Rorty on Politics, Culture, and Philosophy: A Defence of his Romanticism Rorty's historicist romanticism is a peculiar and oft criticized feature of his neopragmatism. I attempt to show that it should be regarded not so much as a more or less exceptionable philosophical approach, but rather, as a practice in ‘cultural politics’—which is his ultimate definition for philosophy—prompted by his acute political concerns and his views on the nature of moral progress.

The paper outlines a critique and reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s version of pragmatism. While sympathetic to many elements in Rorty’s philosophy, his recent creation of a dichotomy between state-level (read credible) and global-level (read utopian) politics is criticised. Patterns of governance in the global polity simply do not match. Decision-making prowes s within institutional and agent networks transcends exclusively state-centric cartographies and proffers the need to theorise global politics in a non-dichotomised, multi-level fashion. This is not to dispense with pragmatism. (...) Rather, it is to extend it. By drawing on Rorty’s concept of sentimental education, a global pragmatic praxis is elaborated via a narrative of the Tobin Tax and its place in a burgeoning global civil society. In this way, Rorty’s oft-repeated claim that “we should start from where we are” is applied to the plurality of ‘we-groups’ and their multiple activities within an emerging global polity. (shrink)

Virtue liberalism holds that the success of liberal politics and society depends on the citizenry possessing a set of liberal virtues, including traits like open-mindedness, toleration, and individual autonomy. Virtue liberalism is thus an ethically demanding conception of liberalism that is at odds with conceptions, like Rawlsian political liberalism andmodus vivendiliberalism, that attempt to minimize liberalism’s ethical impact in order to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although he claims to be a Rawlsian political liberal, Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism (...) is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good liberal citizenship. Indeed, Rorty ultimately joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life,” rather than merely a set of political relations that have a minimal effect on our characters or on the shape of our private commitments and projects. (shrink)