, which requires that entities show up in a certain way. . . . Or, otherwise put,
the entities will demand that we use the language that can disclose them as things. In
other words, our use of language is no longer arbitrary, up for grabs, a matter of our

143 Saurette, The Kantian Impertative, 211.

144 Fergus Kerr, “The Self and the Good: Taylor’s Moral Ontology,” in Charles Taylor, ed. Abbey
(2004), 94.
145 CIS, 73.
146 Ibid., 76.
Rorty versus Taylor 207

own feelings and purposes. . . . It is why Heidegger speaks of our relation to language in
terms of a call (Ruf) we are attentive to.147

To illustrate this understanding of language and human existence, Taylor cites

Heidegger’s ecologism. With regard to our relationship to the environment,
“the purposes in question are not simply human. Our goals here are fixed by
something we should properly see ourselves as serving.”148
Unsurprisingly, this is the position of the later Heidegger, whom Rorty
criticizes for “reifying” language by conceiving of it as a metaphysical authority
rather than as a coping tool.149 “The quest for the sublime was, in Heidegger,
the quest for words which had ‘force,’ rather than the mere exchange value
given them by their role in language games.”150 In his later writings, “Heidegger
refuses to think of himself as one more finite and contingent bit of Dasein
assembling tools for the accomplishment of various finite projects. Rather, he
wants to see himself as projectless, will-less, a mere open ear, a conduit for the
voice of Being.”151 “The later Heidegger persistently, and Derrida occasionally,
treat Language as if it were a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that
stands over and against human beings.”152
This Heidegger, whom Taylor embraces, is precisely the one whom Rorty
rejects. Rorty agrees that we are not “masters” of our language; we do, after
all, inherit a language not of our making that provides us with initial horizons
of intelligibility. Nevertheless, for Rorty there is nothing beyond the language
itself and the causal forces of the world that prevents us from changing our
language, and thus our form of life. We should think “of language as a way
of grabbing hold of causal forces and making them do what we want, altering
ourselves and our environment to suit our aspirations.”153 There is no part of
our language that must, of necessity, be preserved from possible revision.
When Taylor writes of Heideggerian “calls” and of serving the nonhuman,
Rorty worries about the potential political ramifications. Heidegger scholar
Richard Wolin echoes this worry. In a review of Heidegger’s recently published
Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), Wolin writes,

Many of Heidegger’s key assertions concerning “humanity,” “fate,” and the “history
of being” shun demonstrative argument in favor of airy conjecture about the nature of
obscure deities and supra-mundane potencies to whom we must passively submit. In
this respect Heidegger’s later thought represents, in no uncertain terms, a renunciation
of human autonomy. . . . Heidegger’s philosophical posture is peculiarly conducive to

147 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 124.

148 Ibid., 126.
149 EHO, 50–65.
150 CIS, 126.
151 PSH, 190.
152 EHO, 3.
153 ORT, 81.
208 Defending Rorty

discipleship and adulation. It breeds passive acceptance and fierce loyalty rather than
the virtue of individual autonomy and active citizenship.154

Indeed, Taylor even admits that the Heideggerian metaphysics of language

that he endorses has not only “tremendously positive uses, but terrifyingly
dangerous ones as well.”155 For Rorty, the latter possibilities must be tamed
with a pragmatic sense of irony and contingency. Yet this ironic stance is
exactly what Taylor seeks to avoid.

Reification of Culture versus Pragmatic Liberalism

Taylor’s conceptions of rational supersession, phenomenology of agency, and
Heideggerian philosophy of language all point to universal features of human
experience that apply to all human beings regardless of cultural context. But
on the foundation of his robust, universalist ontology, Taylor argues for a
conception of pluralism that insists on the deep importance of difference to the
human experience. Indeed, it is because of Taylorian ontology, which holds
that human experience is inexorably normative, that he takes the cultural
construction of identity so seriously. Culture and its language give us the specific
moral identity and horizon of moral ideas that enable us to practically engage
the world. Different cultures ideally provide their respective inhabitants with a
(Heideggerian) language that discloses essential features of the world. Because
our ability to be authentic and effective, self-interpreting, ethical agents depends
so deeply on this language, Taylor asserts that we must defend our home culture
lest our identities and moral agency become confused and distorted. This is
what Taylor takes from Herder, and why it is so important that culture and
language be properly recognized by Others.156 In our American-led, globalizing
world, this can mean taking political measures to protect culture (e.g., Canadian
and French-Canadian culture) from domination by American proceduralist,
rights-obsessed liberalism and the culture it has fostered. Against the onslaught
of American liberalism, Taylor asserts that our dependence on culture for
our orientation toward the Good commits us to an “obligation to belong” to
our cultural community, which is “as fundamental as the assertion of rights,
because it will be inseparable from it.”157
While Taylor generally supports the standard scheme of individual liberal
rights (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), his recognition of
the importance of culture makes him willing to modify or even curtail those
rights if they conflict with what he sees as essential cultural goods. The impe-
tus for this position is Taylor’s experience as a politically engaged Quebecer.
Indeed, one way to understand Taylor’s broader theorizing of pluralism is to see

154 Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks,” Jewish Review of Books (Summer 2014).
155 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 125.
156 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 30–37.
157 Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 198.
Rorty versus Taylor 209

it as his philosophical attempt to finesse the tension between liberalism, which

is supposed to be culturally neutral, and state-supported cultural survivance
in Quebec, which protects and privileges French-Canadian culture. This leads
Taylor to support the controversial language laws of Quebec that aim to ensure
that French remains the language of public life in the province by, for example,
requiring Francophone and immigrant children to attend French-language pub-
lic schools (if they do not want to pay for private school), and mandating that
French remain the language of commerce in the province. Taylor recognizes
that, from the point of view of the Anglo tradition of liberalism, these laws
unacceptably limit individual freedom. Nevertheless, because these democrati-
cally supported measures help preserve the cultural/linguistic background that
is essential for the unique ethical life of French Canadians, Taylor argues that
such political modifications to proceduralist liberalism are justified, so long as
they do not violate any “fundamental rights” of any minorities.158
Although he is clear that, in his view, Quebec’s language laws do not violate
fundamental rights, Taylor gives us little direction for how to determine the
balance between individual rights and collective cultural goods in other cases.
We do know, however, that he rejects Will Kymlicka’s influential theory of
cultural rights because it is still too individualist. Although Kymlicka’s theory
supports group rights to help preserve minority cultures, it does so only if the
group rights are compatible with, and hopefully augment, individual liberal
autonomy.159 In Taylor’s view, Kymlicka, like other liberals, still makes the
mistake of prima facie privileging individual autonomy over the separate and
distinct good of cultural survivance. Taylor puts relatively more weight on the
collective good against liberalism’s insistence on the value of individual free
choice. While he undoubtedly values liberal rights up to a point, Taylor, as
a communitarian and civic republican political thinker, simply finds that the
predominant Anglo-American theories of liberalism get the balance between
rights and collective traditional goods wrong. From the liberal point of view,
however, his preferred balance looks conservative and at least mildly oppressive
of individual freedom.
Even more controversially, Taylor’s desire to respect cultural goods leads
him to come perilously close to supporting the censorship of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses in Muslim societies, and to conclude that Rushdie’s book should
have been more respectful of their religious beliefs.160 Taylor’s support of
traditional cultures against the encroachment of liberalism has led to what
Nicholas H. Smith calls a “widespread suspicion that Taylor’s portrayal of
the relation between the individual and the community is at once arbitrarily
weighted in favour of actually existing communities and unduly conservative in

158 Ibid., 59–61.

159 Charles Taylor, “Can Liberalism by Communitarian,” Critical Review 8 (Spring 1994),
257–62.
160 Charles Taylor, “The Rushdie Controversy,” Public Culture 2 (Fall 1989), 118–22.
210 Defending Rorty

its moral and political orientation. It seems to lock the individual in a particular
social practice.”161
Liberal theorists, unsurprisingly, have ferociously attacked this component
of Taylor’s thought.162 An obvious problem with it is that if a particular
culture and language are so essential to the ethical life of those who identify
with it, how can Taylor endorse laws in our modern pluralistic societies that
restrict other citizens (e.g., non-French speakers in Quebec) from using the
(different) languages that are constitutive of their identities? How can Taylor
argue so vigorously for the value of culture and language, such that they are
legitimately protected by the coercive power of the state, and simultaneously
suggest that the restriction on culture and language that comes with such
coercion does not, apparently for disfavored minorities, implicate fundamental
rights? This inconsistency leads Andrew Lamey to accuse Taylor of blatant
cultural chauvinism:
Recall Taylor’s description of why he supports measures such as Quebec’s language
laws: it is because, as a member of the minority culture at hand might put it, they
preserve and perpetuate “the culture of our ancestors.” This strikes Taylor as quite a
fine idea, one that even heralds a bold new variant of liberalism. And yet he is equally
emphatic that we should be welcoming, in a deep sense, to the changes that can result
from contact with a culture not our own. But how so? If a culture passes laws designed
to preserve the culture of its ancestors, a “fusion of horizons” with other cultures is
precisely what it is trying to prevent. A judgment has been made, and the ancestral
culture is deemed to take priority.163

Since Taylor agrees with Wittgenstein that a language is a way of life – that
is, a culture – Taylor’s Heideggerian reification of language amounts to a reifi-
cation of culture: it is a transcendent authority that individuals must respect.
Brian Barry worries about the illiberal implications of this position: once “cul-
tural survival is elevated to the status of an end in itself. . . . Human beings
then become mere cyphers, to be mobilized as instruments of a transcendent
goal.”164 Again, the problem is that Taylor’s position courts authoritarianism

161 Smith, Charles Taylor, 146. Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, writes that, “In a rather
unphilosophical nutshell, my suspicion is that Taylor is happier with the collective identities
that actually inhabit our globe than I am, and that may be one of the reasons why I am
less disposed to make the concessions to them that he does” (K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity,
Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism,
ed. Gutmann, 156).
162 Lamey, “Francophonia Forever”; Weinstock, “The Political Theory of Strong Evaluation,”
183; Rockefeller, “Comment” on Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition,” 92; Brian Barry,
Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 65–68; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 71–72, n. 4.
163 Lamey, “Francophonia Forever,” 14.
164 Barry, Culture and Equality, 67.
Rorty versus Taylor 211

in the name of cultural preservation, which is exacerbated because he neither

tells us when cultural goods should trump individual rights, nor how such
cultural goods are defined.
In contrast to most (metaphysical) liberals, however, Rorty cannot simply
claim that Taylor’s fuzzy identity politics is an affront to philosophically jus-
tified, liberal individual autonomy. Rather, he would claim that Taylor’s com-
mitment to culture smacks of essentialism, which is stifling and authoritarian.
Rorty’s view, nevertheless, should be open to pragmatic arguments for cultural
rights and accommodations. For example, he might agree that Sikhs should
be exempted from motorcycle helmets laws in Great Britain, perhaps on the
ground that the issue is simply not worth fighting over (it matters much more
to the Sikhs that they wear their turbans than it does to most other citizens
that they do not wear motorcycle helmets, though this might not always be
the case). Rorty might even agree that a book should be censored in a certain
society if it is certain to result in an immediate and unacceptable amount of
bloodshed. But, for Rorty, there are no philosophical grounds for shielding a
culture against the evolving liberal consensus. Indeed, Taylor’s insistence on
the deep importance of culture to its members is aimed at protecting people
from Rorty’s key liberal virtue: irony. Taylor’s lack of irony, his essentialism,
and, thus, failure of imagination are clearly on display in his statement that
“I would be out of my mind to step out in the public sphere and say forget
defending the French language [in Quebec]: I just couldn’t do that.”165

Conclusion
The disagreements between Rorty and Taylor are difficult to assess because of
the tension-filled mixture of pragmatism and essentialism in Taylor’s work. As
Mark Redhead describes the tension, “Taylor’s Catholic modernity is self-
understood to be a partial and contestable account of modernity’s moral
sources, yet its primary implication for Taylor is that it forms an all-pervasive
moral horizon whose theistic sources can be ignored only at the cost of spiritual
‘mutilation.’”166 Stephen Mulhall observes that Sources of the Self “oscillates
between being an impassioned articulation of a personal moral perspective and
a dispassionate delineation of history, conceptual geography and the skeleton
of a moral trajectory that is objectively compulsory for Western culture and
its members.”167 John Dunn writes that Taylor attempts to combine a “mod-
ern post-romantic project of self-exploration” with a premodern project of

165 Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2002), 131.
166 Ibid., 176; see also, ibid., 198.
167 Mulhall, “Sources of the Self’s Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity,” in D.Z.
Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 160.
212 Defending Rorty

situating oneself within an “objective order of natural and social value.”168

Ronald Beiner concurs with this assessment: “Dunn rightly identifies a crucial
tension in Taylor’s work between the enterprise of cultural interpretation that
is contingent on the history of the modern self and, on the other hand, the
intimation of a larger moral order that could furnish standards of transcultural
judgment.”169 While reading Taylor’s work is exhilarating and edifying, it is
also exasperating because it is so often difficult to tell what status he intends
his claims to have. Are they necessary truths that obligate us in some way?
Are they suggestions for our specific Western culture, or are they universally
applicable?
While Rorty applauds Taylor’s Romantic, historicist side, it is Taylor’s
rhetoric of realism and essentialism, which runs from his conception of supers-
ession through his discussions of ethical authenticity, that Rorty cannot accept.
Rorty’s response to Taylor’s historical narrative is a bit like Kierkegaard’s
response to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: it would be brilliant if only
it had been ironic. Perhaps the most simple way to understand the differ-
ence between Rorty and Taylor is to say that, ultimately, Taylor holds an
Aristotelian-Thomistic commonsense view about value, which constitutes a
universal metaphysical substrate beneath his homages to value pluralism. The
invocation of common sense is not very explicit or straightforward in Taylor’s
work, but it is, nevertheless, the most defensible interpretation of it, where
Taylor’s argument hits Wittgensteinian bedrock. Taylor agrees with Aristotle
and Thomas that there are objective starting points for normative inquiry that
a rational person accepts because they are, for lack of a better word, obvious
to any properly functioning human mind.
Taylor’s allegiance to a commonsense ontology is manifest in his strong
emphasis that there are “limits to what people can unconfusedly and undi-
videdly espouse.”170 Rorty, by contrast, agrees with Wittgenstein and Robert
Brandom that “anything has a sense if you give it one.”171 When Rorty insists
that all vocabularies are for us, ultimately, optional, and that we can thus
attempt to modify them through ironic experimentation, Taylor sees this as
one more instance of an impossible attempt to adopt a disengaged, objective
stance toward our deepest values, which we cannot do if we are to be fully
functional agents.
Simon Blackburn, reviewing Taylor’s Dilemmas and Connections, confesses
that he may not be the ideal reader of Taylor on the ground that Taylor
is a “hand-wringing, pessimistic, religious spirit,” while Blackburn considers

168 John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
186.
169 Ronald Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1997), 156.
170 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 36.
171 PCP, 23.
Rorty versus Taylor 213

himself to be “a moderately cheerful pragmatist.”172 (Yet again, we find our-

selves confronted with James’s insightful observation about temperament.) We
might surmise that, at bottom, the difference between Rorty and Taylor is
similar to the one Blackburn identifies. And yet, in another sense, when he
is compared to Rorty, it is Taylor who is more – indeed, overly – sanguine
about our dealings with the Other. He has faith in Hegelian reconciliation
(aufhebung) between plural ways of life. It is our telos to reconcile and fuse
horizons; it is likely that the Nazi can be brought around because his values
are so obviously inauthentic to human agency.
Compared to Taylor, it is Rorty who is the pessimistic realist. There is no
telos pulling us toward “rational” moral consensus. All we have to rely on
in our exchanges with the Other is our rhetorical talent that proceeds from
our liberal virtues and education. The more creative and imaginative we are,
the more likely we will be able to reach reconciliation, though there are never
any guarantees. For Rorty, however, we should always hold out hope if we
can keep the conversation going. It is this position, which combines a proper
recognition of deep pluralism with a realistic balance of pessimism and hope,
that is more likely to aid liberals as they grapple with the challenge of pluralism.
By insisting that this fraught dispositional balance is the goal of the virtuous
liberal, Rorty more clearly understands of the challenge of pluralism. Knowing
that it will sharply provoke Taylor’s fans, I submit that Rorty is a wiser guide
to modernity than Taylor is.

172 Simon Blackburn, Review of Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, by Charles Taylor,
New Statesman, February 24, 2011.
5

Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism

My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that some-
day, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization
in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication
would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would
be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at
the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.1
– Richard Rorty
It is never an objection to a religious belief that there is no evidence for it. The
only possible objection to it can be that it intrudes an individual project into a
social and cooperative project, and thereby offends the teaching of On Liberty.2
– Richard Rorty
Religion does indeed seem unlikely to wither away, but it is important to insist
that we would be better off if it did.3
– Richard Rorty

Disparate religious beliefs and practices are at the root of so many of our deep-
est ethical and political disagreements that religion remains the paradigmatic
example of the challenge of pluralism; one cannot theorize convincingly about
liberalism without addressing it. What place does religion have in Rorty’s prag-
matic virtue liberal society? We have seen some hints, like his inflammatory
suggestion presented in Chapter 2 that monotheism and democratic citizenship
may be at odds with one another. Yet it is also the case that Rorty, at times,
seems unclear about what the pragmatic liberal position on religion should be.

1 Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 40.
2 PCP, 35.
3 Richard Rorty, “Reply to Jeffrey Stout,” in PRR, 547.

214
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 215

He identifies as an atheist, but unlike the “New Atheist Four Horsemen” –

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens –
he has no interest in attacking religious belief for being demonstrably false or
irrational. In this sense, Rorty is a “boring atheist,” who finds religious claims
“too obviously unconvincing to merit a great deal of intellectual energy: the
question of the existence of God simply doesn’t register as a serious matter of
philosophical dispute anymore.”4
When discussing history, of course, whether of philosophy, politics, or cul-
ture, Rorty has no qualms about recognizing the crucial importance of religious
ideas and institutions, and has genuine admiration for much of the art and the
many moral acts that religious devotion has inspired. He fully appreciates that
religion, particularly in the guise of its greatest traditions, is an awesome testa-
ment to the powers of the human imagination (though not, of course, indicative
of any ultimate reality, as believers would insist). Yet beyond this one senses
that, for most of his career, traditional religion is a topic that Rorty would
prefer to ignore. He has no time for the best-selling polemics of the New Athe-
ists, or for the commercially less successful responses to them (or for Christian
apologetics more generally). Instead, he would like to call a truce: “People who
find themselves quite unable to take an interest in the question of whether God
exists have no right to be contemptuous of people who believe passionately in
his existence or of people who deny it with equal passion. Nor do either of
the latter have a right to be contemptuous of those to whom the dispute seems
pointless.”5 Of course, he also recognizes the futility of this suggestion.
Since he sees his intellectual role as a calling to practice cultural politics in
the service of his liberal ideals, Rorty cannot avoid the topic of religion. His
proposed truce – a short-term modus vivendi even in his own thought – is
clearly not on, given the influential role that religion plays in contemporary
American and global politics. Religion thus appears frequently, if reluctantly,
in Rorty’s writings, receiving more sustained attention in the last couple of
decades of his career as he thrust himself further into the cultural political fray.
Rorty’s treatment of religion, however, can be evasive; he seems to waffle,
leaving readers scratching their heads. Commentators have identified several
positions or, at least, emphases that emerge in Rorty’s writings about religion,
some of which appear to be in obvious tension with others. These include:
(1) a strident secularism that denounces religion as something we need to “get
over” if we are to have a truly liberal politics and culture; (2) an endorsement
of the “Jeffersonian compromise,” which accommodates religion as long as it
is restricted to the private sphere and rendered irrelevant to liberal democratic
politics; (3) “anticlericalism,” which emphasizes that it is religious institutions,
rather than false or irrational metaphysical beliefs, that cause religion to be

4 Danny Postel, “High Flyer: Richard Rorty Obituary,” New Humanist 122 (July/August 2007),
38.
5 Ibid., 30–31.
216 Defending Rorty

problematic for liberal politics; (4) a more accommodating, Jamesian prag-

matic position, which gladly acknowledges the value of religion on utilitarian
grounds because of the psychological benefits that religious believers ostensibly
receive from their faiths; and (5) praise for a religious or spiritual conception
of American democracy, which has its provenance in Dewey’s thought and in
the literary and artistic tradition that Wallace Stevens and Harold Bloom dub
the “American Sublime.” One can see the problem, and it is unsurprising that
interpreters have found Rorty’s thinking on religion difficult to pin down.
In an early, seminal discussion of liberalism, Rorty praises what he takes to
be Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment liberal position on religion, which itself
is a nonauthoritarian update of Thomas Hobbes’s early modern treatment of
it. For Hobbes, the trouble with religion is not that its claims are demonstrably
false – Hobbes asks: How can one prove or disprove someone else’s claim to
have experienced a revelation?6 Rather, the problem is that diverse individuals,
each claiming divine imprimatur, make conflicting religious demands, which
leads to political strife and violence. Similarly, Rorty’s pragmatic problem with
religion is strictly political, not epistemological: religious beliefs, along with
the religious institutions that cultivate them, dangerously claim to be more
authoritative than the dictates of liberal politics. Liberals like Jefferson and
Rorty, of course, reject Hobbes’s unpalatable solution of investing all religious
authority in an autocratic sovereign. Instead, they argue that religious pluralism
can exist peacefully if we secularize politics and privatize religion. We must
adopt Jefferson’s attitude that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say
that there are twenty Gods or no God,” and agree that, if social peace is to be
maintained, society’s diverse religious sects must not attempt to use the state
to advance their theological doctrines.7
Rorty elaborates that while Jefferson was content to maintain that both
believers and nonbelievers could be good citizens, by contrast,
Many Enlightenment intellectuals were willing to go further and say that since religious
beliefs turn out to be inessential for political cohesion, they should be discarded as
mumbo jumbo – perhaps to be replaced (as in twentieth-century totalitarian Marxist
states) with some sort of explicitly secular political faith that will form the moral
consciousness of the citizen. Jefferson again set the tone when he refused to go that
far. . . . Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they
please as long as they are not “fanatical.” That is, they must abandon or modify opinions
on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and
point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most
of their fellow citizens.8

