Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription

American Political Science Review Vol. 89, No. 4 December 1995

RICHARD RORTY, LIBERALISM AND THE POLITICS OF REDESCRIPTIONK E I T H T O P P E R California State University, Long Beach

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n recent years Richard Rorty has sought to develop an alternative to the familiar rationalist andnatural rights "vocabularies" of liberalism. Unlike most critics of classical liberalism, however,Rorty eschews attempts to argue against these vocabularies, and instead seeks to persuade his

readers by redescribing the aspirations of a liberal society in a more "attractive" way. I assess Rorty'sredescriptive practice through an analysis of his ideal liberal polity. I contend that although Rortydefends redescription as an alternative to "normal" philosophical and theoretical argument, hisredescriptive efforts fail on their own terms: not only does it appear that there is no redescription inhis descriptions, but he proves incapable of offering any insights into or exits from pressing problemsin contemporary liberal societies. This, I submit, can be traced back to his unwillingness to investigateand redescribe power and power relations.

In the essay "Method, Social Science, and SocialHope," Richard Rorty (1983) contends that per-haps the most important challenge facing social

scientists today is that of reinvigorating the longdormant Deweyan ideal of social science. This ideal,which flourished in America for a period prior to theadvent of behavioralism, accents above all "the moralimportance of the social sciences—their role in wid-ening and deepening our sense of community and ofthe possibilities open to that community" (pp. 203-4).Rorty urges pragmatists not to follow the path offigures such as Michel Foucault (who, Rorty claims,adopts the "pragmatist line" but, unlike Dewey,emphasizes the darker aspects of the social sciences,the ways they "have served as instruments of 'thedisciplinary society'" [p 204]) but to devote theirenergies to the positive task of enlarging humansolidarity, that is, the task of expanding the scopeand depth of our liberal democratic community byshowing us how others who do not share our partic-ular cultural practices or form of life or who lookstrange or who act differently are ultimately also "oneof us" (p. 203). This transformation of both oursensibilities and our sense of community is accom-plished, Rorty says, not by locating something uni-versal that binds us all together but by describingwhat unfamiliar people are like and redescribingwhat we ourselves are like (1989a, xvi). By interpret-ing people, cultures, institutions, and practices inways that make us more sensitive to the details ofhuman pain, suffering, and humiliation; by promot-ing an appreciation of the cardinal liberal values oftolerance, diversity, and freedom; and by fostering anawareness of the contingency of all communities—pragmatists contribute to both a "strengthening ofliberal institutions" and "a renewed sense of commu-nity" (Rorty 1983, 166; idem 1986b, 13).

Now if the principal aim of this Deweyan/Rortyianvision of social science is the widening and deepen-ing of a flexible, pluralistic, open and tolerant "bour-geois liberalism,"1 then the means to this end lies inthe somewhat vague interpretive practice whichRorty labels "redescription." As conceived by Rorty,

redescription is an intellectual practice employedspecifically for the purpose of radically transformingor replacing a calcified but well-entrenched vocabu-lary. Such a practice is necessary because, followingfrom his neo-Wittgensteinian account of alternativevocabularies and language games, in cases whereone's aim is to uproot a well-established and "time-honored" vocabulary, standard forms of argumentprove invariably to be "inconclusive or question-begging" (Rorty 1989a, 9). This, he says, is becausethe proponents of the time-honored vocabulary al-ways demand that any arguments against it bephrased in their vocabulary. And this implies thattheir opponents must show that certain features ofthe entrenched vocabulary are internally incoherentor inconsistent or that they "deconstruct themselves"(p. 8). But these demands, Rorty holds, can never bemet, for the current vocabulary defines what is co-herent, consistent, and meaningful speech in the firstplace (p. 9). Thus the attempt to uproot an en-trenched vocabulary through argument is always atbest inconclusive, simply because there are no non-invidious common criteria of evaluation or compari-son. For this reason, Rorty maintains that "interest-ing philosophy is rarely an examination of the prosand cons of a thesis. Usually it is . . . a contestbetween an entrenched vocabulary which has be-come a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabularywhich vaguely promises great things" (ibid.).

In these instances, what is required is not carefulargument but an ability to show how things mightlook when rearranged and placed in a different light.As Rorty explains, this "method" of philosophy

is the same as the "method" of Utopian politics orrevolutionary science (as opposed to parliamentary pol-itics or normal science). The method is to redescribe lotsand lots of things in new ways, until you have created apattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the risinggeneration to adopt it, thereby causing them to look forappropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, forexample, the adoption of new scientific equipment ofnew social institutions. This sort of philosophy does notwork piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or

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testing thesis after thesis. Rather, it works holisticallyand pragmatically. It says things like "try thinking of itthis way" . . . It does not try to pretend to have a bettercandidate for doing the same things which we did whenwe spoke in the old way. Rather, it suggests that wemight want to stop doing those things and do somethingelse. But it does not argue for this suggestion on the basisof antecedent criteria common to the old and newlanguage games. For just insofar as the new languagereally is new, there will be no such criteria. (1989a, 9)

In short, redescription is not an attempt to enunciate"the right description" but an attempt to avoid ordissolve intractable problems, conflicts, or anomaliesby reweaving the fabric of our current ways of speak-ing into a new vocabulary, one "that cuts across thevocabulary we have so far used in our . . . delibera-tions" (Rorty 1989a, 99; idem 1990b, 638-39). The aimof the redescriber is not to offer arguments against thecurrently familiar vocabulary, but to "make the vo-cabulary I favor look attractive by showing how itmay be used to describe a variety of topics" (Rorty1989a, 9). If successful, the redescriber will contributeto intellectual progress by creating new metaphorsand modes of speech that over time succeed inbecoming literalized (p. 44).

