Pragmatism and Democracy

Rorty inverts the usual order of priority. Standard liberal theory assumes that we first establish a philosophical account of human nature or rational agency, and from that account derive the principles of justice that legitimate democratic institutions. Rorty argues this is both philosophically futile and politically dangerous: futile because no such foundation has ever commanded assent, and dangerous because the search for foundations suggests that democracy is an experiment to be endorsed or rejected depending on what philosophy discovers. Democracy does not need to wait for philosophical permission.

In his later essays, Rorty turned from metaethics to politics proper, arguing for a revival of the reformist left in America — a left willing to work within democratic institutions, to take pride in America's past achievements, and to articulate a concrete programme for expanding economic opportunity and reducing inequality. He was sharply critical of what he called the cultural left: academics who focused on symbolic recognition and cultural criticism at the expense of economic solidarity. Philosophy and Social Hope is both a statement of his metaphilosophy and a call for a politics of hope rather than resentment.

Rorty's treatment of religion is characteristically pragmatist: he takes no position on the metaphysical truth of religious claims but argues that religion is a perfectly legitimate element of a person's private final vocabulary, and that the attempt to exclude religious citizens from democratic debate on the grounds of irrationality is both philosophically confused and politically counterproductive. The liberal society he envisions is tolerant of religious and non-religious final vocabularies alike, asking only that citizens be willing to translate their deepest commitments into publicly shareable terms when the common interest demands it.

Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) collects essays from two decades. The political essays in Parts III and IV develop arguments that Rorty extended in Achieving Our Country (1998).