6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Rev. student ed., ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 198.
7 ORT, 175, quoting Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, in The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh (Washington, DC, 1905),
vol. 2, 217.
8 ORT, 175.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 217

This position thus accepts that plural religions will exist and even thrive in
liberal society and tolerates them as long as they are kept out of politics. The
Jeffersonian compromise also clearly depends on a liberally virtuous citizenry:
citizens are expected to “abandon or modify opinions on matters of ultimate
importance” if the practices that spring from those beliefs cannot be publicly
justified. They will be better able to do so if they possess the liberal virtues,
especially the civic virtue of irony.
In CIS, however, Jeffersonian toleration is replaced with the radical Enlight-
enment sentiment that religion is a premodern vestige of humanity’s nonage that
is no longer needed and should simply die out. As we saw in Chapter 1, Rorty
writes that, “in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which was
enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace
of divinity remained. . . . Such a culture would have no room for the notion that
there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible.”9
Denizens of Rorty’s liberal utopia would derive meaning for their lives only
from their relationships to other mortal, finite, contingent human beings. This
sentiment arguably marks Rorty as more than a mere boring atheist, but rather
as one of the more militant variety after all. Indeed, he even refers to himself
as a “miltant secularist” in a talk given in 2000.10
In his 2001 acceptance speech for the Eckhart Prize, however, Rorty
announces that his position on the relationship between liberalism and reli-
gion is more accurately labeled “anticlericalism,” rather than “atheism,” which
better emphasizes his primarily political concerns about organized religion:

[Anticlericalism] is the view that ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do –
despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair – are dangerous to
the health of democratic societies. Whereas the philosophers who claim that atheism,
unlike theism, is backed up by evidence would say that religious belief is irrational,
contemporary secularists like myself are content to say it is politically dangerous. On
our view, religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatized – as long as ecclesiastical
institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long
as believers and unbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live.11

This anticlerical position is thus a further refinement of the Jeffersonian com-

promise: it is only when religion attempts to play a political role that it is
problematic and, empirically, it is more likely and more able to trespass effec-
tively into the political sphere when it has strong, organized institutions. When
religion is properly privatized, however, “the only role left for religious belief

9 CIS, 45.
10 Richard Rorty, “The Moral Purposes of the University: An Exchange,” The Hedgehog Review
(Fall 2000), 107.
11 Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 33; see also, Richard Rorty, “Religion in the Public
Square: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31, 1 (2003), 141–42.
218 Defending Rorty

will be to help individuals find meaning in their lives, and to serve as a help to
individuals in their times of trouble. Religion will, in this secularist utopia, be
pruned back to the parish level.”12 Thus, in contrast to what Rorty suggests in
CIS, religion does seem to have a place in liberal utopia after all.
Rorty’s most positive assessments of conventional religion, however, come
when he is in a Jamesian mood. While he is too “religiously unmusical” to
join James’s earnest spiritual questing and explorations of the mystical, Rorty
follows him in recognizing that, although religious beliefs cannot achieve infer-
entialist justification within the secular vocabularies of modern liberalism and
science, believers have a “right to believe” since those beliefs ostensibly enhance
their experience and make their lives better.13 If religious faith “works” in this
large sense for those who espouse it, who is to say that it is illegitimate?
Rorty dismisses objections to religion, like those made by James’s antagonist,
W.K. Clifford, based on arguments about “intellectual responsibility” ethically
requiring us to believe in only that for which there is “evidence.”14 As long as
religionists refrain from interfering with the ongoing public project to establish
liberal justice, it is nobody else’s business what they believe.
Moreover, Rorty admits that even beyond the existential meaning and
psychological comfort that religion often provides to believers, it sometimes
even motivates them to actively promote policies that, perhaps coincidentally,
advance liberal justice. When he expresses this positive view of religion, how-
ever, he is still quick to emphasize that the Jeffersonian compromise must
remain operative (often to the chagrin of his religious critics). Thus, while it
is difficult to pinpoint exactly where he is located on the spectrum between a
positive appreciation of religion and mere (grudging?) toleration of it, the three
“middle positions” – Jeffersonian, anticlericalist, and Jamesian – although they
have different emphases, are arguably all consistent with one another. But
regardless of whether Rorty appreciates or is wary of religion (or both), his
insistence that arguments based on religious propositions have no place in
liberal democratic politics remains clear.
It is surprising, then, to find several commentators arguing that there is a dis-
tinctly religious cast to Rorty’s commitment to American democratic politics.15
These claims focus especially on his discussion of “romantic polytheism” and
his invocation of the “American Sublime” as sources of inspiration for his
liberal ideal. “Romantic polytheism” is yet another characterization of the

12 Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 142.

13 PSH, 148–67; PCP, 25. Rorty applies the Weberian phrase, “religiously unmusical,” to himself
in “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 33.
14 PSH, 150–54.
15 See, e.g., Jason Boffetti, “How Richard Rorty Found Religion,” First Things 143 (May 2004),
24–30; John Richard Neuhaus, American Babylon (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 129;
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “An Engagement With Rorty,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31, 1 (2003),
138; Frank B. Farrell, “Rorty & Antirealism,” in R&P, 174–82.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 219

spirit of pragmatic liberalism that cherishes the freedom of individuals to wor-

ship the plural “gods” of their choice while minimizing any unjustified harm
caused by such pursuits. Aldous Huxley expresses the idea beautifully: “Life,
then, individual life, is mainly nourished by the direct participative knowledge
of the world’s diversity. Out of that diversity and out of the inner diversity
of the human spirit, the poetic imagination of man extracts the deities of
polytheism.”16 On Rorty’s conception, polytheism “is pretty much coextensive
with romantic [Millian and pluralistic] utilitarianism.” Pragmatic liberal citi-
zens are polytheists in this sense: “Once you become polytheistic, you will turn
away not only from priests but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians
and physicists – from anyone who purports to tell you how things really are,
anyone who invokes the distinction between the true world and the appar-
ent world that Nietzsche ridiculed in Twilight of the Idols.”17 The American
Sublime is a complex aesthetic and moral concept, but it suffices to define it
here as the Romantic artistic tradition that celebrates America’s protean demo-
cratic spirit as it struggles to assert itself over the vast and terrible openness
of both the nation’s geography and its future.18 Writers like Emerson, Whit-
man, and Stevens (who coined the term) are among its exemplary creators,
and although most of its voices hardly qualify as religiously orthodox, the
powerful influence of American Christianity is unmistakable in much of its
productions.
Trying to make sense of what he calls Rorty’s “religious turn,” Jason Boffetti
charts Rorty’s evolution from the “militant secularist” on display in CIS to the
“romantic polytheist” who proposes an identifiably religious conception of
American liberal democracy. Boffetti writes,
Rorty has adopted – perhaps inadvertently at first, but now more intentionally – a new
religious faith that gives him the unified picture of the universe he has always longed
for. Rorty has come to accept that all competing worldviews are ultimately competing
commitments to some orienting faith, and that no conflict between worldviews can
be resolved by an appeal to reason or objective standards of truth. At their core, all
worldviews require faith and hope.19

Boffetti sees evidence of a general rapprochement with religion in Rorty’s

“long overdue mea culpa” for his critique of Stephen L. Carter’s defense of
religious argument in the democratic public square.20 In this critique, Rorty

16 Aldous Huxley, “The One and the Many,” in Complete Essays, Volume II: 1926–1929, ed.
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 317.
17 PCP, 30.
18 See, Harold Bloom, Repression and Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Mary
Arensberg, ed., The American Sublime (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Rob Wilson, American
Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
19 Boffetti, “How Richard Rorty Found Religion,” 26–27.
20 Ibid., 26.
220 Defending Rorty

notoriously calls religion a “conversation-stopper” because its absolutist

propositions shut down productive democratic politics. In a 2003 “recon-
sideration,” Rorty confesses that this characterization of religion was “hasty
and insufficiently thoughtful.”21 He explains that his exchanges with inter-
locutors like Nicholas Wolterstorff and Jeffrey Stout have convinced him to
moderate and refine his position on religion. Indeed, Rorty also engaged with
the Italian Catholic philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, which led him to explore
more thoroughly the relationship of his pragmatism to religion.22 Vattimo
intrigues Rorty because he is a philosopher who has learned a similar antimeta-
physical lesson about historical contingency from the Continental canon of
Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger-Gadamer, and yet who nevertheless remains a the-
ist (however idiosyncratically).
Indeed, Rorty appears not only to have made his peace with religion, but
now wields religious language on behalf of his utopian project. Boffetti writes
that in Achieving Our Country,

Rorty describes a uniquely American faith, whose adherents, he writes, have included
Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes Rorty calls
this American faith a “religion of democracy” and at other times “romantic polytheism.”
But both concepts bring together in a single vision his strong sense of “social justice”
and an appreciation for the sublime and the mystical.23

Richard John Neuhaus concurs, noting that, “when Rorty gets his political
wind up,” he “portrays liberal democracy as a quasi-religion.”24 Rorty can
even sound a bit preachy, as he does in the first epigraph to this chapter, when
echoing Dewey’s view that religious sentiment should ideally be bound up with
our social hopes for democracy. Steven C. Rockefeller, in his magisterial study
of Dewey’s religious thought, describes Dewey’s “religion” like this:

Dewey did not doubt that there is religious – ultimate – meaning and value to be realized
in life. He did not, however, believe that the self could participate in the reality of the
divine except in and through relation to other persons and the larger world of nature.
From his perspective the idea of God as an all-powerful perfect being dwelling apart
from the world is an illusion just as the idea of the self as a being which can develop
itself and find fulfillment in itself as an isolated ego is an illusion. . . . The divine, he

21 Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 141.

22 See, e.g., Future of Religion, ed. Zabala; Richard Rorty, An Ethics For Today: Finding Common
Ground Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011);
Richard Rorty, “Foreword,” in Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, Gianni
Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Richard Rorty,
“Heideggerianism and Leftist Politics,” in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni
Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 149–58;
Gianni Vattimo, “Truth, Solidarity, History,” in PRR, 574–83; Richard Rorty, “Response to
Gianni Vattimo,” in PRR, 584–86.
23 Boffetti, “How Richard Rorty Found Religion,” 26.
24 Neuhaus, American Babylon, 129.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 221

taught, is to be identified with a unified vision of the ideal, the common good, and with
those forces and processes in nature and human culture that make for the actualization
of the ideal. God – if one chooses to use this traditional symbolic language – is the mind,
heart, and body of the authentic community, which finds its highest expression in the
contemporary world in creative democracy.25

This seems consistent with Rorty’s endorsement of a “spirituality” that

amounts to “an exalted sense of new possibilities opening up for finite beings,”
as opposed to a “yearning for the infinite.”26 While Rorty’s “religion of democ-
racy” is far from a traditional orthodoxy, we must still ask whether it violates
the Jeffersonian compromise that he insists all other religions must abide by.
Indeed, Boffetti suggests that Rorty’s new religiosity contradicts his anticleri-
calism, because his “religion” has institutions that are politically very powerful
and which Rorty fully endorses: our colleges and universities.27 He thus accuses
Rorty of exhibiting a “quasi-religious zealotry” that is politically intolerant of
other faiths.28
Yet despite having identified this “religious turn” in Rorty’s thought, Bof-
fetti concedes that Rorty’s “new religion” continues to coexist in his work
alongside expressions of militant secularism.29 In Nicholas H. Smith’s subtle
analysis, any rapprochement between pragmatic liberalism and religion that
Rorty sometimes appears to be urging is dubious. He concludes that “antago-
nisms between Rorty’s pragmatism and religion re-emerge.”30 Indeed, the final
epigraph to this chapter, where Rorty expresses his wish that religion would
“wither away,” was one of the last things he wrote: a posthumously published
reply to Stout’s defense of religion as a positive influence in American politics.
Rorty thus continues to endorse his anti-religion position to the end, following
Hume to the grave as a committed nonbeliever.
So what are we to make of this apparent hodgepodge? Does Rorty have a
coherent position on religion’s role in pragmatic liberal modernity, or are his
disparate discussions simply irreconcilable? This chapter suggests that we can
best make sense of Rorty’s thinking on religion if we understand the three
middle positions as constituting a pragmatic halfway house on the journey
to Rorty’s ideal: the secularized liberal utopia of the future in which no one
takes the metaphysical propositions of conventional religion seriously. For all
of Rorty’s praise of the Jeffersonian compromise, he wants liberal civilization
to move beyond it and become a “postreligious” culture.31 Indeed, Rorty adds

25 Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 562.
26 Rorty, An Ethics For Today, 14.
27 Boffetti, “How Richard Rorty Found Religion,” 28.
28 Ibid., 30.
29 Ibid., 24.
30 Nicholas H. Smith, “Rorty on Religion and Hope,” Inquiry 48 (February 2005), 79.
31 CIS, xvi.
222 Defending Rorty

a shocking footnote to his announcement that he is not so much anti-religion

as he is anticlericalist:

Of course, we anticlericalists who are also leftists in politics have a further reason for
hoping that institutionalized religion will eventually disappear. We think otherworldli-
ness dangerous because, as John Dewey put it, “Men have never fully used the powers
they possessed to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power
external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.”32

While Rorty is especially suspicious of institutionalized religion – a category

expansive enough to capture much of what we call “religion” – he distrusts reli-
gious belief in general for the same reason he criticizes metaphysics. Religions
typically entail beliefs in entities that are beyond and greater than humanity and
which make demands on, as well as promises to, us. Belief in such entities thus
constitutes a standing temptation to authoritarianism, and, as Dewey suggests,
encourages fatalism and quietism. Rorty writes,

As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside
any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans. . . . What Dewey most
disliked about both traditional “realist” epistemology and about traditional religious
beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority
over us.33

But if this is Rorty’s position, how can we reconcile it with his so-called
religious turn? The crucial thing to recognize about Rorty’s use of religious
metaphors in support of liberal utopia is that they do not imply the existence
of a nonhuman authority. He writes, “The kind of religious faith which seems
to me to lie behind the attractions of both utilitarianism and pragmatism is,
instead, a faith in the future possibilities of moral humans, a faith which is
hard to distinguish from love for, and hope for, the human community.”34 His
“religious faith” is thus a hope for a progressive democratic future, not for
redemption by God or the cosmos.
Does this mean that the pragmatic, virtuous citizens of the “secular, through
and through,” liberal utopia are necessarily atheists? Not quite. It simply means
that, if one must have a sensus divinitatis, it does not serve as an authority that
can override the evolving norms established through liberal democratic politics.
This is the sort of faith Rorty understands Vattimo to have. As commentators
(including Rorty) have noted, Vattimo’s “weak thought” Catholic theology is
of a piece with Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s characterization of religious

32 Rorty, The Future of Religion, 40, n. 2, quoting John Dewey, A Common Faith in The Later
Works of John Dewey, 1933–1934, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 2008), vol. 9, 31.
33 Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” 7, 9.
34 PSH, 160–61.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 223

faith as “ultimate concern.”35 Rorty admires the way that Tillich “fuzzes up”
conventional Christianity, rendering it noncreedal:
Liberal Protestants, to whom Tillich sounds plausible, are quite willing to talk about
their faith in God, but demur at spelling out just what beliefs that faith includes. Fun-
damentalist Catholics, to whom Tillich sounds blasphemous, are happy to enumerate
their beliefs by reciting the Creed, and to identify their faith in those beliefs. The rea-
son the Tillichians think they can get along without creeds, or with a blessedly vague
symbolic interpretation of creedal statements, is that they think the point of religion is
not to produce any specific habit of action, but rather to make the sort of difference to
a human life which is made by the presence or absence of love.36
This Tillichian-Vattimian love of the divine, like one person’s love for another,
cannot not be spelled out into some sort of theory that serves as a basis for
action. It is rather a disposition of ultimate hope, and as such, it does not inter-
fere with the liberal democratic project. Indeed, Rorty’s “religion of democ-
racy,” if we can indeed call it such, is simply an expression of ultimate hope for
Whitman’s “democratic vista,” hope that fortifies us as we confront challenges
to liberal justice.
Since most religion at present does not take this nonauthoritarian form,
however, Rorty is suspicious of it as an obstacle to liberal progress. Neverthe-
less, unlike the New Atheists, he refrains from trying to convince believers to
drop their religious beliefs by showing them that they are “wrong about the
facts.” He is skeptical of attempts to rationally argue people into the secularist
or, at least, Tillichian camp. This is why he is willing, in the short run, merely
to insist on the Jeffersonian compromise, and hope that over time we will cease
to need conventional religion and its institutions. In what follows, I exam-
ine Rorty’s debates with Wolterstorff and Stout, which exhibit his struggle to
articulate his pragmatic position on religion.

Wolterstorff
Wolterstorff and Carter take umbrage at Rorty’s Jeffersonian compromise.
They cannot abide contemporary liberal theory’s intolerant relegation of reli-
gion to the private sphere because they maintain that religious thinking is essen-
tial to their democratic political reasoning. Carter, for example, argues that
privatizing religion requires believers to treat their faith as if it were some sort
of quaint hobby, like “building model airplanes . . . something quiet, something
private, something trivial – and not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-
spirited adults.”37 This is not toleration of religion, but rather the destruction
of it. He insists that a truly tolerant liberal democracy does not restrict the

35 See, e.g., R.R. Reno, “Loving the Law,” First Things 219 (January 2012), 34–35.
36 PSH, 158.
37 Stephen L. Carter, A Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivializes Religion
(New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 22.
224 Defending Rorty

political sphere to “citizens willing to speak in a purely secular language, but

instead is equally open to religious and nonreligious argument.”38
Because he is a virtue liberal rather than a minimalist about liberalism’s
ethical demands, Rorty does not does try to reassure Carter that his religious
faith can be welcomed by the liberal public sphere. While he does not believe
that a liberal society should ban religious language in politics, liberalism must
not back down when it clashes with religious belief, no matter how sincere
and heartfelt it is. For example, Rorty writes, “When we American college
teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility
of reformulating our own practices so as to give more weight to the authority of
the Christian scriptures. Instead we do our best to convince these students of
the benefits of secularization.”39 Indeed, if one reads carefully what Boffetti
calls Rorty’s “mea culpa” to Carter, it is clear that Rorty does not backtrack an
inch: his liberal politics will not finally accommodate religion that undermines
the liberal virtues and obstructs public progress toward his secularized liberal
utopia.40
As an anticlericalist, Rorty does not pull punches about the odious influence
that he thinks religious institutions have often had on democratic politics. In
Rorty’s view, pragmatic liberals can “grant that ecclesiastical organizations
have sometimes been on the right side, but we think that the occasional Gus-
tavo Guttierez or Martin Luther King does not compensate for the ubiquitous
Joseph Ratzingers and Jerry Falwells. History suggests to us that such orga-
nizations will always, on balance, do more harm than good.”41 For example,
he sees the contemporary debate over gay equality as “a standoff between
a sizable body of opinion that treats gays and lesbians as contemptible and
despicable and another body of opinion that treats those who quote Leviticus
18:22 as contemptible and despicable.” He notes that “religious reasons are
pretty much the only reasons brought forward in favor of treating [gays and
lesbians] with contempt.”42 He concludes that perhaps “the reason Christian
pulpits have become the principal source of homophobia is the same as the rea-
sons that they were the principal source of European anti-Semitism – namely,
that encouraging exclusivist bigotry brings money and power to ecclesiastical
organizations.”43 Thus, for Rorty, the relevant disagreement that he has with
Wolterstorff is over whether, empirically, ecclesiastical organizations are more
likely to harm or help the quest for liberal justice.
Wolterstorff retorts that he is tempted to tell his own historical narrative of
how religion has crucially bolstered, rather than undermined, human freedom

38 Carter, Culture of Disbelief, 214.

39 Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” 22.
40 Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square.”
41 Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 142.
42 Ibid., 146.
43 Ibid.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 225

and well-being. Instead, however, he chides Rorty and his fellow liberal the-
orists for their hypocritical fear of pluralism – especially religious pluralism –
which drives their insistence that liberal democratic politics must proceed from
“shared moral (i.e., liberal) premises.” Because these premises must be shared,
liberal theorists insist that they must be secular; they cannot, given religious
pluralism, be religious premises. Wolterstorff, however, rejects the idea that
democratic politics must begin from shared moral premises. Liberal theorists
must get over their worry about too much pluralism producing intractable
moral disagreement in the public sphere. What is so surprising or disastrous
about a “stopped conversation” in pluralistic democratic politics? Wolterstorff
offers a time-tested solution to this alleged problem: “We take a vote.”