Because the practice of redescription is resolutelynot an attempt to engage in, but to avoid, "normal"philosophical and conceptual argumentation, effortsto evaluate it on these grounds are in Rorty's viewfundamentally misconceived. They are misconceivedfor the obvious reason that they presuppose preciselythe normal vocabulary and practices of justificationthat the redescriber seeks to circumvent and replace.As one commentator has noted, to ask Rorty "fora conceptually adequate account of redescriptionwould be to demand a philosophically responsibleaccount of irresponsibility" (McCumber 1990, 8).While I would maintain that there are indeed cases inwhich it is possible to argue for or against the intro-duction of a new vocabulary,2 here I am primarilyinterested in examining Rorty's redescriptive practicein its own pragmatic terms—that is, I want to see towhat extent his redescriptive efforts promise to pre-serve and extend freedom and pluralism, help us todetermine which social and political traditions andpractices should endure and be extended and whichmay need reconstruction or abandonment, and pro-vide us with an attractive and promising exit fromparticular conflicts and dilemmas. In what follows,therefore, I will explore what is perhaps Rorty's mostambitious effort at redescription, his attempt to rede-scribe liberalism by sketching a picture of what hecalls a "liberal Utopia." By examining some of theproblems implicit in this particular exemplar of rede-scription, I hope to identify some of the limits ofRorty's redescriptive practice. However, before ex-amining these questions, it is first necessary to de-scribe in more detail Rorty's understanding of currentimpasses in social and political thought, as well as hisvision of a postmetaphysical liberal Utopia.

REDESCRIPTION APPLIED:RORTY'S LIBERAL UTOPIA

Rorty's postmetaphysical redescription of liberalismis, among other things, an attempt to offer a way outof what he sees as a prototypical case of philosophicaldeadlock in contemporary social and political theory,namely the stalemate regarding the relation betweenthe private and public domains of life, or, as Rortyredescribes it, the conflict between the desire forprivate autonomy and self-creation and the desire forsolidarity and social justice. Rorty contends that theseconflicting impulses constitute the principal tensionbetween two distinct and ultimately irreconcilabletypes of thinkers, each with its own philosophicalvision, as well as its own understanding of language,selfhood, community, and freedom: ironists, such asNietzsche, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov and lib-erals, such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, andRawls (1989a, xiv).

Rorty begins by noting that in at least one respectboth kinds of writers are quite similar: both are"historicist" in the sense that they reject any and allattempts at theoretically, theologically, or metaphys-ically grounding our "most central beliefs and de-sires" (1989a, xv). Like Rorty, both types repudiatethe idea "that there is any such thing as 'humannature' or the 'deepest level of the self'," as well asthe notion that there is "an order beyond time andchange which determines the point of human exis-tence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities"(pp. xiii, xv). To the contrary, they both "insist thatsocialization, and thus historical circumstance, go allthe way down—that there is nothing 'beneath' social-ization or prior to history which is definitory of thehuman" (p. xiii). In this respect, both have helpedrelease us from the grip of "theology and metaphys-ics" and have prepared the way for a future, "post-metaphysical culture," one organized around "anendless, proliferating realization of Freedom, ratherthan a convergence toward an already existingTruth" (pp. xiii, xvi).

However, apart from their common animus to theidea of metaphysical grounding, these two types ofhistoricist writers are motivated by dramatically dif-ferent desires. For ironists like Nietzsche, Heidegger,and Foucault, "the desire for self-creation, for privateautonomy, dominates" (1989a, xiii). These writers areinterested primarily in the quest for "private perfec-tion," in the self-creation of a distinctive, autono-mous life, one that is not, as Harold Bloom says,either "a copy or a replica" (quoted on p. 24). Assuch, they are exemplars of "what private perfection. . . can be like"; but at the same time they distrustprocesses of socialization, which they tend to view as"antithetical to something deep within us" (p. xiv)—such as the will to power, libidinal impulses, orBeing. By contrast, liberal authors like Mill, Dewey,Habermas, Rawls, and Isaiah Berlin are inspiredprimarily by "the desire for a more just and freehuman community" (ibid.). They see their work not

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as a personal quest for autonomy, but as "a shared,social effort—the effort to make our institutions andpractices more just and less cruel" (ibid.). Indeed,Rorty (borrowing Judith Shklar's definition of "liber-al") calls these figures liberals precisely because they"think that cruelty is the worst thing we do" (p. xv,see Shklar 1984, 8; idem 1989). However, this over-riding regard for social justice and the cessation ofcruelty places them deeply at odds with their ironistcounterparts, whose pursuit of private perfectionseems frequently imbued with a decidedly antiliberalproclivity for "'irrationalism' and 'aestheticism'"(Rorty 1989a, xv). For this reason, liberals like Rawls(in his early writings) and Habermas continue to searchfor a postmetaphysical anchor for their politics, hopingin this way to harness the threat of unbridled ironism.

In discussing this oftentimes acrimonious conflictbetween "writers on autonomy" and "writers onjustice," Rorty holds that the standard philosophicalsolutions all seek to reconcile these antagonisticstances by uniting them under a single, more syn-thetic theoretical or philosophical view, one that"would let us hold self-creation and justice, privateperfection and human solidarity, in a single vision"(1989a, xv). Hence, we find debates among neo-Kantian rationalists like Habermas, neo-Nietzscheananarchists like Foucault, communitarians like MichaelSandel, and philosophically oriented liberals likeRawls and Ronald Dworkin—all seeking to commen-surate opposing claims by bringing them under amore synoptic philosophical view. Rorty maintains,however, that these manifold proposals are plausibleonly if one first assumes that the ironist and liberalvisions are not fundamentally "incommensurable"but are merely opposed. But, he insists, they areincommensurable: "The vocabulary of self-creation isnecessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument.The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public andshared, a medium for argumentative exchange"(ibid.). Because of this basic and ineradicable incom-mensurability, there "is no way to bring self-creationtogether with justice at the level of theory" (ibid.).

