2
democracy over philosophy and on treating "the demands of self-creation and of human
solidarity as equally valid," the promise of Rorty’s contribution to political thought is a
way of combining self-development with social justice that overcomes historic liberal
shortcomings.
3
As a thinker with ties to both liberalism and pragmatism, Rorty’s recent
work is well-situated for using the resources of the pragmatist tradition to rethink certain
liberal assumptions.
Amongst the pragmatists a concern with character and “temperament,” to use
William James’s term, has been a recurrent and central theme. In contrast to the liberal
focus on formal procedures and institutional arrangements, their ideal of democracy was
imbued with a deeper moral and ethical quality. Most prominent in John Dewey’s
assertions about democracy as “a way of life” and a “moral ideal,” the pragmatist
conception provides a stark contrast to what Stanley Fish has described, somewhat
uncharitably, as liberalism’s tendency “to bracket off as much as life as possible from
these thorny questions, to fashion a public sphere held together by agreements like two
plus two equals four and red means stop.”
4
Taking cues from John Stuart Mill, to whom it is worth recalling James dedicated
his Pragmatism lectures, Rorty argues that the highest goal of liberal societies should be
to "optimize the balance between leaving people's private lives alone and preventing
suffering." Liberal individuals, he holds, more provocatively, should divide themselves
into "private self-creators" and "public liberals," ideally, being in alternate moments
"Nietzsche and J.S. Mill." Instituting a public-private divide along these lines will not
only enrich liberal individuality, creating the space necessary for Nietzschean projects of
becoming what one is, but at the same time galvanize the public's resolve to diminish
Convention