In Rorty, Rawls, Audi, Larmore, and their cohorts, there is an implicit dislike for a
procedure that I regard as belonging to the very essence of a democracy, viz., voting. I
do not understand it. . . . Conversation-stopping is not some appalling evil perpetrated
upon an otherwise endlessly-talkative public by religious people. Stopped conversation
is an all-pervasive feature of political debate in a democracy; and voting is a procedure
for arriving at a decision of the body when conversation is stopped.44

Wolterstorff concludes that the reason that this democratic solution is unac-
ceptable to Rorty is that he maintains a substantively anti-pluralist conception
of democracy.
On Wolterstorff’s more tolerant view, it is

the genius of liberal democracy to guarantee certain basic rights and liberties to its
citizens and resident aliens, and to assure access by all normal adults to fair voting
procedures. Given that basic framework, it accepts all “comprehensive doctrines,” to
use Rawls’ term, as they come. It does not tell religious people that they have to shape
up by privatizing their religion. . . . It doesn’t tell anybody that they have to shape up.
Come as you are.45

Some votes and judicial decisions you will win and some you will lose. “A
liberal democracy survives as long as those who lose the vote think it’s bet-
ter to lose the vote than to destroy the system. Its survival does not depend
on making anybody shape up to anything other than the formal requirements
of the system itself.”46 Against Rortyan liberalism, Wolterstorff argues that
this is a more realistic and tolerant conception of modern democracy, which
inevitably features a cacophony of voices and demands, and in which funda-
mental disagreements get resolved, not by philosophy, but through the ballot
box. Wolterstorff, however, passes too easily over the demanding ethical pre-
suppositions of such a politics.

44 Wolterstorff, “Engagement with Rorty,” 136.

45 Ibid., 137.
46 Ibid.
226 Defending Rorty

Indeed, this is all a bit quick. There is a reason that liberal theorists are not
satisfied with Wolterstorff’s ostensibly straightforward democratic procedural-
ism. One need hardly invoke the worst democratic injustices (e.g., the election
of Hitler) to be concerned that voting can lead to a tyranny of the majority
and produce unjust and anti-pluralist political results. Of course, Wolterstorff
is not a simple majoritarian. As the passages quoted earlier indicate, Wolter-
storffian democracy presupposes a liberal framework of “certain basic rights
and liberties” and a citizenry that is ethically disposed to respect it. But how
is the requisite commitment to this moral framework any different from the
idea of “shared moral premises” for which Wolterstorff lambastes liberal theo-
rists? As Wolterstorff surely knows, it is the details of his assumed framework
of rights, which he leaves utterly unarticulated, that are at issue for liberal
democratic theory and, ultimately, politics. He thus commits the philosophical
sin of begging the question by blithely and implausibly assuming that there is
unproblematic agreement on the framework of “rights and liberties” in which
voting takes place. Simply “taking a vote” fails to adequately solve deep dis-
agreements about this framework, because the very point of calling something
a “right” means that it is not something that should be subject to a vote.
Wolterstorff’s simplistic response to liberals who are concerned about how to
navigate fundamental moral disagreement about justice in a liberal political
regime is thus singularly inadequate and unsatisfying. He owes us more here,
but exploring the liberal framework and what the commitment to it means for
the ethical characters of the citizens is something he wants to avoid. Yet even
he indicates, if ever so subtly, that it implies a degree of ethical conformity that
runs counter to his insistence on the robust pluralism of his theory of liberal
democracy.
Indeed, when he chastises liberal theorists for insisting that political argu-
ment must proceed from shared, and therefore secular, premises, Wolterstorff
challenges, “Here’s a more just arrangement: letting people say what they want
to say on political issues and letting them argue for their positions as they think
best to argue for them, provided they conduct themselves with the requisite
virtues.”47 Although Wolterstorff forcefully insists that a tolerant democracy
does not tell citizens to ethically “shape up” but rather to “come as you are,” he
then adds that, by the way, there are “requisite virtues” they must possess, as if
this were an insignificant thing. As Macedo points out, “So great is the desire to
respect diversity, ‘difference,’ and particular commitments and identities that
many [proponents of pluralism] seem to forget that peaceful, orderly, tolerant
liberal diversity needs to be planned for: it does not come about naturally or
by the deliverance of an invisible hand.”48

47 Ibid., 135 (emphasis added).

48 Stephen Macedo, “Liberal Civic Education and Its Limits,” Canadian Journal of Education 20
(Summer 1995), 304.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 227

The tradition of virtue liberal thought in which I place Rorty suggests that
“creating” such liberal citizens is no mean feat, requiring much in the way
of liberal education and socialization.49 Because being a good liberal citizen
entails a distinct, ethical way of looking at the world, Macedo argues that
“[l]iberal political norms have a private life: they help shape and structure
the private lives of liberal citizens.”50 Indeed, “[t]he success and stability of
liberal politics depends on people’s private beliefs and commitments becoming
importantly liberalized – becoming, that is, supportive of liberal politics.”51
Contra Wolterstorff, liberal politics inevitably tells citizens to “shape up.” This
is because “[l]iberalism embodies a set of substantive moral values, positive
values that should secure the highest allegiance of liberal citizens, values that
override or preclude many commitments, require some, and condition all other
goals and projects, positive values that penetrate and pervasively shape the lives
and characters of liberal citizens.”52
Rorty, because he is explicitly committed to a substantive moral and polit-
ical ideal of Deweyan liberal democracy, understands this. This is why he is
so brazen about his intentions to educate his students who hail from ethi-
cal and religious backgrounds that are incompatible with this ideal away from
those backgrounds and toward his ideal. As Wolterstorrf notes, Rorty endorses
Dewey’s view that the socialization of American children in school should
consist

in acquiring an image of themselves as heirs to a tradition of increasing liberty and rising

hope. Updating Dewey a bit, we can think of him as wanting the children to come think
of themselves as proud and loyal citizens of a country that, slowly and painfully, threw
off a foreign yoke, freed its slaves, enfranchised its women, restrained its robber barons
and licensed its trade unions, liberalized its religious practices, broadened its religious
and moral tolerance, and built colleges in which 50 per cent of its population could
enroll – a country that numbered Jefferson, Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene Debs,
Woodrow Wilson, Walther Reuther, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Rosa Parks and James
Baldwin among its citizens. Dewey wanted the inculcation of this narrative of freedom
and hope to be the core of the socializing process.53

To this passage, Wolterstorff responds, “Do you understand why I as a reli-

gious person find this menacing? . . . I do not want the government pressing
the Darwinian pragmatist’s religion of the American Sublime on me and my

49 Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
50 Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitution-
alism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 265.
51 Ibid., 54.
52 Ibid., 265.
53 PSH, 121–22.
228 Defending Rorty

children, anymore than Rorty wants the government pressing my religious Sub-
lime on him and his children.”54 But, like Rawls and other minimalist liberals,
Wolterstorff cannot finally have it both ways: a deep, operative commitment
to liberal democratic politics and a deep, operative commitment to a nonliberal
creed. Given the evolving nature of liberalism, there is no guarantee that these
commitments will not clash, and when they do, virtuous liberal citizens are
willing and able, as pragmatists, to abandon or modify such creeds in order to
abide by liberal norms. There is no principled, as opposed to pragmatic, reason
why liberals should accommodate nonliberal, authoritarian creeds, given the
risk to justice that they pose. Ideally, they are educated and socialized out of
existence.
Exposing what he calls Rorty’s “Darwinian pragmatist’s religion of the
American Sublime,” Wolterstorff recognizes that Rorty’s co-optation of reli-
gious language to describe his liberal utopia is anything but a reconciliation
with conventional religion. It is rather a rhetorical gambit to secure for his polit-
ical ideal the passion that religious devotion often inspires, rather than a true
rapprochement with traditional faith. In fact, Rorty usually prefers to apply
the adjective “romantic,” rather than “religious,” to his passionate, imagina-
tive, this-worldly hopes for humanity. But because postmodern theologians and
philosophers of religion have so expanded our notion of what counts as “reli-
gion,” Rorty avails himself of their largess. He can, without too much irony,
for example, suggest that hope for a future liberal utopia should replace faith
in God as our Tillichian religious “symbol of ultimate concern.” He knows, of
course, that the vast majority of believers at present would not find this uncon-
ventional, humanistic “religion” as even remotely religious. Yet if Tillich and
Vattimo can grow in influence, so perhaps can Rorty’s vision of the American
Sublime.

Stout
Although he is a secular pragmatist who has been much influenced by Rorty,
Stout does not quite qualify as the “boring” sort of atheist: unlike Rorty, he is a
scholar of religion and is therefore much more interested in and sanguine about
religious belief. Like Rorty, however, he does worry about the illiberal political
influence of some strains of religion. He also, in contrast to the New Atheists,
prefers to criticize these strains “without using the concept of rationality as a
club.”55 But that is where the similarity between Rorty and him on religion
ends. Stout charges that “Rorty’s writings on the role of religion in politics
often retain the spirit, if not the letter, of militant secularism,” whereas Stout
strives to see “religion, in its public as well as its private manifestations, as an

54 Wolterstorff, “Engagement with Rorty,” 139.

55 Jeffrey Stout, “Rorty on Religion and Politics,” in PRR, 524.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 229

ever-changing mixture of life-giving and malignant tendencies.”56 Where Rorty

dreams of a completely secular liberal utopia, Stout’s liberal utopia features
secularists and religious believers proceeding arm-in-arm, working together to
achieve a just society.
As we have seen, Rorty thinks the downside of the more numerous, illiberal
Falwells tends to outweigh the upside of the religious heroes of liberalism, like
MLK. Stout, in contrast, lets his hope for MLK’s eclipse his fear of the Falwells.
He writes, “My dream is to revive the sort of coalition between religious groups
and secular intellectuals that I first experienced when I joined the civil rights
movement as a teenager. Only by rebuilding such a coalition, it seems to me,
are we likely to save American democracy from plutocrats and theocrats at
home and abroad.”57 Rorty responds with complete agreement that this is the
best-case political scenario in the short term, that is, at least for the “next
couple of centuries,” since religion is not about to disappear in this time frame.
But he insists on the importance of pursuing “a long-term, militantly secularist,
philosophical agenda” that will hopefully one day result in a “perfect secularist
utopia,” whose inhabitants will be “puzzled about how democracy managed
to survive in a time when a majority of citizens still professed to believe that
the wrong political choices might doom them to the fires of hell and the right
ones entitle them to the joys of paradise.”58
Given his much more positive assessment of the political and cultural poten-
tial of religion, Stout challenges Rorty’s insistence that secularization must be
the long-term goal for pragmatic liberals. For Stout, secularization, even if it
were possible, throws the baby out with the bathwater. In contrast to Rorty,
Stout sees no reason why liberal believers should refrain from using arguments
from scripture in the political realm, and argues that when scripture is used
to justify illiberal policies, liberals should challenge these arguments “on their
own ground” by citing other scriptural passages that illiberal Christians arbi-
trarily ignore.59 Stout agrees with Rorty that some people who, for example,
quote Leviticus 18:22 to justify anti-gay discrimination are indeed homophobic
sadists, but refuses to accept the implication that all who do are. Instead, Stout
divides believers who espouse antigay policies based on religious grounds into
three groups: (1) sadists motivated by hatred and cruelty; (2) sincere believers
who are trying their best to figure out what the Bible teaches about homosex-
uality, gender roles, and so on; and (3) people who are more or less unreflec-
tively against liberal policies, such as same-sex marriage, not because they hate
gays, but because they have been raised (religiously) to accept that position.
Stout insists that while people in the first group may be genuinely vicious and

56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Rorty, “Reply to Stout,” 549.
59 Stout, “Rorty on Religion and Politics,” 531.
230 Defending Rorty

unconvertible, the latter two groups, and especially group (3), might be reached
and have their minds changed.
The way for a liberal to do this, Stout tells us, is to show religious believers
that one takes the details of the Bible seriously. Liberals should, for example,
ask religious believers to explain why, if they take Leviticus as their basis for
being against gay equality, they do not take other biblical passages literally,
like Exodus 21:7, which permits a father to sell his daughter into slavery? Stout
contends that, if such believers are “confronted with the flimsiness of their rea-
soning,” they are likely to change their minds, or else reveal themselves to be
motivated merely by hatred and fear.60 Rorty is therefore wrong to discourage
religious reasoning in the public square; religious arguments for illiberal poli-
cies should rather be engaged head on and liberals should pragmatically use
religious language to undermine them.
Rorty, unsurprisingly, is more dubious that such a Socratic ploy can, as it
were, separate the sheep from the goats. After all, as Stout admits, “few people
take themselves to be hateful or sadistic,” and “[g]iven that rational entitle-
ment [to one’s beliefs] is context-sensitive and that relevant features of context
vary from person to person, this sort of criticism is bound to be complicated
business.”61 Rorty is famous, of course, for his skepticism about the power
of “rational” argument, because interlocutors who deeply disagree with each
other so often proceed from such different premises that they cannot but appear
to one another to be begging the question. Committed religious homophobes
will have rationalizations at hand for why some biblical passages must be inter-
preted one way rather than another. After all, the Christian tradition of taking
some scriptural passages more literally and others more allegorically goes all
the way back to first readings of Paul’s Letters. Thus, although arguments
pointing up alleged inconsistencies may occasionally change minds, Rorty gen-
erally does not “share Stout’s belief that ‘picking apart their rationalizations’
is likely to give Leviticus-citers ‘insight into their own motives.’”62 Although
Rorty maintains that citizens should generally be allowed to say what they want
in the public sphere, he suspects that, empirically, the net effect of legitimizing
religious argument in politics – even liberal religious argument – will bolster
illiberalism.
Stout not only thinks that Rorty underestimates the possibility of rationally
convincing religious believers of the errors of their illiberal beliefs; he also
accuses Rorty of underestimating the positive role ecclesiastical institutions
can play in advancing liberal democratic justice. This is, of course, the same
empirical disagreement that Rorty has with Wolterstorff, and it is difficult to see
how it could ever be resolved. Attempting to count up the historical instances
of “good” and “bad” behavior by ecclesiastical institutions seems rather futile,

60 Ibid., 532, passim.

61 Ibid., 530, 532.
62 Rorty, “Reply to Stout,” 548.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 231

even if there was agreement on what qualifies as “good” and “bad” (although
Rorty and Stout, as pragmatic liberals, appear to have more agreement on the
standards than do Rorty and Wolterstorff).
Lastly, Stout attacks Rorty’s hunch that “nontheists make better citizens
than theists.”63 Stout argues that this conclusion does not follow from Rorty’s
pragmatism, which looks to the practical consequences of belief. Theism,
defined simply as belief in God, “involves no political implications whatso-
ever,” and thus has no necessary connection to the quality of one’s citizenship.64
Indeed, Stout believes that Rorty pretty much concedes this point when he
praises religious thinkers like Vattimo for adopting a version of theism that
amounts to little more than the notion that God is love. Given that “bare
theism” does not necessarily lead to bad liberal democratic citizenship, Stout
advises Rorty to avoid sweeping generalizations about the compatibility of
theism and liberalism and instead evaluate the political meaning of each set of
beliefs on a case-by-case basis.65
Stout tries to make sense of Rorty’s seemingly unpragmatic anti-theism
by attributing to him the assumption that theism must be accompanied by a
distinction between the natural and the supernatural. This distinction opens
the door to the sort of spectatorial conception of knowledge that Rorty has
spent his career criticizing, because it suggests that there is a supernatural,
“God’s-eye view” of reality. This then inevitably leads to claims by some, for
example, priests and prophets, to have privileged access to this ultimate view,
which causes problems for democratic political equality.66 Stout notes that
one finds similar lines of logic in Dewey and Hegel. He also asserts, without
much discussion, that these arguments are simply not persuasive: there is no
necessary dialectical direction from theism to authoritarianism.
Stout here puts his finger on the crux of Rorty’s position: if pragmatism
“entails that epistemic authority or privilege is always and only a matter of
social agreement among human beings, then theism, with its characteristic
acknowledgement of an ultimate, non-human source of authority, is incom-
patible with pragmatism – and also perhaps with democracy.”67 Indeed, the
reason that Rorty has no problem with the peculiar theism of a philoso-
pher like Vattimo is that Vattimo’s own theology prevents him from mak-
ing any ethical or political claims on the basis of his religion. But, as Stout
well knows, this is not the case with most theists, who believe that divine
will, represented in their religious belief and practices, is (or should be) the
source of their ethical codes. Stout’s logical point that theism has no ethical

63 Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradi-
tion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (June 2010), 419.
64 Stout, “Rorty on Religion and Politics,” 537.
65 Ibid., 538.
66 Ibid., 537.
67 Ibid., 540.
232 Defending Rorty

or political implications is correct but trivial, because that is not empirically

what most theists believe.
Because religious believers are likely to endow their metaphysical creeds, and
the institutions that promulgate them, with normative authority (that is often
the point of having such creeds and institutions, after all), Rorty is skeptical
that believers will properly and consistently privatize their religion. Large,
organized, politically active religious institutions heighten this risk to liberal
culture, which is why Rorty presses his anticlerical position. Yet finally he wants
to move beyond mere anticlericalism and the Jeffersonian compromise: insofar
as absolutist creeds are empirically at the heart of many religions (particularly
the Abrahamic religions that we know best in the Western world), even “parish-
level” or privatized religion is problematic. Rorty may trust that his pragmatist
friend, Vattimo, will manage to avoid conceiving of his God as any sort of
authority, but he has no confidence that most believers will be consistently
ironical about their religious beliefs. Thus, Rorty hopes for a society in which
there is a “consensus that good citizenship requires us to have non-religious
bases for our political views. . . . If we secular humanists have our way, the
liberal democracies will eventually mutate into societies whose most sacred
texts were written by John Stuart Mill.”68
Stout offers one final argument to suggest that Rorty is wrong to see theism
as incompatible with pragmatic liberal democracy. Stout says that Rorty’s
pragmatism is a “pragmatism about norms,” which according to Brandom is
the idea that “any normative matter of epistemic authority or privilege . . . is
ultimately intelligible only in terms of the social practices that involve implicitly
recognizing or acknowledging such authority.”69 Stout observes that

Rorty glosses this in turn as the self-reliant claim that all authority rests ultimately in
human hands. But [theistic pragmatist] thinkers like [Peter] Ochs and [Cornel] West
can respond to this move, if they wish, by glossing “pragmatism about norms” simply
as the claim that all authority derives from social practices of mutual accountability
among persons, leaving open what sorts of persons there are. If one of the existing
persons is God, then authority can still be something that arises only within social
practices.70

Stout goes on to suggest that these practices might include “the very activities
that the Bible represents as involving human beings and God in partnership,
such as promise making, promise keeping, agreeing to enter a covenant, and
holding one another responsible in terms of a covenant.”71

68 Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 144.

69 Robert Brandom “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in
RC, 159.
70 Stout, “Rorty on Religion and Politics,” 541.
71 Ibid.
Rorty, Religion, and Pragmatic Liberalism 233

This is, one must admit, an interesting suggestion. Nevertheless, it is easy

to see why Rorty would demur if asked to extend the democratic political
community to include a Supreme Being: a “partnership” between God and
man could hardly resemble the one that ideally holds between equal democratic
citizens. Moreover, there is also the obvious problem that it is difficult to tell
when God is deliberating with us and our fellow (human) citizens. As Rorty
puts it, “As I see it, the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human
beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those
who answer to us – only to conversation partners. We are not responsible either
to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us.”72 If
Rorty is correct that religion, and especially its institutions, tend to encourage
authoritarian ideas and practices, then he is right to argue that it is not finally
compatible with the secular ideals of liberal democracy.

Conclusion
Rorty sees “theism as a resilient enemy of self-reliance, and metaphysics as
merely a surrogate for the traditional theistic insistence that we humans need
to abase ourselves before something non-human.”73 In light of his study of
Vattimo and Tillich, Rorty agrees with Stout that theism and religion are not
essentially problematic for pragmatic liberalism because they are not essen-
tially anything. Rather, his doubts about religion stem from his judgment that,
historically, it has been too often an obstacle to liberal progress. Empirically,
religion has traditionally been bound up with absolutist metaphysical thinking
involving hopes that something nonhuman governs our fate. Rorty’s pragmatic
liberal modernity is about having the courage to overcome over such hope.

If we give up this hope, we shall lose what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort,” but
we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our community –
our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage – is heightened when we
see this community as ours rather than as nature’s, shaped rather than found, one
among many which men have made. In the end, pragmatists tell us, what matters is
our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of
getting things right. James, in arguing against realists and idealists that “the trail of the
human serpent is over all,” was reminding us that our glory is in our participation in
fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent nonhuman
constraints.74

This is a bold vision (and no doubt horrifying to the traditional faithful), and
Rorty admits that, like James (and Huxley), we fluctuate between “romantic”

72 Rorty, “Pragmatism and Democracy,” 423.

73 Ibid.
74 CP, 166.
234 Defending Rorty

moods, which find us chuffed by dreams of a heroic but all-too-human future,

and moods of “chastened humility,” in which we hanker for divine approval
and guarantees. Thus, he agrees with James that religious belief satisfies a real
and deep need.75 Nevertheless, Rorty insists that secular beliefs can satisfy as
well, and without the authoritarian risk. Conventional religion finally just is
not worth the trouble. If we can rid our culture of “any trace of the divine,”
we will be more likely to secure the blessings of pragmatic liberalism.

