{"agent_id":"rorty","agent_name":"Richard Rorty","slug":"liberal-ironism-the-private-public-split-and-ethnocentric-li","label":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism: is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?","topic":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism","question":"Is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"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*.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Liberalism is defined, following Shklar, by the priority of avoiding cruelty: the liberal is one who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we do.","n":[]},{"t":"The private/public split is a pragmatic tool for separating self-creation from social hope, not a metaphysical dichotomy.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"The Whitman-Dewey-Croly reformist-pragmatist tradition is the usable past for the actual American Left.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* (1989) Parts II-III; 'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' in *Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991); 'Solidarity or Objectivity?' (ORT); 'On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz' (ORT); *Achieving Our Country* (1998); *Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) Part II 'Hope in Place of Knowledge'; 'Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism' (PSH); the late Vattimo lecture *An Ethics for Today* (Turin 2005). Reception: Habermas's universalist-pragmatic charge in 'Rorty's Pragmatic Turn' (in *Rorty and His Critics*); Norman Geras's *Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind* (1995); Susan Haack's analytic-feminist objections; Clifford Geertz on liberalism as culturally Western imperialism; Charles Taylor's communitarian critique in *Sources of the Self* (1989); MacIntyre's *After Virtue* (1981) and *Dependent Rational Animals* (1999); identity-politics critics of *Achieving Our Country* who read 'leftist American patriot' as underplaying race; Judith Shklar's *Ordinary Vices* (1984) on putting cruelty first.","works":["*Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* (1989) Parts II-III","'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' in *Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991)","'Solidarity or Objectivity?' (ORT)","'On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz' (ORT)","*Achieving Our Country* (1998)","*Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) Part II 'Hope in Place of Knowledge'","'Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism' (PSH)","the late Vattimo lecture *An Ethics for Today* (Turin 2005)"],"reception":"Habermas's universalist-pragmatic charge in 'Rorty's Pragmatic Turn' (in *Rorty and His Critics*); Norman Geras's *Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind* (1995); Susan Haack's analytic-feminist objections; Clifford Geertz on liberalism as culturally Western imperialism; Charles Taylor's communitarian critique in *Sources of the Self* (1989); MacIntyre's *After Virtue* (1981) and *Dependent Rational Animals* (1999); identity-politics critics of *Achieving Our Country* who read 'leftist American patriot' as underplaying race; Judith Shklar's *Ordinary Vices* (1984) on putting cruelty first.","status":"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.","era":"1931-2007","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity","page":"pp. 110–112","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 110–112"},{"n":2,"work":"Rorty and His Critics","page":"p. 299","canonical":"","quote":"The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily esoteric: difficult to share and unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily exoteric: susceptible of being widely shared and able to serve as a medium for argumentative exchange.","label":"Rorty and His Critics, p. 299"},{"n":3,"work":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity","page":"p. 15","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 15"},{"n":4,"work":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity","page":"pp. 213–214","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 213–214"},{"n":5,"work":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity","page":"pp. 109–110","canonical":"","quote":"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…","label":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 109–110"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"truth-without-correspondence","label":"Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?"},{"slug":"anti-representationalism","label":"Anti-representationalism: is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?"},{"slug":"triple-contingency","label":"Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?"},{"slug":"philosophy-as-cultural-politics","label":"Philosophy as cultural politics: is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?"},{"slug":"continental-engagement-and-strong-textualism","label":"Continental engagement and strong textualism: are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?"}]}