Rather than endeavoring to unify these foreverincommensurable stances in a single philosophicalvision or to terminate the conflict by granting priorityto the demands of one side over those of the other,Rorty instead recommends that we look at the rela-tion between these two types of writers "as being likethe relation between two kinds of tools—as little inneed of synthesis as paintbrushes and crowbars"(1989a, xv). One kind of writer, the ironist, teaches usthat there are indeed legitimate virtues other thansocial virtues, that some people do succeed "in re-creating themselves" (ibid.). These writers serve usby bringing to light our own "half-articulate need"for self-transformation and by encouraging us tobecome "one whom we as yet lack the words todescribe" (ibid.). Conversely, liberal writers promptus to recognize the gap between the commitmentsembodied in "the public, shared vocabulary we usein daily life" and the actual character of our currentinstitutions and practices (ibid.). By pointing out the

ways in which these institutions and practices fallshort of our implicit commitments, these writers helpgive focus to our "sense of obligation to other humanbeings" (p. 68).

As a way of preserving what is most valuable inboth types of writers, Rorty advocates not a theoret-ical solution but, rather, a satisfactory practical "com-promise." In this compromise, each party is recog-nized as being "right" but only within a particulardomain (Rorty 1989a, xiv-xv, 68). The challenge,Rorty believes, is to reconcile ourselves to the factthat our "final vocabulary" (i.e., those fully contin-gent and foundationless but nevertheless irreducibleand authoritative words that constitute the linguisticground for all of our claims about knowledge, moral-ity, and the good life [1989a, 73; idem 1992, 216])contains "two independent parts," one crucial for theprivate project of self-creation, the other indispens-able for the public project of human solidarity (1989a,68). Our imperative, he emphasizes, is not to unify butto accommodate practically these two "equally valid, yetforever incommensurable" parts (p. xv; see also p. 68).

For Rorty, the most suitable modus vivendi is onethat grants the ironist's demand for autonomy andself-creation yet insists that the pursuit of this goal bestrictly a private affair. Ironists, Rorty writes, arefigures who are defined in part by their acute aware-ness of the arbitrariness and contingency of their ownfinal vocabulary. Unlike nihilists, ironists have com-mitments, but unlike metaphysicians, their commit-ments are wedded to "a sense of the contingency oftheir own commitment" (Rorty 1989a, 61). Indeed,precisely because ironists are "never quite able totake themselves seriously," they continually enter-tain and experiment with other vocabularies, hopingthrough this ongoing process to fashion an increas-ingly self-made self, one that is not simply a reflectionor effect of one's predecessors, historical circum-stances, or local culture (p. 73). However, while thisunending process of questioning, redescribing, andreweaving one's inherited vocabularies and exploringand creating new ones is central to the ironist's questfor an ever more autonomous, self-created final vo-cabulary, Rorty denies emphatically that this activityplays any positive role in public life. "Irony," hestates, "seems inherently a private matter," some-thing that "is of little public use" (pp. 83,120). Moreimportantly, Rorty warns that when nonliberalironists such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucaultseek to bring their redescriptive practices into thepublic domain, they typically abandon their ironicappreciation of the contingency of their own vocab-ulary and instead become convinced that they havehit upon some deep truth about the way in whichpublic institutions repress inherently the desire forautonomy. Failing to recognize that autonomy "is notthe sort of thing that could ever be embodied in socialinstitutions," ironist public philosophers are led todismiss too easily both liberalism and its attendantinstitutions (p. 65). When this happens, publicironists become "at best useless and at worst danger-ous" (p. 68).

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In order to circumvent these potential hazards ofpublic ironism, Rorty offers an elegantly clear andsimple prescription: we should "privatize the Nie-tzschean-Sartrean-Foucauldian attempt at authentic-ity and purity" and enforce this by insisting upon "afirm distinction between the public and the private"(1989a, 65, 83). On this view, the ironist's desire forautonomy and self-creation, as well as the Utopianvision of a culture characterized by an endless prolif-eration of alternative descriptions (what Rorty calls a"poeticized culture"), are all to be welcomed aslegitimate and even exemplary private ideals. As longas they "do it on their own time—causing no harm toothers and using no resources needed by those lessadvantaged," ironists are free to be "as privatistic,'irrational' and aestheticist as they please" (p. xiv).Such freedom from coercion is not only tolerable butis, Rorty claims, "the aim of a just and free society"(p. xiv). In the public realm, however, things arealtogether different. This is the realm of what WilfredSellars calls "we-intentions," of shared practices andself-interpretations that define us not as individualsbut as part of a larger moral community (quoted inRorty 1989a, 59-60). Here our paramount concern iswith public issues of social justice, and in publicmatters of this sort, discourse must begin necessarilyfrom within a common vocabulary, one that permitsboth argument and rational consensus. This, ofcourse, does not imply that public vocabularies mustremain forever immune from criticism, expansion,and transformation but it does entail a "mild ethno-centrism," one based on the idea that public dis-course must start from "the way we live now" andthat "people [and communities] can rationally changetheir beliefs and desires only by holding most ofthose beliefs and desires constant" (Rorty 1989a, 197,idem 1991a, 29, 212).