75 PSH, 162–63.
6

Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island

The time will no doubt come when our present philosophies will seem as prepos-
terous as the medieval schoolmen’s speculations about the nature of matter now
seem to us. Meanwhile let us beware of taking any of the Riddles of the Universe
too painfully to heart. They are in all probability bogus problems. And in any
case the important thing is always life, not thoughts about life.1
– Aldous Huxley
The prime mistake of Christian moralists and idealists has been to suppose that
the human character is fundamentally consistent; or alternatively that, if it isn’t in
fact very consistent, it ought to be made so. . . . For consistency, the consistency of
unflagging spirituality, is one of the principal characteristics of that superhuman
being that it is man’s duty to become. The soul must be reduced to singleness,
violently – if necessary, surgically; all but one of the hydra’s heads must be
chopped off. So commands the superhumanist. The humanist, on the other hand,
admits the right to existence of all the heads; his preoccupation is to keep the whole
collection, if not at peace (for that would be impossible), at least in a condition of
balanced hostility, of chronically indecisive warfare, in which defeats are alternate
and the victories impermanent.2
– Aldous Huxley

What is the best introduction to political philosophy? Our minds instinctively

reach for one of the classics: Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince,
Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s Social Contract or, above all, Plato’s Repub-
lic. According to Rorty, however, it is a book that does not appear to be a work
of philosophy at all. It is Aldous Huxley’s celebrated dystopian novel, Brave

1 Aldous Huxley, “Ravens and Writing Desks,” in Complete Essays, Volume II: 1926–1929, ed.
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 302.
2 Aldous Huxley, “Spinoza’s Worm,” in Complete Essays, Volume II, ed. Baker and Sexton, 325.

235
236 Defending Rorty

New World. Rorty defends this idiosyncratic pick by arguing that the novel
creatively challenges our post-Enlightenment commitment to utilitarian tech-
nocracy by warning us about “what sort of human future would be produced
by a naturalism untempered by historicist Romanticism, and by a politics aimed
merely at alleviating mammalian pain.”3 In addition to his praise of Huxley’s
masterpiece, Rorty has also written an important essay on that other great
dystopian novel of the twentieth century, George Orwell’s 1984, in which he
explores the subject of cruelty.4 For Rorty, novels like these are indispensi-
ble for political thinking because they stretch our conventional frameworks of
thought.
Rorty’s serious engagement with dystopian literature is a product of his con-
viction that literary media are primary tools for fomenting moral and political
progress.5 Well-crafted fictional and nonfictional accounts of particular Others
and their situations help us expand our moral imaginations and reform our
moral identities. In Rorty’s words:

This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is
a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription
of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as
ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially,
the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Shreiner, or Richard Wright gives us
details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously
not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives
us details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets
us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have,
gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of
moral change and progress.6

While formal works of moral and political philosophy can be important (usu-
ally at the margins of progress) and do have a role to play in helping us
think about our politics, Rorty insists that, for example, Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle is ultimately more important for our pursuit of social justice than Eduard
Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism is, and that Orwell and Huxley are more
needful for liberal political culture than Rawls and Habermas are.
Although Rorty never wrote a novel aimed at educating our sentiments, he
adopts the literary term “utopian” to describe his own hopes for liberal politics
and culture.7 Rorty writes,

3 Richard Rorty, “Response to Robert Brandom,” in RC, 189; see also Richard Rorty, “Response
to Matthew Festenstein,” in RRCD, 222.
4 CIS, 169–88.
5 See, e.g., ibid., p. xvi; TP, 167–85.
6 CIS, xvi.
7 He did, however, pen a brief, imaginative, prospective history that describes the collapse and
reemergence of American democracy during the twenty-first century. See his “Looking Back-
wards From the Year 2096” (PSH, 243–51).
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 237

A historicist and nominalist culture of the sort I envisage would settle instead for
narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian
futures on the other. More important, it would regard the realization of utopias, and
the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process – an endless, proliferating
realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth.8

“Utopia” for Rorty is thus not an impossible society lacking political conflict
or ethical angst, but rather simply an imaginative extension of our best liberal
democratic political ideals.9 He concurs with George Kateb’s assertion that,
“[t]he principal mission of utopianism is to encourage the hope that human
nature is malleable beyond the limits assigned by worldly pessimism or theo-
logical despair.”10 Rorty’s description of liberal utopia, though inspirational,
is admittedly “lightly sketched.”11 As we saw in Chapter 3, this has led critics
to pounce on his “vague” defense of liberalism for its lack of substance and
failure to directly engage pressing political issues.
Policy-level engagement, however, is not the primary point of Rorty’s philo-
sophical work. Rather, his utopian musings are pitched at the more intellectu-
ally ethereal level of the history of ideas, and are therefore particularly aimed at
the intellectual class, especially liberal theorists and critics of liberalism, rather
than directly at politicians and technocrats in their professional roles. He would
vehemently deny, however, that this means his project is lacking in “practical”
value. To the contrary, the sort of “big picture” thinking that philosophers like
Rorty produce plays a vital role in shaping the backdrop of culture and values
upon which our more immediate political concerns become salient. The philo-
sophical abstractions of John Locke, for example, in their own way, arguably
mean much more for the American political project over the long haul than
whether and how we presently reform our health care system. Indeed, we argue
about the latter in terms that Locke helped invent.
Utopian thinking in Rorty’s sense is therefore practical and even necessary
for political philosophy. Utopian thinking – our ability to imagine our way to
a better, more humane and just future – is crucial for liberal progress. Rorty
therefore explicitly calls on liberal writers to “take greater pains to dream up
utopias which, though filled with conflict, are nonetheless greatly preferred
to the socio-economic setup we have at present.” He even submits that sci-
ence fiction is the “most widely read, most imaginative and fruitful genre of
long-range political deliberation.”12 In this vein, he identifies not only Brave
New World and 1984 as relevant to political thought, but also discusses Neal

8 CIS, xvi.
9 Rorty, “Response to Matthew Festenstein,” 222.
10 George Kateb, “Utopias and Utopianism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul
Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 215.
11 This is a phrase of approval that Rorty applies to Roberto Unger’s similar “political romanti-
cism” (EHO, 183).
12 Rorty, “Response to Matthew Festenstein,” 222.
238 Defending Rorty

Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
(and in his discussion of these latter two works, Rorty also mentions Richard
Condon’s Manchurian Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as Pynchon’s Vine-
yard and Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost).13
We might notice, however, that all of these works are manifestly dystopian
rather than utopian visions that suggest possible liberal futures. Indeed, one is
hard-pressed to find any mention of idealistic utopian fiction in Rorty’s writing.
Yet it does not appear to be the case, for Rorty, that only dystopian fiction,
depicting negative scenarios to be avoided, is useful to the liberal project. For
example, he praises the effusive visions of utopian democracy in the poetry
of Walt Whitman as exemplifying a vital, positive hope in liberal democratic
possibility.14 Moreover, he writes that “[i]t would be well to have a docu-
ment which spelled out the details of a this-worldly utopia without assuring
us that this utopia will emerge full-blown, and quickly, as soon as some single
decisive change has occurred.”15 He even counts imaginative works of liberal
theory, like those of Dewey and Rawls, as constituting a genre of useful, posi-
tive utopian literature (while remaining committed to his suspicion that more
literary, less analytic efforts generally have more rhetorical efficacy for most
audiences). Nevertheless, it is curious that he never identifies any specific works
of utopian fiction as providing attractive future scenarios that might edify and
inspire liberals in their quest for moral progress and justice.
One reason for this reticence, perhaps, is that a work of idealistic utopian
fiction would typically seem to qualify as politically revolutionary rather than
reformist. But Rorty never suggests that we should read utopian writing as
providing a social blueprint and an exhortation to reproduce the fantasy as
reality. Such an unironic approach to reading utopian fiction is an obvious
recipe for political disaster. Rather, the point of utopian writing is to provoke
thought and spark new ideas – to break our thinking out of its “crust of
convention.” Thus, Rorty’s praise of utopian fiction must not be taken to run
afoul of his conviction that liberal political thought has had the “last conceptual
revolution” that it needs.
Another possible reason that Rorty does not identify any positive utopian
fiction might be because he finds it generally lacking in the literary quality
of its dystopian counterpart. Indeed, Huxley, sardonically commenting on the
lackluster critical reception of his own positive utopian answer to Brave New
World – his less well-known and final novel, Island – surmises that “[i]t’s
with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. Which is why, as a novel,
Island is so inadequate.”16 Similarly, more recently, Martin Amis hints at the

13 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
4–8.
14 Ibid., 1–39.
15 PSH, 208.
16 Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002), 182.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 239

improbability of producing interesting positive utopian fiction in his novel, The

Information, where he mercilessly satirizes the mushy-headed, multiculturalist
paradise imagined in the best-selling tales of one of his characters.17 Still, such
views hardly constitute a definitive argument against the possibility of writing
good, liberal, utopian fiction of the sort that Rorty’s political project seems
to find helpful to liberal thought. In fact, I want to suggest that Rorty, in his
praise of Brave New World, unfortunately overlooks Huxley’s Island, which
presents an imaginative portrait of a society that in many ways lives up to
Rorty’s sketch of liberal utopia.
Although Island may never garner the literary laurels bestowed upon Brave
New World, Huxley’s positive utopia is worth a second look. Jeff Kripal,
Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, agrees and suggests that
we are witnessing a “Huxley renaissance.” Writing about the latest round of
modernity’s dance-cum-battle between “faith” and “reason,” which includes
the recent salvos fired by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Terry Eagleton,
Kripal asks, “What do neural Buddhists [David Brooks’s phrase for those who
think that science and mysticism are mutually supportive], individual spiritu-
alities, cultural wars over science and religion and creationism and evolution,
a nature-hating technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and poten-
tially omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were
all core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley
(1894–1963).”18 Huxley’s wife, Laura, told Kripal in an interview that her
husband attempted to place in Island all of his accumulated wisdom about
human nature and what it is capable of achieving at its best. Far from being
merely a whimsical literary “tropical paradise,” Island is aimed at making us
deeply question our contemporary values and political priorities. Kripal thus
suggests, “This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous
Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as important
as Brave New World, and that the two books should be read together.” By
comparing Huxley’s fictional liberal utopia in Island with Rorty’s conception,
we can deepen our understandings of both.
The first section of this chapter argues that Rorty and Huxley are broadly
intellectual fellow travelers: Huxley is a pragmatic, ironic, literary intellectual
in the Rortyan mold par excellence. Claiming Huxley for the pragmatist camp
may seem a bit of a stretch because, although he cites James with approval a
number of times in his massive collection of nonfictional essays, and mentions
Dewey in passing, Huxley never specifically engages the topic of American prag-
matism. This is unfortunate because, as the epigraphs suggest, he shares definite
philosophical affinities with the pragmatist thinkers, especially with James, and
thus also with Rorty. Indeed, Rorty’s and Huxley’s respective approaches to

17 Martin Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1995).

18 Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Brave New Worldview: The Return of Aldous Huxley,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, 54, 31 (2008), B7.
240 Defending Rorty

modern culture and its challenges are remarkably similar, even though they
differ in some of their predilections and concerns. These differences, however,
are mostly attributable to the different intellectual training that these two men
had, and the different historical times in which they lived, rather than to any
fundamental disagreement between them.
The second section of this chapter describes the society of Pala in Huxley’s
Island and shows how it meets the broad criteria of Rorty’s liberal utopia.
The Palanese community comprehensively cultivates and supports the liberal
virtues among its citizenry in order to progress toward its utopian vistas. Indeed,
Palanese culture presents one way in which the details of Rorty’s utopia might
be fleshed out. Island thus qualifies as something that Rorty’s approach to
liberalism calls for: an imaginative extension of liberal values and practices
that can provoke and inspire liberals to think about how their society might be
improved.
Lastly, the third section deals with the strongest objection to the claim
that Pala is a Rortyan liberal utopia: the idyllic, harmonious Palanese culture
appears at first glance to be to unlikely produce ironic “strong poets,” the
heroes of Rorty’s liberal vision. Although the Palanese are afforded an excel-
lent liberal education and are cultivated to possess the liberal virtues, including
the civic virtue of irony, one gets the impression that they are also effectively
socialized to be contented conformists – everyone is well adjusted and happy.
Can such a culture, seemingly bereft of alienation and cultural strife, produce
ironist intellectuals? Or is such a society inevitably stagnant and self-satisfied –
unlikely conditions for the emergence of strong poets with their culturally rev-
olutionary ideas? I counter, however, that Rorty’s liberal utopia requires a
similar conformity: all its citizens must be socialized and educated to possess
the liberal virtues. Obviously, Rorty does not think that this ethical homo-
geneity is incompatible with the existence of strong poets; to the contrary,
a population possessing the liberal virtues cultivated through a vibrant liberal
education creates the optimal conditions for strong poets. Such a political com-
munity would provide the regime of freedom and pluralism that best produces
them. Ideally, the only conceptual innovations that are stifled by the universal
possession of the liberal virtues are ones that are incompatible with liberal jus-
tice – that is, cruel practices that committed liberals should want to suppress. If
Rorty’s liberal utopia can produce strong poets, then Pala can too. Moreover,
the objection itself demonstrates how reading Island through a Rortyan lens
raises fertile questions about liberal politics and culture.

Rorty and Huxley: Kindred Intellectual Spirits?

Although their career tracks dovetail in that they both became prominent social
critics, Huxley and Rorty had very different intellectual starting places. While
Huxley’s family was only respectably upper middle class on the economic
ladder, they qualified as English intellectual aristocracy: the famous biologist,
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 241

T.H. Huxley, a.k.a., “Darwin’s Bulldog,” was his grandfather, and the iconic
Victorian man of letters, Matthew Arnold, was his great-uncle. It was thus
preordained that young Aldous should attend Eton and go up to Oxford.
Although as a boy he had wanted to study medicine, he contracted keratitis
punctata when he was sixteen and lost much of his eyesight.19 Consequently,
he abandoned his dream of becoming a physician, studied English literature at
Balliol College, and fixed his sights on becoming a poet and writer. He published
three volumes of poetry before turning to novel writing, which produced his
critically well-received debut effort, Crome Yellow (1921). Huxley began his
nonfictional prose career as a literary journalist and critic in 1919 to make ends
meet while he worked on his poetry and fiction, but he broadened the scope of
his nonfiction beyond literary subjects in the mid-1920s as his reputation as a
novelist grew. Although he obviously aspired to be a belle-lettrist and literary
light, there is little indication that he initially imagined himself becoming the
accomplished essayist and cultural commentator he eventually became.
Rorty was also born into an intellectual household: his parents were Left-
wing writers and activists who ran in New York intellectual circles and were
friendly with philosophers such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook. Although
Rorty and Huxley were both fascinated by literature and philosophy (which
is perhaps why neither put much stock in the ancient distinction between the
two genres), where Huxley veered into literary writing, Rorty chose academic
Philosophy as his métier. He got his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale and was
firmly on track as a promising young analytic philosopher, first at Wellesley
and then at Princeton, publishing important papers on specialized, technical
issues in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
In Rorty’s case, as in Huxley’s, there were no early signs that he would
become, or even desired to become, a public intellectual. Yet it seemed des-
tined with the fame that came with the 1979 publication of PMN, which also
attracted a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 1981. After all, Rorty’s conclu-
sion in that work is that philosophy should not see itself as a specialized attempt
to ground knowledge on something objective and permanent, but rather as
hermeneutical cultural politics that experiments with new vocabularies aimed
at moral and cultural progress. As Dewey insisted, philosophy should not be
an esoteric subject with little relevance for social issues, but should rather take
up the “problems of men.”20 From this springboard, Rorty took on his more
public role.
Thus, at a time when academic Philosophy, at least as it is practiced in the
Anglophone world, seems as remote as ever from the rest of culture, Rorty
cuts a maverick figure. As Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley note, “Rorty’s
work has moved freely in and influenced such areas as literary theory, law,

19 Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), 30.
20 John Dewey, “The Need For a Recovery in Philosophy,” in The Middle Works, Volume 10,
1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 42.
242 Defending Rorty

historiography, psychotherapy, education, and social theory. He wrote regu-

larly for the popular press, and he was a frequent lecturer and symposium
participant in events drawing nonphilosophical audiences on a wide range of
culturally important issues.”21 This is not to suggest, however, that Rorty
abandoned his disciplinary roots in academic Philosophy (though his final
professional perch before his death was in Stanford’s Comparative Literature
Department, not Philosophy); indeed, the bulk of his work up until his death
in 2007 is still aimed at parsing the cutting-edge debates in analytic philosophy
dealing with technical philosophical subjects like epistemology, meta-ethics,
and philosophy of language.
Yet it was Rorty’s mission to change the self-image of the philosopher
from someone who knows something more about truth and reality than non-
philosophers to someone who, thanks to her honed critical talents and spe-
cialized knowledge of intellectual history, is able to fruitfully recontextualize
problematic parts of culture and thereby illuminate perspectives and concep-
tual connections that help serve our needs. At their best, philosophers initi-
ate changes in our language that foment cultural progress. For example, they
develop coherent, historically informed narratives about “human rights” that
help encourage behavior that protects the vulnerable against the predations
of the powerful. Rorty suggests that this ability to create useful new vocab-
ularies is ultimately more a matter of imagination and poetic skill than of
systematic thinking and logic-chopping, because what counts as the latter is
defined by the status quo intellectual environment and often tends to inhibit
rather than produce progressive change. As a practitioner of cultural politics,
the philosopher is thus an “informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic
intermediary between different discourses.”22 While Huxley never explicitly
claimed the mantle of “philosopher,” he fits Rorty’s definition to a tee. He cer-
tainly qualifies as an “all-purpose intellectual” who is “ready to offer a view on
pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything
else.”23
Although Rorty mentions Huxley only briefly in his work and always in
conjunction with Brave New World, Huxley is manifestly Rorty’s kind of intel-
lectual: the hyper-literate bricoleur engaged in the social and literary criticism
that Rorty considers so much more socially important than analytic Philoso-
phy. Indeed, Huxley mockingly referred to himself as an “amused, Pyrrhonic
aesthete,” a label that is pure Rorty!24 Despite the fact that he is best known
today as a novelist (and perhaps really only for being the author of Brave New

21 Guignon and Hiley, “Introduction,” 1.

22 PMN, 317.
23 CP, xxxix.
24 Aldous Huxley, “Preface,” in Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited (New York:
HarperPerennial, 2004), 6.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 243

World), Huxley was a prolific essayist, whose wide interests and encyclope-
dic knowledge are amply on display in his nonfictional writings. The range
of topics he explores is breathtaking, from science, religion, and philosophy
to politics, history, literature, music, theatre, art, architecture, and travel.25
Indeed, one of Rorty’s favorite literary authorities, Harold Bloom, thinks more
of Huxley as an essayist than even as a novelist!26 Huxley’s unique ability to
discuss with authority and insight both science and the arts is, as biographers
always note, practically his birthright, given his bloodline featuring both T.H.
Huxley and Arnold.
Huxley’s facility for writing competently across disciplines is a rare talent,
and one he shares with Rorty. Guignon and Hiley praise Rorty in terms that
could equally be applied to Huxley: “Rorty seems to read everything. . . . He
writes with self-effacing charm, a quick and biting wit, a dizzying capacity for
broad analogies, and a way of dividing through diverse thinkers in a single
sentence that in less skilled hands would be mere pastiche.”27 Indeed, Rorty’s
readers frequently comment upon his ability to combine impressive erudition
with an enjoyable prose style. It is thus significant that Huxley’s nonfiction
writing teems with sentences that sound startlingly similar to the sort uniquely
identified with Rorty’s work, for example, “Unlike Milton or Dante, Shake-
speare had no ambition to be a systematic theologian or philosopher. He was
not concerned to ‘justify the ways of God to Man’ in terms of a set of metaphys-
ical postulates and a network of logical ideas.”28 Another excellent passage,
on philosophy of science, no less:

The primitive might admit the existence of our natural laws, while insisting that we had
forgotten to take account of the magic and the devils lurking behind the superficially
impersonal phenomena. We reject the devils not because we can actually demonstrate
their non-existence but because they do not fit our contemporary world-view, which
seems to us true mainly on pragmatic grounds – because it enables us to control natural
forces. Magic and devils offend our sense of probabilities and a certain aesthetic feeling
for what is intellectually “good form.” A study of history shows that belief in witchcraft
was not destroyed by intellectual argument. (Indeed Glanvill’s argument in favor of
the existence of sorcery was intellectually much more convincing than any argument
adduced against it.) It died out because educated men had adopted a new world-view,
different from that which had been accepted by the believers in magic. In the world
which Galileo invented and Newton brought to perfection there was no room for
witches; they seemed absurd and therefore ceased to be believed in.29

