Liberal Utopia and Solidarity

Traditional liberal theory — from Locke through Kant to Rawls — tries to justify liberal institutions by deriving them from a theory of human nature, rational agency, or moral reality. Rorty argues these derivations never work: the foundations are always disputed, and the institutions are better defended on their merits — on what they do for human beings — than on what they are grounded in. A genuinely liberal culture would be comfortable with its contingency: it would say "this is what we believe and why we value it" rather than "this is the truth that reason compels all rational beings to acknowledge."

Solidarity — the sense that suffering anywhere demands a response — does not arise from the discovery of a universal human essence but from the extension of imaginative sympathy: the capacity to imagine the detailed particular suffering of someone very unlike oneself. Rorty argues that the novel — especially the novels of Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nabokov — has done more for human solidarity than any philosophical argument, because it makes the particular suffering of specific people vivid and real in a way that abstract argument cannot.

The liberal ironist maintains a sharp split between the public and the private. In public life, the currency is solidarity: shared commitments to reducing cruelty, extending rights, and listening to the voice of the marginalised. In private life, the currency is self-creation: the ironist's ongoing project of constructing a vocabulary adequate to her own sense of who she is. These two currencies are not convertible, and attempts to cash one in terms of the other — to make self-creation a public criterion or to make solidarity a private emotion — produce bad politics or a diminished private life.

Rorty's liberal utopia is articulated in Part III of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), particularly in the readings of Nabokov and Orwell. The project is further developed in Achieving Our Country (1998).