For "us" citizens of "the secular modern West,"this shared and public vocabulary is unavoidably thatof liberal democracy, with its characteristic accent onaverting cruelty and "the humiliation of human be-ings" (Rorty 1989a, xv; idem 1991a, 29).3 Rorty openlyaccepts the idea that these core commitments cannever be buttressed by appeals to transcendental orontological arguments but maintains that such philo-sophical reinforcements are not needed in the firstplace. All that is required to sustain a commitment toliberal democracy is a comparative historical narrativeabout the way in which its customs and institutionshave, on the whole, made these societies less crueland more free (i.e., tolerant of a greater range ofself-expression and providing more leeway for peo-ple to pursue what private projects they wish) thanother, nonliberal societies (Rorty 1989a, 68; idem1991a, 29). Such an account could not, he acknowl-edges, rationally convince just anyone of liberalism'ssuperiority, for unless one already shares our moralsensitivity to acts of cruelty and humiliation, as wellas our appreciation of the pleasures devolving fromfreedom, diversity, and toleration (i.e., unless onealready accepts some of the "words" in liberalism's"final vocabulary"), such comparative accounts have

no persuasive force. This absence of ultimate ground,however, is in Rorty's view no cause for despair notonly because the demand for a "noncircular" justifi-cation of our social practices is itself incoherent but,more notably, because our own ungrounded groundis all we need for our social deliberations.4

While at first reading this resolutely nominalist,historicist, and "postmodernist" conception of liber-alism might appear to be hopelessly at odds with thestandard canon of liberal thought, Rorty contendsthat in fact it remains in tune with the basic commit-ments both of J. S. Mill's liberalism and Jeffersoniandemocracy (1991a, 175-96). For example, he tells usthat although the practical tasks of reducing crueltyand of balancing public and private commitmentsrequire perpetual deliberation, discussion, and socialexperimentation, his "hunch" is that "Western socialand political thought may have had the last conceptualrevolution that it needs. J. S. Mill's suggestion thatgovernments devote themselves to optimizing thebalance between leaving people's private lives aloneand preventing suffering seems to me pretty muchthe last word" (1989a, 63). On the question of howbest to close the divide between liberal ideals and theoftentimes depressing (and cruel) realities of life incontemporary liberal states, Rorty rejects the ideathat what we need is a "radical critique" of liberalthought and instead urges that "contemporary liberalsociety already contains the institutions for its ownimprovement" (1989a, 63; idem 1990b, 633-43; idem1991b, 129-39). Indeed, the "only way to avoid per-petuating cruelty within social institutions" is simplyto continue extending those institutions emblematicof liberalism, that is, to continue "maximizing thequality of education, freedom of the press, educa-tional opportunity, opportunities to exert politicalinfluence, and the like" (idem 1989a, 66-67).

Seen in this light, Rorty's fully developed idealpolity (i.e., his "liberal utopia") is a clear repudiationof both Habermas' (1987) attempt to eradicate allironism and ground social democratic practices in auniversalist, "communicative reason" and Foucault'sputative hope for a "total revolution" that wouldembody our autonomy in our institutions (Rorty1989a, 65). Rather, what emerges is a dualistic, com-partmentalized vision not only of the self but also ofthe relation between the public and private spheres.On the private side of this divide is the ironist'spreoccupation with autonomy and passion for con-tinual redescription—both esteemed as exemplaryimpulses in the quest to achieve private perfection.Here we find the realm of negative freedom and theabsence of other-regarding obligations and hence alsothe realm of fantasy, play, incommensurate meta-phors, and self-creation. On the public side of thedivide is the liberal's commitment to the minimiza-tion of pain, cruelty, and humiliation through theexpansion and refinement of "the institutions ofbourgeois liberal society" (ibid., 84). This is the realmnot of idiosyncracy and aesthetic invention but of"solidarity" and "we-intentions." Here the highestvirtues are those of the public citizen, the person

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engaged in common public discourse about ways tominimize cruelty, achieve social justice, and extendhuman solidarity. As a polity populated by citizenswho have dispensed with attempts to unify or syn-thesize philosophically the public and private spheres,Rorty's Utopia stands as a picture of a transformedculture freed of such Enlightenment neuroses, onethat seeks only to devise various practical and polit-ical measures to balance these "equally valid" yetdualistic commitments (p. xv). Likewise, the idealresident of this polity, the "liberal ironist" (an un-likely combination of the private ironism of Proustand Derrida and the public liberalism of figures suchas Dewey and George Orwell) is one who abjures theEnlightenment-induced longing for a unified andcentered self and instead strives merely to negotiatethe irreconcilable demands between "a private ethicof self-creation and a public ethic of mutual accom-modation" (Rorty 1986a, 12).

For Rorty, this redescription of Enlightenment lib-eralism terminates in a new and more compellingvision both of liberal politics and of the relationbetween the public and private spheres. By abandon-ing the now-outdated vocabularies of theology, meta-physics, and foundationalist philosophy, Rorty be-lieves that we provide the conditions for a revitalizedpublic and private life, one that consists of an "intri-cately textured collage of private narcissism and pub-lic pragmatism" (1991a, 210). Moreover, he insiststhat the absence of such vocabularies does not leaveus without the tools necessary for defending liberalcommitments to freedom, tolerance, pluralism, andthe like (as some critics maintain it does) but ratherreinvigorates those commitments precisely by under-scoring in detail both their practical advantages andtheir historical contingency. Such a story may lack thesense of epic drama found in the "grand" treatises ofEnlightenment philosophy, but it is no less capable ofengendering a commitment to human solidarity.

This vision of a liberal society founded entirelyupon "our loyalty to other human beings clingingtogether against the dark, not our hope of gettingthings right" (Rorty 1983,166) is unquestionably oneof the more ambitious efforts to rejuvenate liberal-ism's most attractive ideals—namely, its moral com-mitment to toleration, pluralism, and the avoidanceof cruelty and its preoccupation with developing amix of rights, liberties, and institutions that protectsindividuals and minorities against the all-too-familiardangers of absolutism, totalitarianism, and otherforms of unrestrained statism. By detaching theseaspirations from the abstract and rigid philosophicalstructures in which they have frequently been en-cased, Rorty proposes a vision of liberalism thatdeparts both from classical social contract and naturalrights versions and from those offered by contempo-rary foundationalist liberals like Ronald Dworkin(1977), Robert Nozick (1974), and the early JohnRawls (1971). However, apart from the evident orig-inality of Rorty's liberal Utopia, one must still posethe basic pragmatist questions: What is the cash valueof this redescription? Does it offer us a useful alterna-

tive to foundationalist liberalism, one based on a clearunderstanding of "the patterns of the past and theneeds of the present" (Rorty 1987, 11)? Or, by con-trast, does the very way in which he seeks to escapefrom the pathologies of conventional foundationalistphilosophy leave him without the resources requiredfor expanding and ultimately realizing liberalism'smost admired ideals?