25 See Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays Vols I–VI, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2000–02).
26 Harold Bloom, ed., Aldous Huxley (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), 2.
27 Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, “Introduction,” in RR, 2–3.
28 Adlous Huxley, “Shakespeare and Religion” in Complete Essays, Volume VI: 1956–1963, ed.
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 157.
29 Huxley, Complete Essays: Volume II (1926–1929), 186.
244 Defending Rorty

This is Rorty avant la lettre! Indeed, anticipating some of Kuhn’s thinking by

three decades, Huxley here justifies modern science on pragmatic grounds and
suggests that our adoption of the scientific worldview was not a straightfor-
wardly rational process whereby the existence of the supernatural entities was
argumentatively and evidentially disproved (as Charles Taylor would have it).
Rather, as we began to accept the worldview developed by Galileo and Newton,
we dropped references to devils based on “a certain aesthetic feeling for what is
intellectually ‘good form,’” and thus underwent what Kuhn later famously calls
a “paradigm shift.” Rorty would add that, in this process of change, it became
apparent to early modern Europeans that the new vocabulary was enabling
them to do and show new things that they were realizing they wanted to do
and show. Huxley’s sentiment here fits nicely with Rorty’s view that “Europe
did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics,
or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than
it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using
certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.”30
Indeed, Huxley expresses many similar pragmatist sentiments in his essays
that Rorty would find congenial. For example, like Rorty, Huxley points out
the contingency of rationality: “Reason is not, as our ancestors supposed, one
and absolute, the same thing for all men at all times and in all places. It is in
mathematical phrase, a function of psychology and physiology of the individual
reasoner and of the intellectual environment in which he lives.”31 Pragmatically
assessing science, Huxley writes, “Science is no ‘truer’ than common sense, or
lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably;
but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences
are supposed to refer.”32 Huxley on truth: “To talk about truth as a relation-
ship between human notions and things in themselves is an absurdity.”33 And
one last favorite: “‘Do what you will, this world’s a fiction.’ All the labors
of all the metaphysicians who have ever thought about the Theory of Knowl-
edge are summed up in Blake’s one doggerel line. This world, the world of
Spinoza’s tiny worms, is inescapably a fiction. But it is no less inescapably our
fiction.”34
Pragmatic, Rortyan themes appear throughout Huxley’s essays, including:
skepticism about metaphysics and absolutes; praise of nominalism; recogni-
tion of historical contingency; appreciation for pluralism; a Freudian-inspired
conception of the self as multiple, as opposed to a unified metaphysical entity
(as the epigraph above shows, Huxley uses the metaphor of the hydra to
describe the plural self); serious respect for science combined with a wariness of

30 CIS, 6. See also, CP, 155; ORT, 115.

31 Huxley, Complete Essays: Volume II, 140.
32 Ibid., 303.
33 Ibid., 306.
34 Ibid., 321.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 245

“scientism”; the attempt to negotiate the C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” of science
and art; recognition of the importance of the arts for cultural values; skepticism
about revolutionary political ideologies; a liberal philosophy of education; and
an abiding commitment to anti-authoritarianism and pragmatic liberalism.
Nevertheless, while Rorty would generally endorse Huxley’s pragmatism,
there is also much in Huxley’s work that Rorty would ignore or reject. One
obvious problem that Rorty would have with Huxley is the same one he has
with Dewey and James: although Huxley may be a pragmatist, he is still a pre-
“linguistic turn” thinker, and therefore he tends to speak philosophically in
terms of “experience” and “consciousness,” which Rorty wants to dispense
with and replace with the naturalistic concept of “language.” Indeed, from
Rorty’s point of view, Huxley’s fascination with mysticism (reminiscent of
James’s) unfortunately litters some of his works with retrograde, empiricist
references to the possibility of experiencing “Reality” unmediated through
concepts. Even though, like James and Dewey, there is no doubt that Huxley
is a good Millian liberal, it is still the sort of metaphysical rhetoric that raises
Rorty’s hackles. Yet while Huxley seemed dispose to seek “redemptive truth,”
he was pragmatic and fallibilist enough to never believe that he had actually
grasped it. Like James, when Huxley is on his best rhetorical behavior, the spir-
ituality he embraces is of the Tillchian-Vattimian variety, and thus thoroughly
nonauthoritarian.
Rorty’s (1931–2007) and Huxley’s (1894–1963) different time frames lead
to other disparities between their philosophies as well. For example, like many
intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Huxley was impressed by
the ambitious promise of the burgeoning young science of psychology. Indeed,
he frequently discusses contemporary psychology and psychologists in his non-
fiction and fiction as well. (Who can forget the famous, and chilling, Pavlovian
conditioning featured so prominently in Brave New World?) In contrast, Rorty
does not write about contemporary psychology. Although he counts two of
psychology’s pioneers, James and Freud, as intellectual heroes, he praises them
much more as philosophers (and even as poets) than as scientists. Rorty’s lack
of interest is a function of psychology’s apparent failure to meet its original
goal of rendering the mind a transparent and predictable system, a goal that
scientists widely thought achievable when Huxley began writing.
Then there are Huxley’s interests that are not generally shared by today’s
liberal intellectuals, including Rorty, and indeed might even be considered a
source of embarrassment, for example: parapsychology, hallucinogenic drug
use, eugenics, neo-Malthusianism, and open skepticism about mass democ-
racy. In Huxley’s defense, however, none of these interests or positions was
beyond the pale for liberal intellectuals of his time. We must remember, for
instance, that James himself took very seriously the possibility of parapsycho-
logical phenomena. This was a result of his pragmatic commitment to “radical
empiricism,” which exhorted positivist philosophers to refrain from myopic,
scientific reductionism when considering the large realm of human experience.
246 Defending Rorty

Indeed, both Huxley and James were alarmed by the knee-jerk philosophical
positivism that followed in the wake of the indisputably impressive successes
of the natural sciences. This positivism unfortunately leads modern intellectu-
als to summarily dismiss or disdain parts of human experience that are not
presently amenable to the methodologies of natural science. Although Huxley
never explicitly mentions James’s “radical empiricism,” it is an orientation to
experience and knowledge that he shares. It allows both James and him to
take ideas of mystical and religious experience seriously, in contrast to the
hard-nosed positivist critics of their times.
Huxley is famous for his occasional use of mescalin and LSD during the
last decade of his life, which he wrote about in The Doors of Perception and
Heaven and Hell. His experimentation was undertaken in a radical empiricist
vein: he did not take the drugs “recreationally” for fun, but rather in the
interest of serious philosophical investigation. Indeed, he deprecated the more
unrestrained use of LSD advocated by his friend, Timothy Leary.35 Huxley
wanted to see if the substances, by altering his perception of reality, would
dissolve any of the philosophical afflictions from which we suffer. He was
impressed by his experiences, though he never thought they delivered any sort
of “final answers” to the mysteries of the human condition.
Early in his career, Huxley was also pragmatically interested in the idea that a
program of progressive eugenics might be able to ameliorate some of the defects
of the human race. In this interest, he joined one of America’s most hallowed,
pragmatist jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who notoriously endorsed eugenics
in his 1927 Supreme Court opinion, Buck v. Bell.36 Before we condemn Huxley
and Holmes, however, we must recall that liberal opinion did not roundly unite
against the idea of eugenics until after the Nazi program was exposed in the
wake of World War II. Indeed, optimism about the possibilities of progressive
eugenics was arguably a very scientifically and culturally enlightened position
to take in the 1920s. Moreover, today’s liberal societies seem to be coming full
circle on a version of progressive eugenics, as newly developed techniques of
genetic manipulation increasingly hold out the possibility of curing hereditary
diseases.
Huxley’s neo-Malthusian fears amount to his prediction that world pop-
ulation will continue to increase at an accelerating rate and put unbearable
pressure on material resources. According to Huxley, this will result in height-
ened economic insecurity and social unrest, which will in turn give rise to
authoritarian and totalitarian political regimes.37 Like many who have made
catastrophic Malthusian forecasts, Huxley perhaps underestimates our ability

35 Murray, Aldous Huxley, 447

36 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Upholding Virginia’s statute requiring compulsory sterilization of the
mentally disabled, Holmes, referring to the petitioner, infamously opined, “Three generations
of imbeciles are enough” (207).
37 Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 237–50.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 247

to adapt and avoid these dark scenarios, especially through technological inno-
vation (a curious oversight in Huxley’s case, since he was also so impressed with
the possibilities of scientific progress). Nevertheless, his concerns about dimin-
ishing natural resources and the need to focus on “sustainable development”
have become increasingly salient in recent years, and his general discussion of
the Malthusian trap facing parts of the developing world also remains relevant.
Lastly, Huxley is pessimistic about democracy for the classic reasons: the vot-
ers are apathetic and ignorant about politics, especially in today’s mass nation
states; they are prone to exploitation by demagogues; they are manipulated
by the propaganda of the media corporations; and, moreover, democracy is
particularly prone to widespread corruption because so many more people are
involved in governing than in autocratic regimes where power is in the hands
of the few.38 He thinks that, at the very least, candidates for elected positions
should have to pass the same sorts of exams as high-grade civil administrators.
He also makes the perpetually tempting suggestion, which can be seen as elitist
or realistic or both, that the right to vote should only be given to those who
can pass a “fairly stiff intelligence test.”39
Although Huxley remained pessimistic about large-scale democracy, espe-
cially in light of his neo-Malthusian worries, later in his career he took a
Jeffersonian tack, writing in favor of decentralized, smaller-scale, democratic
self-government.40 He believed that only this sort of more localized democracy
would preserve individual liberty. While he did not think political decentraliza-
tion was likely in his era of nationalistic warfare – because success in modern
warfare demands a highly centralized state – Jeffersonian, decentralized self-
government is unsurprisingly featured in Island. Indeed, Huxley incorporates
all of the above concerns and more into his literary utopia.

The Liberal Utopia of Pala

In Island, Huxley mixes a provocative brew of ethical, religious, psychological,
political, and artistic ideas into his description of the Edenic tropical nation
of Pala. The novel begins with the journalist and cynic, Will Farnaby, waking
up on the island of Pala (apparently in geographical proximity to Indonesia)
after his sailboat is wrecked by a squall (a Huxleyan nod to Shakespeare’s
The Tempest). The Palanese are wary of uninvited visitors, but Will is injured
and they do not hesitate to offer him succor. As he convalesces, he talks to
different Palanese who gladly teach him about their impressive society. This
design of the book brings the critical charge that Island is more of an essay or

38 Huxley, Complete Essays, Volume II, 223–24.

39 Ibid., 228.
40 See, Aldous Huxley, “Centralization and Decentralization,” and “Decentralization and Self-
Government” in Complete Essays, Volume IV: 1936–1938, ed. Robert S. Baker and James
Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 191–207.
248 Defending Rorty

series of essays than a novel, with underdeveloped characters who are merely
mouthpieces for the various concepts that Huxley wants to discuss.41 This,
however, could be said of just about all Huxley characters throughout his
fiction, and one can argue that this practice is actually a primary attraction of
his “intellectual novels.” Moreover, the criticism is unfair: some of the most
poignant writing in Island is about Will’s past romantic infidelities, which are
only tangentially related to the allegedly didactic Palanese exposition of their
society.
It is this exposition, however, that concerns us here, and one of the first things
we learn is that Pala’s political system is a type of constitutional monarchy.42
There is a Privy Council that advises the monarch (the Raja), as well as a
Cabinet and a democratically elected House of Representatives. Further on in
the novel, however, Huxley’s commitment to decentralized democracy becomes
manifest in the Palanese political system. We are told that Pala is “a federation
of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units –
so there’s plenty of scope for small-scale initiatives and democratic leaders, but
no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government.”43
Pala is also politically committed to pacifism – another Huxleyan personal
moral position – and thus has no military. Huxley does not say whether Pala’s
economy is primarily socialist or capitalist in character. We might surmise that
is must be the latter, given Huxley’s aversion to centralization, but we also
know that it is progressive and egalitarian: no one is permitted to become
more than five times as rich as the average citizen.44 Huxley also does not
afford a glance at the Palanese Constitution (if it has one), and he tells us
little else about the actual governing apparatus or current political debates of
Pala.
Thus, although we glean that the institutional structure of Pala provides
for democratic representation and incorporates a system of divided power
through (either formal or informal) checks and balances, Huxley, like Rorty,
is clearly more concerned to describe in broad terms the ethos and culture of
his liberal utopia, rather than the nuts and bolts of its government. We get a
feel for it rather than a theoretical description featuring statistical information.
Furthermore, at the center of Huxley’s literary description of Palanese society
is the beautiful, liberal character of the Palanese themselves, who have been
carefully socialized and educated to exhibit the liberal virtues. Huxley devotes
much of the book to describing this Palanese Bildung.
Huxley intends Palanese culture to represent the best of East and West,
combining Eastern spiritualism, especially Mahayana Buddhism, with West-
ern humanism and science to form a pragmatic, utilitarian composite. This

41 See, e.g., Arthur Herzog, “Who Enforces Utopia,” Nation (August 25, 1962): 74–75.
42 Huxley, Island, 46.
43 Ibid., 178.
44 Ibid.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 249

hybridization began in nineteenth-century Pala after a visiting Scottish sur-

geon successfully removed a life-threatening tumor from the beloved ruling
monarch, the “Old Raja.” The two men realized that they had a lot to learn
from one another and decided that they could combine their knowledge to
reform Palanese society. This “odd couple” themselves, of course, together
represent this “best of both worlds” vision: the selfless, mystical, Buddhist
wisdom and attunement to nature of the Old Raja plus the Western human-
ism and constructive, scientific rationalism of Dr. Andrew MacPhail, who had
overcome his sadistic Calvinist upbringing to become, with the Old Raja’s help,
a nineteenth-century version of Brooks’s “neural Buddhist.”
Many of Huxley’s intellectual predilections, mentioned in the preceding sec-
tion, find a place in the reformed Pala, including: religious mysticism, human-
istic science, hallucinogenic drug use for increased self-awareness, birth control
for rational population management, natural resource conservation and sus-
tainable development, eugenics, psychology, art, poetry, and Deweyan liberal
education. Like Rorty’s utopia, the basis of the Old Raja–MacPhail reform
effort is a pragmatic, complex, and romantic utilitarianism, and because it is a
more comprehensive description of such a society, Huxley’s vision is arguably
even more holistically utilitarian than Rorty’s sketch is. Indeed, the entire aim
of Palanese society is to cultivate its citizens to find a “fully human” happiness –
as opposed to the inhuman “happiness” featured in Brave New World – in the
admittedly contingent Palanese context.
Dr. Robert MacPhail, a scientist who is the Palanese great-grandson of
Andrew MacPhail, gives Will a book entitled Notes on What’s What, written
by the Old Raja, which is a statement of the philosophy that guided the Old
Raja and Andrew in their reforms. It contains a stripped-down Buddhist spiri-
tuality mixed with compatible elements of other religions and Western philos-
ophy, and includes pragmatic Rortyan sentiments, such as “Faith is something
very different than belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words
much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s
words – people take them too seriously, and what happens?”45 (Huxley shares
Rorty’s and Bloom’s ethical aversion to cant.) Faith, on the other hand, is com-
patible with Rortyan social hope, and perhaps even simply is Rortyan social
hope: the “empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who we in
fact are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee [dualist] in Good Being. Give
us this day our daily faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”46 “Faith,” or
social hope, is indispensible to the Palanese as they live their lives and improve
their society. “Belief,” however, involves the hypostasization of philosophical
and religious doctrines into authoritarian dogmas, which must be avoided by
a free society. Palanese liberalism is thus pragmatic and fallibilistic, and its
citizens exhibit the civic virtue of irony.

45 Ibid., 43.
46 Ibid.
250 Defending Rorty

Dr. Robert explains Palanese pragmatism to Will:

[W]e have no established church, and our religion stresses immediate experience and
deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires.
So we’re preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist
revivalism, on the other. And along with transcendental experience we systematically
cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching
them to analyze whatever they hear or read – this is an integral part of the school
curriculum. Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbor across the
Strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn’t have a chance here in Pala.47

Indeed, Palanese children even play with scarecrows modeled on gods and
other religious figures to reinforce the idea that religious imagery and symbols
are ultimately man-made notions rather than superhuman authorities. (What
better way to begin the cultivation of the virtue of irony!) As we saw in the
last chapter, Rorty hopes for a completely secular future, but also recognizes
that religion might be here to stay. The Palanese agree with the latter position
that religion, in one form or another, is a permanent feature of human society,
but embrace this fact in the pragmatic, Jamesian way that Rorty approves
of: the Palanese accept that religion has a utilitarian function to serve and
are adamantly anticlerical in Rorty’s sense. And while Palanese intellectuals
tend to be non-Platonist, pragmatic, “Tantrik agnostics,”48 they accept that
some Palanese will continue to engage in innocuous folk religious practices, in
spite of the impressive secular education they are afforded.49 In Rorty’s terms,
however, such practices and beliefs are appropriately privatized in Pala and
thus do not play a role in politics.
Indeed, one of the reasons Pala takes so quickly to the reforms introduced
by the Old Raja and Dr. Andrew is the historically contingent fact that its
population traditionally adhered to a nondogmatic, pragmatic, Mahayana
Buddhism, “shot through with Tantra”50 with “a bit of Shivaism . . . on the
side.”51 Although this is not something we can explore in depth here, we
should note that some scholars have suggested that Rorty’s pragmatic dismissal
of metaphysics has affinities with strains of Buddhist thought. Sheldon R. Isen-
berg and Gene R. Thursby, for example, write that Rorty’s claim that our
identities are contingent cultural constructions “all the way down” “sounds
very much like the beginnings of Buddhist epistemology.”52 Likewise, C.W.
Huntington, Jr., argues that Rorty and the Mahayana Madhyamika tradition
share a similar, edifying, nonfoundational philosophical project. According to

47 Ibid., 178–79.
48 Ibid., 96.
49 Ibid., 219–21.
50 Ibid., 87.
51 Ibid., 219.
52 Sheldon R. Isenberg and Gene R. Thursby, “A Perennial Philosophy Perspective on Richard
Rorty’s Neo-Pragmatism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 17, nos. 1/2
(1985), 49.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 251

Huntington, Rorty’s rejection of metaphysics is reminiscent of “every classical

Buddhist author, in particular Nagarjuna and the other early Indian Mad-
hyamikas, who rejected all assumptions of meaning bound up with the notion
of objective, value-free philosophical view (drsti), thesis (paksa), or proposition
(pratijna).”53 Like Rortyan pragmatism, the Madhyamikas understand all of
“our most fundamental empirical propositions and the matrix of rationality in
which they are cast as matters of strictly normative and ultimately groundless
belief.”54 Indeed, Madhyamika edifying philosophy is unabashedly pragmatic:
“The central concepts of edifying philosophy must ultimately be abandoned
when they have served the purpose for which they were designed. Such con-
cepts are not used to express a view but to achieve an effect.”55 Thus, although
Rorty never demonstrates any scholarly interest in Buddhism, it is a type of
religiosity that is eminently compatible with and even supportive of his liberal
utopia, particularly in the form it takes on Pala. Moreover, the Palanese reli-
gious commitment to the nontheistic, pacifist Buddhist principle of ahimsa –
“no harm” – mirrors Rorty’s liberal imperative to reduce cruelty.
The primary theme that runs through all Palanese institutions is a pragmatic
holism that takes into account the health of both body and mind. Palanese
health care, for example, insists that psychological health and physical health
are deeply connected and must always be treated together. While the Palanese
are extremely impressed by and make use of the advances of Western med-
ical science, they also agree with the frequently made criticism that Western
medicine is far too focused on the cure rather than on the prevention of dis-
ease. By contrast, the Palanese approach entails taking into account not just
the patient’s immediate symptoms but also the patient’s overall physical and
mental health and lifestyle. Indeed, perhaps foreshadowing the current attack
on the entrenched fee-for-service system of American medicine, Will’s nurse,
Radha, emphasizes that Palanese doctors “get paid for keeping people well”
rather than merely for running tests and prescribing drugs.56
The cultivation of healthy body and mind begins in the family, naturally,
but the Palanese family is structured to maximize its flexibility for and effec-
tiveness at raising well-adjusted children. The Palanese have created a system
of “Mutual Adoption Clubs” (MACs), which function like extended clans for
purposes of child-rearing, marriage counseling, and even personal counseling
and support.57 MAC’s are free associations of about twenty families that assist
each other in family life. Children are normally raised primarily by their bio-
logical parents, but can also freely associate with other adults and thus have

