Richard Rorty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The liberal ironist privately cultivates self-creation in the mode Bloom called the strong poet — making the contingent vocabulary one's own — while publicly standing in solidarity with those who suffer.1 Solidarity is built not by demonstrating a shared metaphysical essence (common humanity, common rationality, the dignity of the rational agent) but by sentimental education through novels, ethnographies, and political journalism that make vivid the suffering of those not yet included in our we.
Liberalism is defined, following Shklar, by the priority of avoiding cruelty: the liberal is one who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we do. The private/public split is a pragmatic tool for separating self-creation from social hope, not a metaphysical dichotomy. The defense of liberal democracy is openly anti-anti- ethnocentric: yes liberalism is parochial, yes it grew up in particular Western circumstances, no this does not delegitimize it, because the alternative is not a neutral standpoint but other parochialisms. The Whitman-Dewey-Croly reformist-pragmatist tradition is the usable past for the actual American Left.2345
That is why there is no such things as the "voice of the oppressed" or the "language of the victims." The language the victims once used is not working anymore, and they are suffering too much to put new words together. So the job of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them by somebody else. The liberal novelist, poet, or journalist is good at that.Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 110–112
The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that xiv INTRODUCTION responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 15
Just as there is nothing which validates a person's or a culture's final vocabulary, there is nothing implicit in that vocabulary which dictates how to reweave it when it is put under strain. All we can do is work with the final vocabulary we have, while keeping our ears open for hints about how it might be expanded or revised.Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 213–214
It is associated primarily with Europe and America in the last three hundred years. It is not associated with any power larger than that embodied in a concrete historical situation, for example, the power of the rich European and American democracies to disseminate their customs to other parts of the world, a power which was enlarged by certain past contingencies and has been diminished by certain more recent…Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 109–110
Her culture is one in which doubts about the public rhetoric of the culture are met not by Socratic requests for definitions and principles, but by Deweyan requests for concrete alternatives and programs. Such a culture could, as far as I can see, be every bit as selfcritical and every bit as devoted to human equality as our own familiar, and still metaphysical, liberal culture if not more so.Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 103–104
The most contested position in the corpus, attacked from every side. The Marxist Left charge: the private/public split is bourgeois quietism letting capital off the hook. The postcolonial-and-multicultural Left charge (Geertz, Spivak): liberalism dressed as universal is Western imperialism. The cultural-Left charge: Achieving Our Country's "leftist American patriot" framing underplays race and gender. The communitarian Left (MacIntyre, Taylor): the thin liberal self lacks resources to motivate solidarity. The right (Bloom, Kimball, the religious traditionalists): ironism corrodes shared moral fabric and contingency cannot ground normative authority. Habermas's universalist-pragmatic critique. Each received a serious reply in Rorty and His Critics, in Truth and Progress, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, and in the polemical mode of Achieving Our Country itself. Rorty did not concede.