CONTINGENCY, SELF-CREATIONAND CHANGE

Perhaps these issues can be denned more sharply ifwe begin by examining what is clearly the connectingthread running throughout Rorty's narrative, therather elusive but frequently invoked notion of con-tingency.5 In its broadest sense, Rorty construes con-tingency as the idea that things and events "mighthave been otherwise" (Dreyfus and Hall 1992, 18).Understood in this way, the term contingency typicallystands at one end of a set of oppositions whose otherterm is variously necessary, essential, intrinsic, or un-conditional. These latter terms, (as I have indicated)are themselves tightly intertwined with notions of acommon "human nature," a telos, a divine order orsome other principle of legitimacy that is privilegedprecisely because its status is independent of ourparticular historical location and social practices. At aminimum, then, Rorty's accent on contingency is tiedclosely to his denial of the idea that there is anything'"beneath' socialization or prior to history which isdefmatory of the human" (1989a, xiii).

Unfortunately, this in itself is not highly informa-tive, for it is at best an extremely general and purelynegative construal. When Rorty speaks of contin-gency in a more specific manner, however, he typi-cally uses the term in one of two ways. First, he usesit in a way that links it to notions of novelty, innova-tion, originality, and creativity. In these instances(common in his chapter "The Contingency of Self-hood"), contingency is meant to pinpoint some do-main or space that is devoid of any immanent natureor logic and therefore also open to innovation, trans-formation, and redescription. Here contingency repre-sents the abundant possibilities inherent in the rec-ognition of historicity: because our inherited practicesand forms of life are not ontologically fixed but areculturally and historically constituted, they can (al-though never all at once) be questioned, transformed,and redescribed. Understood in this way, Rorty'sinvocation of contingency moves between a restate-ment of the undeniable fact that human beings andhuman history are something more than the com-bined effects of culture and nature and a voluntaristnotion that the only impediments to human changeand transformation are those set by the human willitself.

On the other hand, Rorty frequently uses the termcontingency in a quite different manner, identifying itnot with the powers and possibilities of humaninnovation but with notions of chance, luck, accident,

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randomness, and fortuitousness. This connection ismade explicit in a number of different passages:"Poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or politicalprogress results from the accidental coincidence of aprivate obsession with a public need" (1989a, 37);Galileo "just lucked out" (1983, 193); "The idea ofhuman solidarity is simply the fortunate happen-stance creation of modern times" (1989a, 68); themention of "random factors" and constellations (p.17; 1986a, 12); and the use of Philip Larkin's meta-phor of the "blind impress" (1989a, 141).6 The con-nection is also implicit in Rorty's radically decenteredconception of human subjectivity, as well as in therecurrence of haunting and despondent passages onthe theme of human powerlessness. Whether explicitor implicit, however, the meaning of contingency inall of these passages is essentially the same: it impliesuncontrollable and unpredictable forces or eventsthat shape our lives in decisive ways.

What is significant about these construals of con-tingency is the way in which they accent Rorty's ownequivocations regarding the potentialities and limitsof individual and collective action. As we can seefrom his dual use of the term, Rorty vacillates be-tween an "anything goes" vision of human agency inwhich our capacities for personal or social transfor-mation are limited only by the powers of our individ-ual or collective imaginations and a vision in whichefforts to shape one's self and one's world are everybit as uncontrollable as in the most deterministic andtotalizing philosophical systems. Here Rorty findshimself locked in the same dichotomy between vol-untarism and determinism that he associates withmetaphysical and foundationalist enterprises.7

In fact, neither of these construals are typical of thesituations that characterize the better part of every-day life. Our capacity for self-creation or imaginationis not unlimited; it is instead partly constituted, andtherefore also partly constrained, by past and presentsocial, cultural, and linguistic practices. These practicesnot only privilege certain imaginative and creative ef-forts over others but also partly constitute the categoriesof "novelty" and "originality," thus distinguishingthem both from "the old" and from eccentricity,insanity, silliness, the quixotic, and so on. Indeed, asmany commentators have pointed out, the absence ofany "great" women artists or philosophers in thestandard canon of Western culture reveals moreabout the ways in which categories like originalityand genius have been constructed than about theartistic or intellectual talents of women.8 Conversely,it may be true that there are countless unanticipatedand uncontrollable events that in one way or anothershape the course of our lives, but precisely what effectthey have on us and how we respond to them isneither fully predetermined nor entirely a matter of"chance." Rather, these things are delimited both bymaterial forces and by the horizons of our individualand social self-understandings—horizons that, im-portantly, simultaneously make meaning possibleand limit the possible domain of meaning.

Rorty, of course, is not entirely unaware of these

problems. He acknowledges at times that our creativecapacities are not unlimited and that even purelychance events can be understood and confronted indifferent ways. He tells us, for example, that there are"no fully Nietzschean lives, . . . no lives which arenot largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past anddependent on the charity of as yet unborn genera-tions" (1989a, 42). Unfortunately, Rorty fails fully toappreciate the social and political implications of thisinsight. For if novelty and imagination are them-selves partly constituted by language and social prac-tice and if (as I have indicated) language and socialpractice place flexible and contestable but neverthe-less real boundaries upon what is and is not intelli-gible, who has the right to speak, whose speech andwhat forms of speech are taken seriously, whatcounts as a problem and what counts as a legitimatesolution to some problem, then questions about thepursuit of and capacity for self-creation and changeare not just personal and private questions, nor arethey just questions about whether we should "drop"worn-out vocabularies and metaphors in favor ofnewer, more useful ones. Indeed, precisely becausewhat counts as a "worn-out" or "useful" vocabularyis itself partly constituted by the social and linguisticpractices of our communities, questions about self-creation, change, and the usefulness of vocabulariesall presuppose a specific social, political, and ideolog-ical context that cannot be erased even if it goesunnoticed.