53 C.W. Huntington, Jr., The Emptiness of Emptiness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1989), 8. For further discussion of Rorty and Madhyamika thought, see Alan Malachowski,
Richard Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 21–22, 155–56.
54 Ibid., 10.
55 Ibid., xiii.
56 Huxley, Island, 78.
57 Ibid., 106–11, 190.
252 Defending Rorty

a range of role models to choose from throughout the MAC. When there are
family problems, the MAC does its best to reconcile the difficulties and support
family members. To us, jaded members of neurotic modern society, the MAC
system may sound like a nightmarish invitation for officious neighbors to med-
dle in our private affairs. We must remember, however, that the Palanese have
undergone a very different sort of socialization than we have. Moreover, we
should also remember that, historically speaking, the extended clan system of
the MAC is a much more common form of family life for our species. Huxley
suggests that the “locked-in” nature of the modern nuclear family is especially
problematic because it can be so restrictive of personal growth. In any case,
Huxley is careful to emphasize that nothing in Pala is perfect; echoing Churchill
on democracy, Huxley just wants to suggest that the Palanese way is generally
better than any of the tried alternatives.
Other relevant practices of Palanese society include the widespread use of
birth control and a generally accepted social norm of couples having only two
or three children58 ; an artificial insemination program whereby couples can
choose to have the child of a Palanese genius (even a deceased one, by means
of frozen sperm or ova) while refraining from passing on genetic diseases
should they possess any59 ; the practice of maithuna, or yogic sex, which the
Palanese are taught as adolescents in school60 ; a system of cooperative banking
and credit based on the Raiffeisen credit union model that, incidentally, is
the predecessor to the Grameen Bank, whose founder, Muhammad Yunus,
won the 2006 Nobel Peace because of the bank’s microfinance activities in
Bangladesh61 ; and a free, non-monopolized, diverse press.62
Most important, perhaps after the MACs, is Palanese education, which is
public, free, and excellent (although it is unclear whether it is compulsory; the
culture is so pro-education, it does not seem to need to be). The content of this
education includes a broad range of the arts and sciences like Western liberal
education, and Pala even brings in lecturers from the outside world to learn
from them. The point of this education is the classic liberal goal of cultivating
individuals who can utilize liberal freedom for the pursuit of happiness and who
are suited for liberal democratic citizenship. It thus successfully helps cultivate
the liberal virtues and, indeed, just about every Palanese citizen we meet (other
than the corrupted Murugan) are paragons of liberal virtue. As Huxley puts it
in Brave New World Revisited, “societies are composed of individuals and are
good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to
lead a happy and creative life.”63

58 Ibid., 93.
59 Ibid., 230–31.
60 Ibid., 93.
61 Ibid., 177.
62 Ibid., 180.
63 Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 253.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 253

The Palanese approach to education is reminiscent of Dewey’s philosophy of

education: Palanese educators teach the children abstract concepts, like math-
ematics, through practical applications and games.64 Postsecondary education
starts at sixteen and combines advanced coursework with practical appren-
ticeships. While Pala apparently has local college education, and does have
advanced research facilities for the study of biology and agriculture (and per-
haps psychology, we might presume), it does not appear to have any research
universities. For this reason, the highest-achieving students are given scholar-
ships to study abroad at the best universities of the developed world.
But academics are just part of Palanese schooling. As Mr. Menon, the Under-
Secretary of Education, tells Will, “What we give students is simultaneously
a training in perceiving and imagining, a training in applied physiology and
psychology, a training in practical ethics and practical religion, a training in the
proper use of language, and a training in self-knowledge. In a word, a training
of the whole mind-body in all its aspects.”65 All students are individually psy-
chologically and physiologically assessed so that educators can better meet their
unique needs and match lessons to students’ particular styles of learning, and
also to nip any detrimental or dangerous psychological tendencies in the bud.
“Peter Pans,” those students who are disposed to becoming ambitious manipu-
lators, and “Musclepeople,” the potential bullies, and “somnambulists,” those
particularly prone to suggestion, are systematically identified and attended to.66
The Musclepeople, for example, are encouraged to expel their natural aggres-
sion through arduous, but productive, physical labor and through nonviolent
sports, like rock-climbing.
The Palanese emphasize the pragmatic, ethical relationship of all the subjects
of the curriculum, presenting an integrated, ethical whole of knowledge to the
students, infused with Buddhist philosophy. Again, this level of intentional,
designed socialization might strike us as frightening and intrusive, maybe even
verging on totalitarian. And yet we all do unavoidably get ethical and psycho-
logical “training” in school – we cannot avoid socialization – it is just that the
Palanese system has opted to explicitly recognize this fact and be systematic
rather than haphazard about it. Indeed, no doubt most educational profes-
sionals working in our primary and secondary schools, and even in higher
education, would agree that psychological and ethical counseling is something
that students in general could use a lot more of. From the Palanese perspective,
our educational system’s failure to more purposefully cultivate good character
and habits, in addition to teaching academic substance, is at the very root of
our society’s worse dysfunctions.
Spiritual exercises, such as maithuna and meditative practices, are also
taught in school, though they are not forced on anyone, and Will is told that

64 Huxley, Island, 258.

65 Ibid., 256.
66 Ibid., 184–87, 249–50.
254 Defending Rorty

not everyone continues to practice them in later life. Will witnesses a unique
feature of this holistic, integrated education: a spiritual “moksha ceremony.”67
Dr. Robert and his research assistant, Vijaya, take Will to a scenic mountain-
top where he observes a class of adolescent rock-climbers helping one another
descend a precarious natural rock chimney. Afterward, the students gather in
an ancient temple for a religious ceremony where they take moksha medicine –
hallucinogenic mushrooms – to enhance their spiritual experience. They take
the drug not as an escape or in rebellion but rather in a supervised, life-affirming
way.
Finally, Palanese education does not end upon graduating from coursework.
The Palanese labor system encourages young men and women to experience
work in different industries before eventually settling on a career. Dr. Robert,
for instance, worked as a copper smelter and then as fisherman, and Vijaya
(who was identified as a “Muscleman” type early on) worked in a cement
factory and as a lumberjack. Dr. Robert readily admits that it is not the most
efficient system in terms of maximizing production, but argues that maxi-
mum efficiency is not the goal. Producing well-rounded, well-adjusted human
beings is.68
The Palanese economy keeps everyone well fed, clothed, sheltered, and
educated, and for the most part eschews the heavy industry of the devel-
oped world. The Palanese appreciate the scientific and technological achieve-
ments that advanced capitalism supports, but choose to do without the hyper-
consumerism. For this reason, they refuse to develop the large oil reservoirs
under the southern end of the island. Huxley asks us to believe that Palanese
culture effectively inoculates its citizens from the desire for the ostentatious
luxuries on offer from the world’s industrialized economies. He recognizes
the challenge: as Will observes, after all, the rest of the developing world is
feverishly globalizing in manic pursuit of the shiny, new, consumer toys.69
Dr. Robert, however, says that after careful consideration, Pala has decided –
democratically, we must assume – that it cannot afford superfluous consumer
luxuries, which of course really means that it chooses not to afford them
given the trade-offs involved (e.g., developing a petroleum industry).70 Whether
this sort of restriction on economic liberty is plausible and palatable, or is
instead the tyranny of the majority over those Palanese who, arguably, will
inevitably want these goods, remains a question. In any case, Pala does engage in
limited trade with the outside world, but only to import vital technologies and
materials that they cannot produce themselves.
Pala’s economy also seems to do a good job of encouraging people to find
occupations suited to their individual desires and talents, and has a strong norm

67 Ibid., 193–209.
68 Ibid., 180–81.
69 Ibid., 171.
70 Ibid.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 255

of appreciating the relative contributions of everyone. For example, the simple-

minded Mrs. Rao, who is a librarian and a maithuna instructor, cheerfully
acknowledges that she is “dumb” but does not feel “inferior or depressed”
because of it. She describes herself to Will: “No talents or cleverness. But
when it comes to living, when it comes to understanding people and helping
them, I feel myself growing more sensitive and skillful. . . . So you see, Mr.
Farnaby, Pala’s the place for stupid people. The greatest happiness of the
greatest number – and we stupid ones are the greatest number.”71

Objection: Palanese Ironic Intellectualism?

This last point indirectly alludes to perhaps the most difficult challenge to the
argument that Pala is a Rortyan utopia. While it is clear that Palanese culture is
ethically liberal in Rorty’s sense because it is eminently successful in achieving
its utilitarian aim to minimize cruelty, where are the ironist intellectuals that
Rorty praises? Citizens exhibit the liberal virtues, including the civic virtue of
irony, by dint of their pragmatic liberal education and “growing up Palanese,”
as it were. But are there any Palanese “strong poets” who shatter conventional
wisdoms? Or is it rather the case that the conspicuously effective Palanese
socialization process produces too much conformity, thereby stifling ironic
intellectualism? If Pala fails to produce Rorty’s cherished vocabulary innova-
tors, then it fails as a Rortyan utopia. Indeed, in the most damning passage to
the case that Pala is Rortyan, Huxley seems to suggest that Palanese culture
is unlikely to produce good literature. This is because Pala’s utilitarian project
has been so successful in overcoming the sources of the literary muse: dualism
and alienation.72 While Rorty insists that his utopia will feature a thriving
literary culture, Pala, it seems, must be literarily challenged. Furthermore, the
Old Raja concedes in Notes on What’s What that Palanese art may be inferior
in some ways to art produced elsewhere: “Being the products of happiness and
a sense of fulfillment, they are probably less moving and perhaps less satisfying
aesthetically, than the tragic or compensatory symbols created by victims of
frustration and ignorance, of tyranny, war and guilt-fostering, crime-inciting
superstitions.”73 By contrast, Rorty insists that the art of his utopia will be
maximally challenging and sublime.
Nevertheless, if we take a closer look, we can see that Palanese culture is
compatible with Rortyan ironic intellectualism. First, we should note that, in
spite of Pala’s utilitarian successes, it is not the case that all Palanese walk
around with serene (and smug?) Buddha smiles on their faces all day long.
Because it is a truly human place, there is pain and suffering in the island
paradise. For example, Dr. Robert’s beloved wife, Lakshmi, is withering away

71 Ibid., 227–28.
72 Huxley, Island, 215.
73 Ibid., 212.
256 Defending Rorty

from incurable cancer, and his son, Dugald, recently died in a rock-climbing
accident, leaving behind young children and his mourning wife, Susila, with
whom Will forges a close relationship that is verging on romantic toward the
novel’s end. Moreover, nurse Radha confirms that there are still “neurotics” on
Pala, though many fewer per capita than in the developed world.74 Likewise,
Dr. Robert confirms that Pala does have a police force and a judicial system,
though there are far fewer crimes committed there than in the outside world
thanks especially to the Palanese educational system.75 He further indicates
that the Palanese take a therapeutic rather than a punitive approach to dealing
with criminal behavior. In any case, this demonstrates that there exists some
degree of alienation and melancholy among the Palanese. If pain and suffering
are necessary ingredients for great art and literature, we can safely conclude
that Pala contains these ingredients.
Pala, at its core, is the opposite of the World State of Brave New World;
there are Palanese who are unhappy, and they do not superficially dull their
pain by taking soma. Indeed, we might surmise that, thanks to their education,
which both socializes them to be ethically liberal and broadly introduces them
to the work of the great ironists, alienated Palanese are more likely to sublimate
their suffering into art and literature than are alienated denizens of the outside
world, who mostly channel their frustrations into antisocial behaviors.
Furthermore, Huxley does introduce us to a budding Palanese ironist intel-
lectual in the character of Ranga. Ranga is a college-aged biochemistry student
who is about to go abroad to continue his studies on scholarship at the Uni-
versity of Manchester. He is brilliant and intellectually aggressive, and tells us
that, in terms of his sanity, he is “[m]aybe a little left of center. . . . I get hor-
ribly depressed sometimes – feel I’m no good for anything.”76 Fortunately for
him, Ranga is romantically involved with the even-keeled Radha, who keeps
him grounded. Nevertheless, he seems to embody the character of the potential
strong poet: a classically frustrated intellectual, full of mental energy, and thus
just the sort of person prone to ironically experiment with alternative vocabu-
laries. He is, of course, a scientist rather than an artist or writer, but on Rorty’s
account, scientific innovators, such as Newton or Einstein, qualify as strong
poets: they teach us to describe the world in new, exciting ways.77 We cannot
know whether Ranga will successfully develop into a strong poet, but the fact
that that Pala has produced someone like him bolsters the case that Pala can
and does contain ironist intellectuals.
If Rorty agrees with the Old Raja’s thesis that great art and literature require
great suffering, then Rorty’s exhortation to minimize cruelty is just as prob-
lematic for the aesthetic culture of his utopia as it is for Pala’s. Clearly, both
Huxley and Rorty agree that the World State has sacrificed its humanity in

74 Ibid., 79.
75 Ibid., 190.
76 Ibid, 84.
77 ORT, 44.
Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Huxley’s Pragmatist Island 257

its single-minded pursuit to minimize suffering. If a balance must be struck

between reducing suffering and living a meaningful human life, which must
include risk and strife out of which good art can be created, Huxley’s ideal
balance is Pala, and it seems to be entirely compatible with the broad terms of
Rorty’s utopia. In Rorty’s terms, while Pala has a politics that is superior in
its efforts to “alleviate mammalian pain,” it also has a culture that, unlike the
World State, has its naturalism tempered by historicist Romanticism.
This assessment is corroborated elsewhere in the book. We learn, for
instance, that while pre-reform Pala had wonderful art, architecture, music,
and dance, it did not possess much in the way of a native literature. Post-reform
Pala, however, universally adopted English as its second language along with
English literature as well, and has since been developing an indigenous “Anglo-
Palanese literature.”78 Indeed, Dr. Robert indicates that Susila is a poet of some
repute, and if pain is indeed necessary for art, we can guess that the tragedy of
her husband’s death supplies her with all that she needs.79 Moreover, Will, a
man of evident taste and cultivation, is thoroughly impressed by the beauty of
the landscape painting by local Palanese artist, Gobind Singh, which is evidence
that Pala does indeed produce “real” artists.80 Further, we learn that Palanese
science, particularly agricultural and reproductive science, has a revolutionary
edge, which means that Palanese “strong poets” are at work in these disciplines.
Nevertheless, while it is clear that Pala affords its intellectuals both the
education and the legal freedom to engage in private, ironic experimentation, a
Rortyan might still be concerned that the whole, deeply communitarian flavor
of Palanese culture militates against the radical individualism of the strong
poet. After all, we do not meet a Palanese satirist or eccentric loner. Are there
any? Can we imagine a Palanese Nietzsche or Derrida? Rorty assumes such
figures would exist in his utopia. We must recall, however, that Rorty’s utopian
Nietzsche also must be committed to liberal justice and possess the liberal
virtues, and therefore is culturally conformist in this sense. Indeed, it is Rorty
who makes the controversial argument that liberals must be “ethnocentrically”
attached to their liberal practices; on Rorty’s account, the commitment to a
communitarian, Deweyan liberalism creates a liberal ethnos or way of life.81
Why is Pala’s culture any more communitarian or conformist than this? If we
can contemplate Rorty’s Nietzschean intellectual, who brandishes his ironic
redescriptions of culture while simultaneously being able to publicly justify
any cruelty they appear to cause, then we have no reason to believe that Pala
cannot produce such an individual.
Huxley shows in Island that he is just as aware as Rorty of the paradox
involved in the pragmatic imperative to be both practically committed to cur-
rently justified beliefs and to accept the contingency of those beliefs and be

78 Huxley, Island, 158.

79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 223–24.
81 ORT, 203–10.
258 Defending Rorty

open to experimentation. As the Old Raja puts it, “[T]he firm support of cul-
ture is the prime-condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is
also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly
grow into a complete human being is, all too often, the thing that prevents us
from growing.”82 Like Rorty, Huxley is dubious that we can identify a philo-
sophical principle or criterion to solve this problem. Rather, he agrees with
Rorty that we must muddle through the best we can, and that muddling is
more likely to be successful among people who are cultivated through liberal
education to possess the liberal virtues. The Old Raja says that Palanese culture
“is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as
well as the extraordinary, can and do experience in every contingency and at
each successive intersection of time and eternity.”83

Conclusion
Given the similarities of the respective intellectual outlooks of Huxley and
Rorty, it is not a surprise that Huxley’s positive utopia is compatible with
Rorty’s. Like Rorty’s utopia, Huxley’s is not a picture of perfection, but rather
a balancing of plural aspirations and tensions, just like Huxley’s description of
the hydra-like self. As Brave New World unforgettably demonstrates, Huxley
understands as well as any liberal Kant’s insight that “out of the crooked timber
of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Island has been criticized for
lacking the brilliant satirical bite of Brave New World. But this is not a case
of an aging Huxley being off his game. While there is Huxleyan wit and
playfulness on abundant display in Island, it is also meant to be taken seriously
for its political ideas. The epigraph Huxley chose for the book is a quotation
from Aristotle’s Politics: “In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish,
but should avoid impossibilities.” While readers may judge whether Pala is
utterly unrealistic, it is difficult to claim that it fails to be provocative to the
liberal imagination. As critic Wayne C. Booth found, Island “made me think
in fresh ways about my own society. . . . I am provoked in the best sense, from
beginning to end . . . arguing with Huxley all the way.”84 If Island can achieve
this for its readers, then it certainly needs to be added to Rorty’s canon of
fiction that is useful for political thought.

82 Huxley, Island, 211.

83 Ibid., 212.
84 Wayne C. Booth, Review of Island by Aldous Huxley, Yale Review (June 1962), 632.
Conclusion

[William James] dedicated his first philosophical treatise to Mill’s memory, and
tried to cultivate not only the debunking, Benthamite strain in Mill’s thought but
also the romantic Coleridgean strain. The latter led Mill to choose an epigraph
from Wilhelm von Humboldt for On Liberty: “The grand, leading principle,
toward which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the
absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
As a romantic utilitarian, Mill wanted to avoid Benthamite reductionism, and to
defend a secular culture against the familiar charge of blindness to higher things.1
– Richard Rorty

A California song, . . .
The new society at last, proportionate to Nature,
In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart
trees imperial,
In woman more, far more, than all your golden vines, or even
vital air
Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America,
heir of the past so grand,
To build a grander future.2
– Walt Whitman

1 PCP, 28
2 Walt Whitman, “Song of the Redwood Tree,” in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Scully
Bradley, Michael Moon, and Harold Williams Blodgett, 2d ed. (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 2002), 173–77. Whitman composed this poem in 1873, and wrote in a March 1874 letter
to Rudolf Schmidt that he had written the poem to “idealize our great Pacific half of America
(the future better half)” (Ibid., 173n).

