Political Philosophy

Philosophy and Social Hope

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Richard Rorty

1999

Philosophy and Social Hope is a collection of Rorty's essays from the 1980s and 1990s on the social, political, and cultural implications of his pragmatism — his most accessible and personal statement of what pragmatist philosophy is for. The essays are addressed not primarily to professional philosophers but to educated general readers, and they address the questions that drive Rorty's entire project: How should we think about democracy without philosophical foundations? What should we do about religion in a pluralist society? What is the relationship between the intellectual's private self-creation and their public political commitments? Rorty defends a vision of social hope that is deliberately without metaphysical guarantees — a liberalism that holds together because people care for each other and share a desire to reduce suffering, not because they have derived their values from a theory of human nature or universal reason.