This discussion of contingency and the public/private dichotomy suggests a profound and unre-solved tension in Rorty's redescriptive efforts. Al-though his accent on contingency, along with hisrigid separation of the public and the private, areboth intended to open up spaces for increased plu-ralism, novelty, play, self-creation, and human soli-darity, they tend instead to pass over or mask justthose forces which not only limit the range of possibleprojects but also structure the level, quality, andpossibility of participation in cultural and politicalconversations. If we ask what features within Rorty'snarrative encourage these problematic construals, wefind at least two interrelated sources of significance,one deriving from Rorty's understanding of politicsand the political and one (which is more "method-ological") concerning the relation, or absence of rela-tion, between theories and narratives and the prac-tices that they seek to inform.

Starting with the second, one of the most puzzlingfeatures of Rorty's redescriptive practice is the con-spicuous gap between his formal pronouncementsregarding the heuristic value of particular genres, andthe content of his own writings. Formally, Rorty tellsus that certain sorts of books are particularly "rele-vant to our relations with others, to helping us tonotice the effects of our actions on other people"(1989a, 141). These are, first, books that "help us tosee the effects of social practices and institutions onothers" and, second, "those which help us see theeffects of our private idiosyncracies on others" (ibid.).Beyond these very general categories Rorty places

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few restrictions (apart from the stipulation that theo-ries and treatises are not well suited for these tasks)upon the types of books that might illuminate theseissues. Apparently anything from "the reports . . . ofgovernment commissions" to novels like Sister Carrieand Black Boy are possible candidates for moral andpolitical edification (ibid.). In accord with his antithe-oretical, antiuniversalist posture, however, he em-phasizes the import of narratives that focus uponparticular exemplars or offer what Clifford Geertzcalls "thick description." He observes, for example,that "ethnography," "concrete examples," "detailedhistorical narratives" and "detailed description ofwhat unfamiliar people are like and . . . redescriptionof what we ourselves are like" are all particularlyeffective ways of enlarging our moral sympathies andpolitical understanding (p. xvi; idem 1991b, 175).

What is significant here is not just the observationitself (which is, after all, common among those whoquestion the practical benefits of transcendental the-orizing) but rather the extraordinary disjunction be-tween these recommendations and Rorty's own nar-rative practice. For within the corpus of Rorty'swritings there is almost no "detailed description" of"the effects of our social practices and institutions onothers" and there are no "detailed historical narra-tives" mapping the genesis and effects of thosepractices. In fact, it is striking that while Rorty ac-knowledges the existence of deep and disturbingsocial problems (e.g., "the unending hopelessnessand misery of the lives of the young blacks in Amer-ican cities" [1989a, 191]), he never describes in anydetail the broader context or "social field" in whichthose problems are embedded, nor does he locateparticular social practices that contribute to and sus-tain these problems.

This failure to offer any detailed description of thesocial field or particular social practices leads inevita-bly to a number of difficulties. It sustains, for exam-ple, Rorty's problematic construal of contingency. Aswe have seen, when he asserts that "man is alwaysfree to choose new descriptions (for, among otherthings, himself)" (Rorty 1979, 362, n. 7) or when hespeaks of poets and other original thinkers inventingradically novel and incommensurate metaphors thateventually become literalized, he verges on the adop-tion of an extreme form of voluntarism—one inwhich, as Roy Bhaskar puts it, we are "always free tochoose any description" (1989, 176-77). This stanceappears credible if we examine only the most palpa-ble and formal types of social constraints. But oncewe observe in narrative detail the role that linguisticand social practices play in constraining, disposing, anddirecting (even if not determining and compelling) ourdescriptions and redescriptions, Rorty's voluntaristicunderstanding of contingency and choice appearsboth facile and complacent.

To take one example, the sociologist Pierre Bour-dieu, in a study of modes of classification in Frenchacademic institutions, examined the individual filesof a professor of philosophy at a premiere superieure inParis (1988,194-225). Through the inspection of grades

and comments on the written and oral work of studentsof different social origins, Bourdieu found "a simpleand dearly visible relation" between a hierarchy of epi-thets (evaluative comments ranging from "simplistic,""silly," and "insipid" to "lively," "cultivated," and"masterly") and a hierarchy of social origins, a rankingbased on "the importance of the cultural capital" thatstudents inherited from their parents (determined by,e.g., the residence and profession of the pupils' par-ents) (p. 197). Students from the middle classes (therewere no students from the lower classes, nor any malestudents, since the files were taken from an afl girls'school) and the provinces "were the prime target ofnegative judgments—and of the most negativeamong them, such as simplistic, servile or vulgar.. . .Even the virtues which are attributed to them arenegative too: academic, painstaking, careful, consci-entious" (pp. 198-99). By contrast, students from theclass with the most cultural capital "almost entirelyavoid the most negative judgments, even in theireuphemistic forms, as they do the petty-bourgeoisvirtues, and they most often find themselves grantedthe most sophisticated qualities" (p. 199). Moreover,he found that in those instances where students fromdifferent social origins received equivalent grades,the remarks were "all the more severe and morebrutally expressed, less euphemistic, as the socialorigins of the pupils decrease" (ibid.).