259
260 Defending Rorty

Reading Rorty’s opus can leave one a bit breathless: so many topics, so many
ideas, so many thinkers and bodies of thought clashing and dancing throughout
his pages. Modernity is a complex, dynamic beast, and thus any attempt to
“hold one’s time in thought,” as Hegel put it, must also be complex and
dynamic. Hopefully, I’ve captured some of Rorty’s complexity and dynamism
in this work.
My strategy has been to focus on the practical upshot of Rorty’s wide-
ranging intellectual project, which only makes sense, given Rorty’s commitment
to pragmatism. This upshot is the necessity of the liberal virtues, especially the
virtue of irony, for the success of liberal culture and politics. It’s not that
institutions, procedures, and principles are less important than the cultivation
of liberal virtue. But the emphasis on ethical character, the creation of the
liberal minds and imaginations that democratic citizenship demands, is cur-
rently being minimized by most contemporary liberal theory. Rorty’s visions
of modernity and liberal utopia show that this is a mistake. They encourage us
to pragmatically see

both intellectual and moral progress not as a matter of getting closer to the True or
the Good or the Right, but as an increase in imaginative power. We see imagination as
the cutting edge of cultural evolution, the power which – given peace and prosperity –
constantly operates so as to make the human future richer than the human past. Imagi-
nation is the source of both new scientific pictures of the physical universe and of new
conceptions of possible communities. It is what Newton and Christ, Freud and Marx,
had in common: the ability to describe the familiar is unfamiliar terms.3

The pluralism of any society has limits because incompatible practices cannot
by definition coexist; you cannot have a liberal society that contains practicing
Nazis. Pluralism in an ideal liberal society will be restricted to the infinite ways
of life that are compatible with the possession of the liberal virtues. It is liberal
society’s imperative to ensure that its citizens develop the virtues on which it
depends. Informal socialization and habituation no doubt play a large role in
this process: citizens learn these virtues by living in liberal culture, breathing its
air, and absorbing its habits, language, and way of looking at the world, which
constitutes the liberal ethos. Formal liberal education, however, must also play
an important role in the cultivation of the liberal virtues. By “liberal education,”
I mean broadly an education in the “liberal arts,” which the American Heritage
Dictionary defines as: “Academic disciplines, such as languages, literature,
history, philosophy, mathematics, and science, that provide information of
general cultural concern.”4
Given the importance of liberal education to the cultivation of the lib-
eral virtues, however, it is curious that Rorty never seriously engages with

3 PSH, 87.
4 The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), s.v. “liberal
arts.”
Conclusion 261

philosophy of education. Although he counts himself as a fairly loyal Deweyan,

interest in educational policy and theory is something he doesn’t share with the
master. Suffice to say that Rorty has an uncontroversial, if traditional, under-
standing of liberal education. That is to say, he broadly approves of the liberal
arts curriculum as it is taught at our best liberal arts colleges. Other than to
express his worry that some Humanities departments tend to teach too much
radical political theory at the expense of more worthwhile traditional materials,
Rorty hasn’t bothered weighing in on the fierce debates over what curricular
balance should be struck between the teaching of traditional works (mostly
authored by DWEM’s: “Dead White European Males”) and works favored by
the New Left that feature the perspectives of historically marginalized groups.
As is clear from his emphasis on “sentimental education” that exposes us to
multiple perspectives, he supports the teaching of both categories of works and
wouldn’t dream of excluding either. He recognizes that there are trade-offs to
be made, but he never offers an opinion on the composition of the ideal canon.
Unlike some of the more staunch traditionalists, he never indicates that he
thinks that our basic ideal has gotten out of whack. Rather, our contemporary
conception of liberal education, if implemented efficaciously and universally,
will produce a citizenry that is “commonsensically historicist and nominalist,”
and will best be able to advance liberal civilization.
In his one article that prominently addresses education, Rorty is concerned
to emphasize against the Left and Right that we should take a pragmatic
approach to it. While the Right emphasizes teaching the traditional communal
“truths,” and the Left emphasizes teaching Socratic critique of such “truths”
in the name of liberation, Rorty splits the difference: he argues that early edu-
cation is primarily socialization while late secondary and college education are
about individualization.5 In other words, children must be socialized into the
dominant, traditional vocabulary of their society before they can be taught to
creatively and productively critique it as they create their own identities and
become involved as citizens in the public quest for justice. Beyond this, Rorty
would no doubt agree with Bruce A. Kimball’s sentiment that liberal educa-
tion is not static, and that we must adapt it to social change in ways that can
be coherently understood and justified by the “metarationale of pragmatism”:
we make liberal education suit our societal needs.6 Kimball argues that the
contemporary emphases on things like multiculturalism, community and citi-
zenship, and educational assessment all grow out of a recognition that liberal
education should produce people who are autonomous, civil, and competent
problem-solvers in the context of modern, pluralistic, democratic society.
The reason why Rorty doesn’t theorize education or engage more in debates
about it, despite it being central to his liberal utopia, is that he doesn’t feel

5 PSH, 114–26.
6 Bruce A. Kimball, “Toward a Pragmatic Liberal Education,” in The Condition of American
Liberal Education, ed. Robert Orrill (New York: College Board Publications, 1995), 1–122.
262 Defending Rorty

he has much to add. Liberal education, like liberal political thought, has had
the last conceptual revolution that it needs. We need to keep doing what
we’re doing, do it better and more expansively, and incrementally improve the
curriculum and the means of delivering it. For Rorty, the idea that all citizens
should ideally receive a comprehensive liberal education doesn’t need much
justification in light of a bona fide commitment to liberalism. Nevertheless,
we know that it’s much more controversial than this, and not just because of
how much money it would cost. The ideal of universal, comprehensive liberal
education comes under prominent assault from at least two quarters: (1) from
the pluralists who argue that such an education is morally problematic because
it doesn’t accommodate ways of life that reject it and the virtues it inculcates;
and (2) the “realists” who argue that it isn’t necessary and, moreover, won’t
be effective.
Pluralist critics of liberalism seek to protect nonliberal communities from
the “corrupting”and “homogenizing” influence of a liberal education. Even
more interesting, however, are the pluralists who identify as liberals, yet who
nevertheless argue against requiring all citizens to receive some high, ideal
threshold of liberal education (and what that threshold is I will not specify
here, but it is certainly higher than what we currently achieving in the U.S.). The
debate among liberals over this issue is captured by the question: “Are you for
Yoder or against Yoder?” One’s answer is a shibboleth among liberal theorists;
it not only identifies one’s stance on the role of the liberal state in citizen
education, but also how one conceives of the relationship between liberalism
and ethical pluralism. The question refers, of course, to the 1972 Supreme Court
opinion, Wisconsin v. Yoder, which held that Amish families could terminate
their children’s formal schooling after the eighth grade in contravention of
state law, which mandated schooling until age sixteen.7 The Court reasoned
that statute violated the Amish families’ First Amendment rights to free exercise
of religion because it failed to respect their “fundamental belief that salvation
requires life in a church community separate and apart from the world and
worldly influence.”8 Members of the Old Order Amish community no doubt
had little idea that their hard fought legal victory would cause political theorists
to spill gallons of ink in subsequent decades. Nevertheless, the case has become
a touchstone not only in the debate over the state’s role in education but also
over the very meaning of liberalism itself. This is because “education is not
simply one more public policy issue (like health care or environmentalism) to
which to apply liberal principles. Rather, education lies at the heart of the
liberal project; it is upon the realization of liberal educational goals that the
success of liberalism itself depends.”9

7 406 U.S. 205 (1972).

8 Ibid., 210.
9 Meira Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
5.
Conclusion 263

Although Rorty never indicated in print which side of the Yoder case he
supports, on my reading of him as a virtue liberal, he would join those who
disagree with its holding. Of course, as a pragmatist, he would be against
forcibly dragging Amish children into the liberal schoolhouse, which likely
wouldn’t be effective, if the goal is to move the Amish toward the liberal
virtues. But Rorty knows where he stands: nonliberal groups should not, as a
general rule, be allowed to opt out of comprehensive liberal education. Rorty
and his fellow virtue liberals are thus at odds with liberal pluralists, like William
Galston, who support the Yoder decision.
Though Galston’s book, Liberal Purposes, initially seemed to place him
in the virtue liberal camp, more recent work finds him rejecting versions of
liberalism that robustly impact nonliberal pluralism, especially because they
require the virtue of “liberal autonomy” and the Millian critical reflection that
comes with it. Galston writes, “My objection to all these views is more or less
the same: properly understood, liberalism is about the protection of diversity,
not the valorization of choice.”10 He formulates an outline of what he calls
the “Diversity State” that properly accommodates pluralism. A primary aim
of the Diversity State is to, in the name of toleration, allow groups that do
not value liberal autonomy to preserve their nonliberal ways of life. Public
education in the Diversity State, then, will be “non-autonomy-based,” and
not “prescribe curricula or pedagogic practices that require or strongly invite
students to become skeptical or critical of their own ways of life.”11 Galston
understands his theory to support Yoder.
Life in liberal society, however, requires people to be able to critically
reflect upon their beliefs and practices to ensure their justification within
the context of the evolving terms of liberal justice. Indeed, Galston admits:
“The liberal state has a legitimate and compelling interest in ensuring that
the convictions, competencies, and virtues required for liberal citizenship are
widely shared.”12 He also argues that individuals must have secure, meaning-
ful “exit rights” which allow them to leave the particular way of life they are
leading:

A meaningful exit right would seem to include at least the following elements: knowledge
conditions – the awareness of alternatives to the life one is in fact living; capacity
conditions – the ability to assess these alternatives if it comes to seem desirable to do so;
psychological conditions – in particular, freedom from the kinds of brainwashing that
give rise to heart-rending deprogramming efforts of parents on behalf of their children,
and more broadly, forms of coercion other than the purely physical that may give rise
to warranted state interference on behalf of affected individuals; and finally, fitness

10 William A. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 105 (April 1995), 523. See
also, William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
15–27.
11 Galston, “Two Concepts,” 529.
12 Ibid.
264 Defending Rorty

conditions – the ability of exit-desiring individuals to participate effectively in at least

some ways of life other than the ones they wish to leave.13

Galston, however, is doing a 180 here, because all of the above sounds a lot like
liberal autonomy. Education that ensures that citizens have the “convictions,
competencies, and virtues required for liberal citizenship” and “meaningful
exit rights,” which supposes “awareness” of other life options and the capacity
to scrutinize and choose among them, sounds fairly comprehensive. It is not
obvious, to say the least, that Galston’s theory does support the Yoder decision
after all. Do the Amish children meet all of Galston’s requirements, given the
way their environment, education, and socialization are controlled? After all, as
Macedo points out, the Amish are not good liberal citizens in certain respects:
“Amish society is patriarchal – women are regarded as unequal helpers of men –
and Amish children are not prepared for being critically reflective citizens.”14
Indeed, we might conclude from Galston’s account that they need even more
liberal education than mainstream American citizens in order to counteract
the parts of their socialization that militate against the capacities that Galston
believes they should possess. In any case, we see here in Galston’s article the
same sort of indeterminacy that we find in political liberalism and modus
vivendi liberalism. Galston pledges his allegiance both to a deep pluralism that
contains nonliberal doctrines, and to liberal values that are incompatible with
those doctrines; Galston gives with one hand what he takes back with the other,
and all in the span of an 18-page article. Instead of emphasizing the toleration
of pluralism, he should, to paraphrase Rorty, take care of cultivating the liberal
virtues, and let pluralism take care of itself.
Like the pluralists, the realists also underestimate what a commitment to
liberal citizenship ethically requires. The realist camp, unlike the pluralist camp,
is not comprised mainly of political theorists, and is more engaged in the policy
debates. Unlike the pluralists, they generally support basic liberal education for
all citizens; they just don’t think we need nearly as much as the virtue liberals
believe. The realists thus take a stand, for example, against the educational ideal
of affording all American citizens a four-year liberal arts degree. This group
includes conservatives, like Charles Murray, who believes that only a fraction
of the population has the intellectual talent and potential to truly benefit from a
liberal arts degree. Murray argues that a real, successful college-level education
(not the dumbed-down one that so many universities offer) requires an I.Q.
of about 115, which means that only 15–25% of the population should be
aspiring to get one.15 We should quit encouraging so many students to waste
both time and money pursuing four-year degrees and instead send them to

13 Ibid., 533–4 (my emphasis).

14 Stephen Macedo, “Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God
v. John Rawls?” Ethics 105 (April 1995), 488.
15 Charles Murray, “What’s Wrong With Vocational School?” Wall Street Journal, January 17,
2007.
Conclusion 265

vocational schools that will give them the career skills that they and our society
will need.
The realist camp also includes libertarians, like Pay-Pal founder, Peter Thiel,
who also worry that college-level liberal arts education isn’t a productive use
of time, not only for people of average intelligence but even for many of the
high I.Q. He has created the Thiel Fellowship, which gives money to promising
young entrepreneurs to forgo college and start up businesses. Thus, while
neither conservatives like Murray nor libertarians like Thiel are hostile to
liberal education as such or for some, they deny that there is a high threshold
of liberal education that is necessary for good liberal citizenship. They are blind
to the crucial role that such education plays in cultivating of the liberal virtues
in the citizenry. They are thus pitted against virtue liberals like Rorty, who
insist that the threshold liberal education for good citizenship is high – likely
beyond even a very effective high school education for most people – because
liberal citizenship, and the development of its requisite virtues, is demanding.
It is thus an ominous sign when William Deresiewicz notes in a 2014 review of
Ivory Tower, a documentary film on the state of American higher education:

The truth is, there are powerful forces at work in our society that are actively hostile to
the college ideal. That distrust critical thinking and deny the proposition that democracy
necessitates an educated citizenry. That have no use for larger social purposes. That
decline to recognize the worth of that which can’t be bought or sold. Above all, that
reject the view that higher education is a basic human right.16

These are forces that must be resisted by liberals, and Rorty’s work, with its
endorsement of virtue liberalism, gives us a powerful narrative with which to
do this.
I began this work with an anecdote about a discussion that I had at a Political
Science conference that braced me in my conviction that Rorty’s pragmatist
vision of liberal modernity is currently the best on offer. I will end with another
anecdote about an exchange that did this as well. I was recently at a talk given
by a Catholic theologian who opined that the Lockean-Millian liberal tradition
is ethically “boring,” especially in comparison to the Christian’s erotic quest
for a relationship with the divine. My jaw dropped at this (though it shouldn’t
have; of course this was his position). During Q&A, my hand shot up and
I stammered, “A Millian life of free, creative individuality based on liberal,
humanistic education ‘boring’?” He quickly emphasized that he had a deep
appreciation for the security and freedom, especially religious freedom, that
liberal society affords. But, finally, he insisted, liberal ethics simply isn’t up

16 William Deresiewicz, “The Miseducation of America,” The Chronicle of Higher Education

(June 19, 2014). See, Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of Liberal Education (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 2015), for a state-of-the-art argument that a primary reason that the American
economy is so relatively successful is our country’s great educational emphasis on the liberal
arts.
266 Defending Rorty

to much; secular humanist romance cannot compete with the promise of love
from an all-powerful deity. Once again, a clash of temperaments.
It is Rorty’s world-historical bet that the theologian’s view is wrong, though
he knows he cannot falsify the premises of the theologian or metaphysician.
The pragmatic virtue liberal can only continue to spin his narrative in the hopes
of sparking the attraction of an ever-greater number of minds. When the battle
heats up between Rorty’s vision and the vision offered by another rhetorically
well-armed rival, like the aforementioned theologian (or Aquinas, for that
matter), Rorty reaches for his poetic champions, like Whitman or Emerson, or
more recently, Dorothy Allison, who impressed Rorty with her description of
her “atheist’s religion of literature.” Rorty is particularly inspired by a passage
where Allison writes:
There is a place where we are always alone with our mortality, where we must simply
have something greater than ourselves to hold onto – God or history or politics or
literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I
think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat
and insist that there is more to this life than we ever imagined.17

Although one might initially be surprised that Rorty doesn’t recoil from the
suggestion that we need something “greater than ourselves,” Rorty interprets
Allison’s conflation of these “greater things,” and her exhortation to heroically
stretch our imaginations and creatively demand more from this life, to capture
the spirit of liberal modernity. There’s certainly no indication in this passage
of submission to or reliance on a nonhuman power greater than ourselves. It
thus represents what Bernstein calls Rorty’s “deep humanism,” his hope, in
Whitman’s words, “To build a grander future.”

17 AOC, 132.
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Index

Abbey, Ruth, 168–169 Bacon, Michael, 39, 103–104, 110, 123

Ackerman, Bruce, 10 Barry, Brian, 210
Adorno, Theodor W., 138–139 Beiner, Ronald, 4, 212
agape, 192–193 Bergmann, Gustav, 55
Ajami, Fouad, 19–20 Berlin, Isaiah, 99, 103, 109, 168–169
Allen, Barry, 107 “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 25
Allison, Dorothy, 266 Bernstein, Richard J.
ambition of transcendence, 35 critique of Rorty, 27, 89, 132, 133–134,
American Sublime, 216, 218–219, 136, 139–150
227–228 Dewey and, 133–134, 136, 144, 145–146,
“America Sucks Sweepstakes” (Yardley), 149–150
138 Rorty’s responses to, 27–28
Amis, Martin Blackburn, Simon, 212–213
The Information, 238–239 Blake, Michael, 83–87, 111
Anscombe, G.E.M. Blake, William, 244
“Modern Moral Philosophy,” 20–21 Bloom, Allan, 31
anti-authoritarianism. See pragmatism Bloom, Harold, 35–36, 100, 125, 216,
anticlericalism of Rorty, 215–216, 217–218, 242–243
221–222 Blumenberg, Hans, 79
anti-essentialism of Rorty, 34–35, 36, 41, 168, Boffetti, Jason, 219–220, 221, 224
189–190, 196–197 Booth, Wayne C., 258
see also Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology, Brandeis, Louis, 102
pluralism, and authoritarianism Brandom, Robert
anti-humanism. See pragmatic secular on cultural context of science, 204
humanism vs. realist, transcendent Davidson and, 75
sources on knowledge and normative vocabulary,
Appiah, K. Anthony, 210 46–47, 59
Aquinas, Thomas, 2, 3–4 Making It Explicit, 75–76
Arendt, Hannah, 2, 160, 161 revisionist pragmatism, 69, 72, 75–77
Aristotle, 8 Rorty, comparison of views to, 212
Politics, 258 Rorty’s responses to, 75–77
Arnold, Matthew, 240–241, 242–243 Stout’s assessment of, 69
Audi, Robert, 225 on Taylor, 169

277
278
Brave New World (Huxley), 29–30, 90,
235–236, 238
see also Rorty’s liberal utopia and Huxley’s
pragmatist Island
Brave New World Revisited (Huxley), 252
Brooks, David, 20, 239, 246–247
Buck v. Bell (1927), 246
Buddhism, 249–251
Butler, Judith, 2
Callan, Eamonn, 4, 18, 29
cant, use of term (Bloom), 35–36
Carter, Lief, 87–88
Carter, Stephen L., 219–220, 223–224
Cartesian epistemology, 37–39, 41, 48, 50, 62,
165–166, 168, 172, 174, 183
Case, Jennifer, 66
charity, principle of (Davidson), 181,
185–187, 205
Chesterson, G.K., 70
Chisholm, Roderick, 55
citizenship
civic virtue of irony, 93, 98, 232
Conway on, 6
in Huxley’s Pala, 252
liberal education, 154, 260, 262–265
monotheism and, 214
pluralism and, 9–10
public-private divide, 108–109
Rorty’s theory of, 6, 7
R. Wolin critique of discipleship and,
207–208
Stout on theism and, 231
Wallace’s “Democratic Spirit,” 7–8
civic virtue. See liberal virtues
civic virtue of irony. See irony
Clash of Civilizations (Huntington), 19–20
Clifford, W.K., 218
coherence theories, 45–46
common sense
Elshtain and morality, 134–135, 156–159
Taylor and ontology, 206
Condon, Richard
Manchurian Candidate, 237–238
Winter Kills, 237–238
Connolly, William E., 2, 136, 138, 194
consensus
contingency and, 32, 187
democratic deliberation and practical, 168
inquiry transcending of, 58
Macedo on, 16–17, 19
overlapping, 7, 113–114
Index
Putnam on relativism and, 65–69
rhetorical talent and, 213
Rorty vs. Gutting viewpoints on, 60–63
Taylor on, 205
truths and, 72–73
conservative viewpoint, on contingent
constraints, 53
see also critics of Rorty, from Left and
Right
constitutive goods (Taylor), 166–167, 189,
192–193
contingency
civic virtue of irony and, 93–94, 96, 98,
158, 161–162, 163–164
fallibilism and, 36–40, 83, 86
liberal freedom and, 36–40, 79, 80, 196–197
naturalism and, 180
pragmatism and, 32, 54, 63, 93, 107,
161–162
relativism and, 36–40, 65–69, 86, 141, 156
science and, 43–44
Taylor and, 28, 169–170, 178–179, 189,
194–197, 204–205, 206–207, 208
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty),
36–40, 82, 93, 94, 104, 127–128
Conway, Daniel, 6, 103, 110
critics of Rorty, from Left and Right
introduction, 130–135
Bernstein’s viewpoints, 132, 133–134, 136,
139–150
on contingent constraints, 53
Fraser’s viewpoints, 134, 137, 141,
143–144, 150–155
from intellectual Left, 135–139
from intellectual Right, 155–162
irony and liberal democracy, 162–164
Rorty’s response to the Left, 27–28, 133,
134, 135–136, 138–139
Rorty’s response to the Right, 27–28,
132–133, 158, 161–162
see also specific individuals
cruelty, 89, 90–93
cultural essentialism (Taylor), 171, 196–197,
208–211
cultural politics, 89, 126–127, 147–148, 197,
215, 241, 242
Dagger, Richard, 15
Darwin, Charles, 40, 50, 125, 146, 165
Davidson, Donald
Brandom and, 75
indefinability of truth, 45
Index
metaphor, 125
principle of charity, 181, 185–187, 205
Rorty, comparison of views to, 45, 46–48,
55–56, 71, 73, 75–76, 184
Rorty comments on, 79
scheme-content distinction, 47
triangulation, 75–76
verdical nature of belief, 47
Dawkins, Richard, 215, 239
decisionism, 60–63
de Laclos, Choderlos, 236
democratic theory
agnostic democracy (Tully), 83–87
radical democracy, 2, 143–144
Dennett, Daniel, 215
Deresiewicz, William, 265
Derrida, Jacques, 104–105, 108–109,
135–136, 138–139, 207
Descartes, René. See Cartesian epistemology
Dewey, John
Bernstein and, 133–134, 136, 144,
145–146, 149–150
on commitment to liberal democracy,
7 127, 136, 163
communitarian liberalism, 50, 172–173,
189–190, 191–192
democratic socialism, 150
on dualisms, 40–41
experimentalism, 148
Hegel and, 146, 172–173, 231
Huxley and, 239, 245, 249, 253, 257
on institutionalized religion, 222
on liberal education, 82
liberal virtues and liberal democracy, 1, 8,
22–23, 191–192
on means and ends, 49
on moral philosophy, 5
Niebuhr and, 161
pragmatism, 3, 35, 40–41, 49, 62, 77–78,
172–173
on private sphere, 109
on problems of men, 81
on purpose of philosophy, 32, 35, 62
on religion and American democracy, 216,
220–221, 222, 227–228
Rockefeller on religion concepts of,
220–221
Rorty, comparison of views to, 3, 8, 22–23,
96, 107, 146, 149–150, 157, 172–173,
220
Taylor and, 169, 172–173, 188, 189, 190,
191–192, 195
279
warranted assertability, 55
Wolterstorff and, 227–228
Dickens, Charles, 236
Diversity State (Galston), 263–264
Dreyfus, Hubert, 185, 198, 199, 200–201
Duncan, Christopher, 163
Dunn, John, 211–212
Dworkin, Ronald, 10, 87–88, 111
dystopian literature. See utopian and
dystopian literature
Eagleton, Terry, 239
education. See liberal education
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 27–28, 134–135,
156–159, 160–162, 170
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 218–220
Enlightenment
critique of, 11–12, 83, 87–88, 136
Jefferson and, 216
liberal theory and, 10–12, 22
minimalist liberalism, 20–21
pragmatism and, 77–78
Rorty and, 21–24, 25, 83, 88, 94, 101–102,
secularism, 37–38, 62
Taylor and, 178–179, 189, 203–204
universal reason/conception of rationality,
10–11, 83, 88
epistemological behaviorism, fallibilism and
liberal virtues, 50–54
epistemology. See philosophy as authoritarian,
and Rorty’s pragmatism; Rorty vs.
Taylor, ontology, pluralism, and
authoritarianism
ethical pluralism. See Rorty vs. Taylor,
ontology, pluralism, and authoritarianism
eugenics, 246
exclusive humanism (Taylor), 167–168,
193–194, 195
exclusivist bigotry, 224
fallibilist balance, 36–40
fallibilistic consciousness (Wellmer), 36
Festenstein, Matthew, 173
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 26
final vocabulary, defined, 95
First Amendment cases, 262–264
Foucault, Michel, 104–105, 111, 138–139,
155–156
Four Mobilities (Walzer), 120
Frankenberry, Nancy, 103
Fraser, Ian, 205
280
Fraser, Nancy, 150–155
critique of Rorty, 27–28, 134, 137, 141,
143–144
politics of recognition, 151–155
free discussion, defined, 82
free inquiry, 43
“freestanding” political morality (Rawls),
16
Freud, Sigmund, 79, 157, 158–159, 245,
260
Frost, Robert, 21
fusion of horizons. See Gadamer, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 87, 172, 186
Galston, William A., 4, 9
Liberal Purposes, 263–264
Gascoigne, Neil, 72
globalization, 14
Grameen Bank, 252
Gray, John, 14, 20
Guignon, Charles, 41, 243
Gutmann, Amy, 4, 17
Gutting, Gary, 54, 60–63, 185
Habermas, Jürgen, 82, 83, 138–139, 149
Harris, Sam, 215
Hatzfeld, Jean, 159–160
Havel, Vaclav, 160
Hegel, G.W.F., 38, 68, 125, 146, 172–173,
231, 260
Heidegger, Martin, 104–105, 125, 170, 172,
177, 178
Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks),
207–208
Heidegger vs. pluralism (Rorty/Taylor),
205–208
Herder, J.F., 170, 208
Hiley, David R., 41, 243
Hitchens, Christopher, 215, 239
Hobbes, Thomas, 216
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 246
homophobia and religion, 224, 229–230
Horkheimer, Max, 138–139, 142
Horton, John, 26, 99, 162
humdrum realism (Gutting), 60–63
Hume, David, 53, 118, 221
Huntington, C.W., Jr., 250–251
Huntington, Samuel, 19–20
Huxley, Aldous
biographical profile, 240–241
Brave New World, 29–30, 90, 235–236,
238
Index
Brave New World Revisited, 252
Chrome Yellow, 241
Dewey and, 239, 245, 249, 253, 257
The Doors of Perception, 246
on eugenics, 246
experimental drug use of, 246
Heaven and Hell, 246
Island, 6, 29–30, 238
neo-Malthusian concerns of, 246–247
pragmatic literary intellectual, 242
pragmatism, 235, 239–240, 242–245
on reception of his books, 238
religious belief, 233–234
on romantic polytheism, 218–219
Rortyan liberal society in literature of, 6,
29–30
W. James and, 239, 245
see also Rorty’s liberal utopia and Huxley’s
pragmatist Island
Huxley, Laura, 239
Huxley, T.H., 240–241, 242–243
idealism, 44
identity politics. See Fraser, Nancy
imagination, 3, 242, 260
intellectual irony. See irony
intellectuals
contrasted with nonintellectuals, 94, 96, 98,
157, 163–164
literary intellectuals, 6, 38–39, 126–127,
135, 147–150
pragmatism and, 98
ironists
illiberalism, 104–105, 107–109, 111,
141–142, 170–171
liberalism, 22–23, 93–96, 98–100, 110, 127,
128, 147–148, 157, 206, 240, 255–258
irony
civic virtue of irony, 8–9, 23–24, 36–37,
89–90, 93, 98, 100, 107, 108–109, 118,
121–124, 130, 135, 147–148, 157,
163–164, 211, 217, 232, 240, 249–250,
255
creativity and, 96
“intellectual” irony, 93, 95, 98–100,
104–105, 111, 162–164
justice and, 96–98
literary critics, 6
pragmatic liberal irony, 23–24
redescription and, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 104,
110, 128, 135, 144–145, 149, 257
Isenberg, Sheldon R., 250
Index 281

