Political Philosophy

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

♡+

Richard Rorty

1989

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is Rorty's most sustained attempt to work out the political and personal implications of his anti-foundationalist pragmatism. The book is organised around three connected arguments. First, that our languages, selves, and communities are radically contingent — products of historical accident rather than expressions of a deeper essence or universal truth. Second, that the proper response to this contingency is irony: holding our final vocabularies lightly, never supposing they are more than our current best instruments for coping with the world. Third, that liberal democracy does not require and should not seek philosophical foundations — it stands or falls by its consequences for human solidarity and the reduction of cruelty, not by its derivability from a theory of human nature. Rorty draws on Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell alongside Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dewey to argue that literature rather than philosophy is the best medium for cultivating the imaginative sympathy that liberal solidarity requires.