As Bourdieu notes, not only technical aptitudes,such as the capacity to construct an argument or tograsp the specialized vocabulary of particular au-thors, but also personal and physical qualities consti-tute part of the disparate criteria of professorialjudgment. Especially in students' oral work, theselatter "'external' criteria" become prominent, andhere too there is a tight connection between students'social origins (as expressed in accent, body language,and style of speaking) and the professor's remarks ontheir work and talents:

The "external" criteria, most often implicit and evenrejected by the institution, have even greater importancein the remarks on oral work, since the criteria alreadymentioned are compounded with all those concerningspeech, and, more specifically, accent, elocution and dic-tion, which are the surest, because the most indelible,marks of social and geographical origins, the style of thespoken language, which can differ radically from writtenstyle, and finally and above all the bodily hexis', mannersand behavior, which are often designated, very directly,in the remarks. (Bourdieu 1988, 200)

Bourdieu's point is clearly not that philosophyprofessors or professors from other disciplines self-consciously conspire to reproduce in the academicfield the social hierarchies characteristic of the societyin which they live. Indeed, if this were the case, theprocess could hardly be sustained in the way that it is(Bourdieu 1988,207-8). Rather, he claims that it is thevery way in which the academic field itself is struc-tured that "makes it unthinkable" for both professorsand their pupils to recognize "the social significanceof the judgments" (p. 205). Hence, both the mani-festly brutal epithets used to describe pupils' work

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(epithets that, Bourdieu rightly observes, "would notbe permissible in ordinary usage") and the "compla-cency and freedom of symbolic aggression" are pos-sible only because they operate in such a way as toappear to be something other than they are (ibid.). AsBourdieu remarks.

It is because they think that they are operating a purelyacademic or even a specifically "philosophical" classifi-cation . . . that the system is able to perform a genuinedistortion of the meaning of their practices, persuadingthem to do what they would not do deliberately for "aftthe money in the world." It is also because they believethat they are making a strictly academic judgment thatthe social judgment which is masked by the euphemisticimplications of academic (or more specifically, philo-sophical) language can produce its characteristic ef-fect. . . . The transmutation of social truth into academictruth (from "you are a petty bourgeois" to "you workhard but lack brilliance" [vous etes travailleur mais pasbrillant]) is not a simple game of writing which has noconsequence but an operation of social alchemy whichconfers on words their symbolic efficiency, their powerto have a lasting effect on practice, (pp. 207-8)

This example shows that although Rorty would liketo separate clearly private projects of self-creationfrom public projects of social justice, in the realm ofeveryday life these projects inevitably spill overand causally intermix with one another. For themiddle-class student from the provinces whoseproject of self-creation includes the desire to teachphilosophy, these concerns are neither abstract nortrivial nor easily eradicable. Indeed, they are the sortof thing of which deep personal conflicts are made,for in this case it may involve either disavowing oreradicating aspects of her identity or history or—having come to believe that she genuinely is "lackingphilosophical talent"—deciding that her preferredproject is not one for which she is suited (Bourdieu1988, 206; see also p. 208). In either instance, how-ever, the private project of self-creation cannot beneatly distilled from the social practices, mecha-nisms, hierarchies, and power relationships that op-erate, sometimes inconspicuously and sometimesquite nakedly, in the public domain. To the contrary,private projects are always and unavoidably struc-tured by public forces.

Rorty would no doubt agree that in practice the linebetween the private pursuit of self-creation and thepublic pursuit of social justice is often fuzzy and thatone of the principal aims of social science is to clarifythis fuzziness by identifying previously unrecognizedforms of cruelty in public institutions that constrainthe private pursuit of self-creation. Nevertheless, hewould—and does—insist that it is important to thinkof these two spheres as distinct and "forever incom-mensurable" universes and to make this the basis ofour political deliberations. This response, however,fails to address the crucial question of why the publicand private spheres should be viewed as linguisticallyand conceptually exclusive and incommensurablecategories if, as Rorty himself recognizes, history andhuman experience clearly indicates that they are not?In other words, if, as writers such as Carole Pateman

argue, the evidence of history and everyday lifeshows that these two spheres have never been simplydivided but have always been intimately and "inex-tricably interrelated" as well (Pateman 1989,121-22),then the proper starting point for deliberating aboutthese spheres would seem to be precisely this evi-dence, rather than the artificial and abstract separa-tion that Rorty defends. Indeed, it appears that inRorty's effort to correct those writers who seek to unifythe public and private spheres via an abstract theoreti-cal synthesis, he simply inverts the problem by positingan equally misleading and abstract separation—onethat, far from being a redescription of the public andprivate spheres, merely follows the time-honored lib-eral practice of insisting solely on a division of thesespheres, while ignoring their historical and conceptualinterrelations. The result is a description that is not inany substantive way a redescription and a proposedsolution/compromise that remains detached from thepolitical realities that it seeks to inform.

This, of course, does not imply that the public/private distinction has no meaningful social or polit-ical purpose but rather that philosophical solutions orpragmatic redescriptions that clearly contravene thelessons of history and everyday experience should bereceived with skepticism. This is especially the casewhen those solutions or redescriptions are ones thatreenshrine patterns of thinking that have historicallypreserved and legitimated patriarchical or other op-pressively hierarchical forms of social relations. Asmany feminists have observed, however, the classicalliberal dichotomy between the public and the privatespheres (founded on the idea that these two spheresare ontologically separate and unrelated, "but equallyimportant and valuable" [Pateman 1989, 120]) hasserved historically as a mainstay of patriarchical rela-tions in both the public and private spheres.9 More-over, to the extent that this philosophical separationeventually became internalized in individual andsocial bodies, it had, as Pateman points out, themystifying and ideological effect of delegitimizingthose aspects of experience which denied the separa-tion (p. 131). For these reasons, many feminists haveadvocated a conception or ideal of the social orderthat is markedly different from the classical liberaland Rortyian versions. This conception

looks toward a differentiated social order within whichthe various dimensions are distinct but not separate oropposed, and which rests on a social conception ofindividuality, which includes both women and men asbiologically differentiated but not unequal creatures.Nevertheless, women and men, and the private and thepublic, are not necessarily in harmony. Given the socialimplications of women's reproductive capacities, it issurely Utopian to suppose that tension between thepersonal and the political, between love and justice,between individuality and community will disappearwith patriarchical-liberalism. (p. 136)

The preceding analysis demonstrates the way inwhich Rorty's reluctance to examine the complicatedinterweavings of past and present social practicesleaves him without any analytic resources for either