Island (Huxley), 6, 29–30, 238 leftist viewpoint, on contingent constraints,

see also Rorty’s liberal utopia and Huxley’s 53
pragmatist Island see also critics of Rorty, from Left and
Ivory Tower (documentary), 265 Right
liberal democracy
James, Henry, 236 Rorty on rationale for commitment to,
James, William, 31 21–22
contingency and, 79 Talisse on, 12
Huxley and, 239, 245 universal rationality concept, 11–12
pragmatic position on religion, 218 virtue liberalism and, 7–9
pragmatism, 38–39 the West’s approach to developing
radical empiricism, 245–246 countries, 19
Rorty, comparison of views to, 3, 40, liberal education, 260–266
172–173, 218, 233–234, 245 citizenship and, 154, 260, 262–265
Taylor and, 172–173 civic virtue of irony and, 23–24, 52, 93, 94,
on temperaments, 26, 161 96
on utilitarianism, 78 defined, 260
Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 215, 216–217 Deresiewicz on, 265
Jesus Christ, 260 Dewey on, 82
“Justice as Fairness: Political Not Galston on, 263–264
Metaphysical” (Rorty), 112 Huxley’s Island and, 240, 249, 250,
252–255, 256, 258
Kant, Immanuel Kimball on, 261
apodictic knowledge, 37–39 liberal democratic citizenship and, 7, 8–9,
pluralist critique and, 10 16–17, 23, 29, 32, 67, 81, 82, 107, 118,
Rorty, comparison of views to, 21, 39, 42, 160, 226–227, 240, 260–265
172 Murray on, 264–265
Taylor and, 172, 175 political liberalism and, 17, 117–118
transcendental idealism, 38, 42 Rorty’s views and, 260–262, 263
Kateb, George, 237 tensions with pluralism and, 120–121
Kautz, Steven, 83 Thiel on, 264–265
Kenworthy, Lane, 133 Yoder, debates over, 262–264
Kerr, Fergus, 206 liberal imagination (Trilling), 29
Kierkegaard, Søren, 104–105, 108–109 liberal ironists, defined, 95
Kimball, Bruce A., 261 liberal politics and society
Kripal, Jeff, 239 criteria for success in, 5, 53–54
Kripke, Saul, 199 description of, 80–81
Kuhn, Thomas, 43–44, 52, 59, 244 liberal utopia and, 36–40
Kuipers, Ronald, 35 source of authority in, 43
Kukathas, Chandran, 13 liberal utopia, 24–25, 29–30, 36–40, 81–90
Kundera, Milan, 127 see also Rorty’s liberal utopia and Huxley’s
Kymlicka, Will, 209 pragmatist Island
liberal virtues, 8, 50–54
Lacan, Jacque, 138–139 Lilla, Mark, 193–194, 195
Laclau, Ernesto, 2 Lincoln, Abraham, 219–220
Laitinen, Arto, 169 linguistic idealism, 46–48, 180–181, 183–184
Lamey, Andrew, 210 linguistic turn, 41, 245
language. See Heidegger vs. pluralism Linker, Damon, 119, 121–122
(Rorty/Taylor) literary culture, 36–39, 40, 124–127
Larmore, Charles, 225 literature, importance of, 8–9, 235–237, 238
Lawler, Peter Augustine, 132–133 Locke, John, 10, 37–39, 41–42, 237
Leary, Timothy, 246 Loyola, Ignatius, 187
282
Macedo, Stephen
on basic liberal values, 119
“California” allusion to, 1, 7–8, 127
changing views of, 9
on ethical demands of liberal politics,
16–18
on minimalist approach, 19, 118
on Nazis in liberal polity, 107–108
nonliberal critique of, 18
on pluralism, 10, 12, 226–227
on Rawls’s use of “reasonableness,” 123
Rorty, comparison of views to, 4
MacGilvray, Eric, 19
Mackie, J.L., 176, 177, 196–197
Mahayana Buddhism, 249–251
Mahayana Madhyamika tradition, 250–251
Mailer, Norman
Harlot’s Ghost, 237–238
Malachowski, Alan, 91–92, 97
Marx, Karl, 64, 104, 260
McCabe, David, 15
McCarthy, Thomas, 137, 162
McDowell, John, 45–46, 57–60, 69, 186
Mead, Walter Russell, 20
Merleau-Ponty, M., 170, 177, 178, 181
metaphor, 98, 125
metaphysical realism, 44, 75–76, 165–166,
174
metaphysics, as authoritarian, 3–4
Mill, John Stuart, 10, 232
Harm Principle, 82, 90, 101
On Liberty, 130, 259
on private sphere, 109, 110, 136
minimalist liberalism. See modus vivendi
liberalism; political liberalism
modus vivendi liberalism
Dagger on, 15
explanation of, 12–21
globalization and, 14
Kukathas tolerationist view and, 13
Rawls on, 14
respectful, use of term in, 15
Morgan, Michael L., 194
Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 21
Mulhall, Stephen, 211
Murray, Charles, 264–265
Nabokov, V., 125, 236
Nagel, Thomas, 45, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 62–63,
100
naturalism (Rorty vs. Taylor), 48–49,
174–179, 180
Index
Neuhaus, Richard John, 220
neural Buddhists (Brooks), 239, 246–247
Neurath, Otto, 86
Newton, Isaac, 37–39, 125, 260
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 161
Nielsen, Kai, 24
Nietzsche, F., 104–105, 172, 187
metaphysical comfort, 233
on philosophy, 26
pragmatism, 38–39, 79
redescribing traditional vocabularies, 104
Rorty, comparison of views to, 108–109,
111
Twilgith of the Idols, 219
Nussbaum, Martha, 92–93
Ochs, Peter, 232
ontology. See Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology,
pluralism, and authoritarianism
Oppenheimer, Mark, 168–169, 196
Orwell, George, 35–36
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 159, 203, 236
Owen, David, 91–92, 114–115
Owen, J. Judd, 35
paradigm shift (Kuhn), 244
paradox of liberalism (Talisse), 12
Peirce, C.S., 48, 183
philosophy
Dewey on, 5, 32, 35, 62
Nietzsche on, 26
Sellars on goal of, 2
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty),
241
philosophy as authoritarian, and Rorty’s
pragmatism
introduction, 32–40
critics on Rorty as irresponsible relativist,
54–69
epistemological behaviorism, fallibilism and
liberal virtues, 50–54
Rorty, comparison to revisionist
pragmatism, 69–77
summary conclusion, 77–78
truth and knowledge, Rorty’s
epistemological behaviorism, 40–49, 50
Plato, 37–38
Gorgias, 7
pluralism
citizenship and, 9–10
Macedo on, 10, 12, 226–227
modus vivendi liberalism and, 12–21
Index
proceduralist liberal theories and, 10, 11,
20–21
tensions with liberal education and,
120–121
virtue liberalism and, 9–21
see also Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology,
pluralism, and authoritarianism
poetry, Rorty and Taylor on, 166
political liberalism, 12–13, 15–21, 89–90,
112–124
politics of recognition. See Fraser, Nancy
Posner, Richard A., 147
pragmatic liberal irony, 23–24
pragmatic secular humanism vs. realist,
transcendent sources, 189–191, 196
pragmatic virtue liberalism
introduction, 79–81
approaching liberal utopia, 81–90
civic duty of irony, 93–100
cruelty, 89, 90–93
post-metaphysical literary culture,
124–127
public-private divide, 100–112
Rorty and Rawls’s political liberalism,
112–124
summary conclusion, 127–129
pragmatism
as anti-essentialism, 34–35, 40–41,
168
ironic redescription, 27. See also irony:
redescription
pragmatism about norms, 232
revisionist, 69–77
as “Second Enlightenment” (Brandom),
77–78
see also philosophy as authoritarian,
and Rorty’s pragmatism
proceduralist liberal theories, 10–11,
20–21
Proust, Marcel, 79, 125
public-private divide, 100–112
punctual self, 174–175
Putnam, Hilary, 54
critique of Rorty, 55–57
on pragmatism, 31, 33
Rorty’s responses to, 65–69, 73–74
Stout and, 69
Pynchon, Thomas
Vineyard, 237–238
Quine, W.V., 43, 86, 186
Quinn, Philip, 115
283
radical democratic-socialist-feminism. See
Fraser, Nancy
Ramberg, Bjorn, 37, 69, 73
Rancière, Jacques, 2
Rawls, John, 10
abortion footnote, 18–19
author critique of, 228
Difference Principle, 82
on “freestanding” political morality, 16
Gray’s critique of, 20
“The Law of Peoples,” 123
Macedo on use of “reasonableness,” 123
on modus vivendi arrangements, 14
Political Liberalism, 17–19
on public-private divide and political
virtues, 17–19
on reflective equilibrium, 148
revises position on public debate, 114
Rorty, comparison of views to, 22–23, 83,
112–124
A Theory of Justice, 112
Wolterstorff critique of, 225
realism. See metaphysical realism
redemptive truth, 34–36, 37–39
redescription. See irony
Redhead, Mark, 211
reductionism/reductivism, 49–50, 172,
174–175, 176, 189–190, 245–246,
259
reflective equilibrium (Rawls), 148
Reich, Rob, 17
relativism, 35–40, 42, 47, 65–69, 86, 141,
156
religion and pragmatic liberalism, 28–29
introduction, 214–223
within literary culture, 37–39
Rorty’s anticlericalism, 215–216, 217–218
Stout on, 228–233
summary conclusion, 233–234
Wolterstorff’s critique of Rorty, 223–228
religion of democracy, 219–220, 221,
222–223
Renaissance era, 37–38
representationalism, 34, 41–43
see also Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology,
pluralism, and authoritarianism
“Response to Bjorn Ramberg” (Rorty), 73
revisionist pragmatism. See philosophy
as authoritarian, and Rorty’s
pragmatism
Rieff, Philip, 157
Robbins, Jeffrey W., 80
284
Rockefeller, Steven C., 1, 220–221
Rogers, Melvin, 162–163
romanticism, 3, 172
romantic polytheism, 218–220
Rorty, Richard
Achieving Our Country, 220
as anticlerical, 28–29
biographical profile, 241–242
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 36–40,
82, 93, 94, 104, 127–128
Enlightenment and, 21–24, 25, 83, 88, 94,
101–102, 127, 136, 163
“Justice as Fairness: Political Not
Metaphysical,” 112
as member of Old Left, 132
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 241
“Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” 73
as Thomas Aquinas of liberalism, 2, 3–4
“Trostsky and the Wild Orchids,” 102
“The World Well Lost,” 75–76
“World Without Substances or Essences,
A,” 200–201
Rorty’s liberal utopia and Huxley’s pragmatist
Island
introduction, 235–240
Pala and ironic intellectualism, 255–258
Pala and Rorty’s criteria of liberal utopia,
247–255
shared pragmatic viewpoints, 240–247
summary conclusion, 258
Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology, pluralism, and
authoritarianism
introduction, 28, 165–171
cultural essentialism, 171, 196–197,
208–211
Hegelian supersession vs. pluralism,
197–205
Heidegger’s philosophy of language,
205–208
pragmatic secular humanism vs. realist,
transcendent sources, 189–191, 196
Rortyan critique of Taylor’s essentialism,
196–197
similarities between, 171–174
summary conclusion, 211–213
Taylor, authenticity from distortions of
naturalism, 174–177, 179
Taylor’s critique of Rorty, 179–183
Taylor’s misreading of Rorty, 183, 188,
189
Rosen, Michael, 168–169
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14–15, 193–194
Index
Rousset, David
L’Univers Concentrationnaire, 161
Rumana, Richard, 26
Rwandan genocide, 159–160
Ryan, Alan, 146, 169, 172–173
Santayana, George, 203–204
Saurette, Paul, 168–169, 206
Savage, Daniel, 8
Scandinavian countries, 82
scheme-content distinction (Davidson), 47
Schneewind, J.B., 72
Schumpeter, Joseph, 7, 93–94
science, philosophy of (Kuhn), 43–44
science fiction genre, 237
scientism, 43, 51–52, 172, 191, 200–201
Searle, John, 53–54
secular humanism. See pragmatic secular
humanism vs. realist, transcendent
sources
secularism, 37–38, 62
Sellars, Wilfrid, 2, 46–47, 184, 199
Shklar, Judith, 89, 91–92
Shreiner, Olive, 236
Silko, Leslie Marmon
Almanac of the Dead, 237–238
Sinclair, Upton
The Jungle, 236
skepticism, 35–36, 42, 47
Skinner, B.F., 176, 190–191
Skinner, Quentin, 168–169, 204
Smith, Nicholas H., 168–169, 187, 195,
209–210, 221
Snow, C.P., 81, 245
social pluralism. See pluralism
solidarity
liberalism and, 55–57, 92, 104–105, 110,
127, 152–153, 161–164, 203
objectivity vs., 55, 57, 72–73, 75–77
space of causation, 46–48
space of reasons, 46–48
Spragens, Thomas A., 4
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash, 237–238
Stevens, Wallace, 216, 218–219
Stout, Jeffrey, 28–29, 54
critique of Rorty, 69–73, 228–233
Putnam and, 69
Rorty’s responses to, 69–73, 76
on Rorty’s self-reliant inquirer, 66
on Rorty’s views of representationalism, 40,
41
Index
strong poets
Bloomian’s ideal of, 100, 125
Huxley’s Palanese culture and, 235–240,
255–258
post-metaphysical literary culture and,
124–127
public-private divide and, 111–112
supernaturalism (Santayana), 203–204
supersession. See Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology,
pluralism, and authoritarianism
Talisse, Robert, 12
Tambornino, John, 137–138, 141
Taylor, Charles
on avoidance of suffering, 91
Brandom on, 169
common sense, 206
as communitarian critic of liberalism, 170
on constitutive goods, 166–167, 189,
192–193
contingency, 28, 169–170, 178–179, 189,
194–197, 204–205, 206–207, 208
Dewey and, 169, 172–173, 188, 189, 190,
191–192, 195
Dilemmas and Connections, 212–213
Enlightenment and, 178–179, 189, 203–204
exclusive humanism, 167–168, 193–194,
195
influence on Elshtain, 156
Kant and, 172, 175
on modern self-conceptions, 174–175
on poetry, 166
on politics of recognition, 151
Rorty’s responses to, 74–75
Sources of the Self, 211
on unbelief, 165
W. James and, 172–173
see also Rorty vs. Taylor, ontology,
pluralism, and authoritarianism
theism. See religion and pragmatic liberalism
Thiel, Peter, 264–265
“thin” liberalism. See modus vivendi
liberalism; political liberalism
Thursby, Gene R., 250
Tillich, Paul, 222–223, 233
tolerationist view (Kukathas), 13
Tomasi, John, 16
Topper, Keith, 137, 191
transcendent source, defined, 166–167
Trilling, Lionel, 29
“Trostsky and the Wild Orchids” (Rorty), 102
Tully, James, 83–84, 87
285
universal rationality concept, 11–12
utopian and dystopian literature, 235–239
utopianism, 237
Vattimo, Gianni, 28–29
Rorty, comparison of views to, 220,
222–223, 231, 232, 233
Stout on theism of, 231, 233
verdical nature of belief (Davidson), 47
virtue liberalism, introduction
overview of chapters, 5–6, 22–24, 27–30
ethical character traits vs. political theory,
5
lack of neutrality claims, 10–11
liberal democracy and, 7–9
liberal utopia, 24–25
liberal virtues, standard list of, 8
modus vivendi liberalism and, 12–14, 21
pluralist critique and, 9–21
political liberalism, 12–13, 15–21
pragmatism and, 3–4, 6–7
romanticism and, 3
Rorty, as virtue liberalism theorist, 21–25
summary conclusion, 26–30, 260–266
thesis of, 7–21
Voparil, Christopher, 9, 103–104, 109, 132
Wallace, David Foster, 1, 7–8
Walzer, Michael, 120, 147
Warren, Samuel, 102
Wellmer, Albrecht, 36, 64–65
Welton, Katherine, 137
West, Cornel, 232
Westbrook, Robert, 150
White, Stephen K., 168–169
Whitman, Walt, 138–139, 266
American Sublime, 218–219
religion of democracy and, 219–220, 238
Rorty, comparison of views to, 138
“Song of the Redwood-Tree,” 259
Will, George, 157
Williams, Bernard, 63–64, 159, 198
Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), 262–264
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79
causal understanding of mind-brain,
48–49
form of life, 186
influence on Rorty’s therapeutic mode,
40–41
on principles, 131
Rorty, comparison of views to, 212
Taylor, comparison of views to, 177
286 Index

Wolin, Richard, 207–208 Wright, Richard, 236

Wolin, Sheldon, 2, 137
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 18, 28–29, 115, Yack, Bernard, 111
223–228 Yeats, W.B., 102
“World Without Substances or Essences, A” Yglesias, Matthew, 119, 122–123
(Rorty), 200–201 Yunus, Muhammad, 252