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assessing the costs of those practices or indicatinghow we might preserve, extend, criticize, or chal-lenge them. All of these endeavors presuppose thatwe first have some understanding of how social andlinguistic practices interact; of the various privileges,distinctions, and distortions that they enshrine; andof the role they play in constituting our individualand collective self-interpretations. This, of course,does not necessarily imply a return to grand theoryor, a fortiori, to totalizing conceptions of society, but itdoes imply an empiricism of sorts, namely, a willing-ness to examine closely how these practices devel-oped, what their effects are, and how their benefitsand burdens are parsed among different individualsand groups in society. In this regard, the recurringtheme of powerlessness, along with the correspond-ing admission that we "have no clear idea of what towork for" (Rorty 1989a, 182), should not be construedas being out of tune with the more celebratory temperof Rorty's narrative. Rather, both motifs should beseen as natural consequences flowing from the typeof narrative that Rorty constructs, one that—ironical-ly—implicitly shares the theorist's and traditionalphilosopher's animus toward all forms of empiricismand detailed historical and sociological description.10

REDESCRIPTION AND POLITICS

Let us turn now to Rorty's postmetaphysical vision ofliberalism. Rorty's redescription of classical liberalthought proceeds, as we have seen, through a nonra-tionalist, nonuniversalist redescription of the hopesand aims of a liberal society. The key maneuver inthis redescription is his recommendation that philos-ophers and political theorists drop their efforts to fusetheoretically the impulses for self-creation and jus-tice. Instead, they should be content to recognize theimport and legitimacy of both impulses, while care-fully circumscribing the domain in which each isallowed to flourish. By insisting on a firm distinctionbetween the public and private spheres, Rorty con-tends that hopelessly irreconcilable philosophical dis-putes can be transformed into concrete practical ques-tions about how best to balance the incommensurabledemands for self-creation and human solidarity.Striking adequate compromises between these twodemands is, Rorty inveighs, the most importantpractical issue in liberal societies, but the skills re-quired to negotiate such compromises are quite dif-ferent from those of the theorist or traditional philos-opher.

In examining this redescription, we might begin byposing the sort of instrumental, pragmatist questionsthat Rorty himself encourages us to ask: What is thepractical benefit of this redescription? Does it illumi-nate or help us to resolve concrete social or politicalquestions? Does it, in the spirit of Dewey, help us todetermine or usefully consider which social practiceswe must preserve, cultivate, or extend and which wemust refashion or jettison—especially, once we havedispensed with the hope of solving these questions

through the application of neutral, context-indepen-dent criteria or theories? Here Rorty's pragmaticliberalism is at its weakest. For although his claimsabout the impossibility of philosophically or theoret-ically synthesizing "Nietzsche with Marx or Hei-degger with Habermas" may be convincing (1989a,xiv), it is difficult to see how Rorty's description of aliberal Utopia could operate as a starting point orprovocative heuristic device for coming to grips withcurrent social and political dilemmas. For instance,Rorty's insistence on a firm distinction between thepublic and private spheres may usefully remind us ofthe obvious dangers of eradicating the distinctionaltogether, but it does nothing to answer the trulydifficult question of how that distinction is to benegotiated in practice. In current political debatesabout abortion rights, prayer in the school, familyleave, governmental regulation of the economy, wel-fare payments to the poor, domestic violence, and soon, the issue under dispute isn't whether somedistinction should be drawn between those aspects oflife that are immune from governmental regulationand those which are not (this is instead the commonstarting point of the debate) but where, how, and onwhat basis that distinction is to be drawn.

Indeed, if we examine current ideological conflictsin the United States, what is striking is the way inwhich conservatives and liberals seek to defend dia-metrically opposed agendas through appeals toRorty-like distinctions between the public and privatespheres.11 Broadly speaking, conservatives view mar-kets and economic affairs generally as the realm offreedom, autonomy, innovation, and self-creation.They accept economic inequality as an unfortunatebut inevitable effect of free markets, arguing thatwhatever cruelties the market may inflict on individ-uals, such cruelties are still less severe than those thatwould result from governmental efforts to regulateeconomic affairs and redistribute wealth. On theother hand, they argue that cultural, moral, educa-tional, and lifestyle issues are issues of public con-cern; for without a consensus on basic moral andcultural questions, civility, decency, and public lifein general cannot be sustained. Conversely, liberalscontend that these same cultural, moral, educationaland lifestyle issues belong in the private sphere, thesphere of negative freedom, autonomy, irony, andself-creation. They maintain that questions of moralbelief, lifestyle choice, and the like are quintessen-tially private questions and thus should remain freefrom state control, regulation, and coercion. By con-trast, the demands of justice and the obligation tominimize cruelty requires more control over eco-nomic affairs and the distribution of wealth than anunregulated market provides. Moreover, they arguethat civility, decency, and civic-mindedness are bestpreserved not through the institution of moral andcultural orthodoxy but by ensuring humane livingconditions and attenuating extreme economic in-equalities.

This brief sketch of current political conflict illus-trates the severe practical limits of Rorty's redescrip-

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tion of classical liberalism. Not only does his pro-posed separation of the public and private spheresfail to provide a clear alternative to or exit fromcurrent ideological combat, but it fails even to be aredescription in the strict sense of the word. As wehave seen, both conservatives and liberals alreadyappeal to distinctions identical to Rorty's own, yetthey make these appeals in defense of diametricallyopposed social and political policies. Hence, Rorty'sdistinctions between autonomy and justice, self-cre-ation and human solidarity, private narcissism andpublic pragmatism are better understood as restate-ments of positions that both conservatives and liber-als endorse, the difference being that they interpretthese distinctions in very different ways.

Rorty would surely reply that only someone stillunder the spell of metaphysics and theology coulddemand something more than the narrative that heprovides, for only such a person believes that thereare things like a special method or general a prioriprinciples that determine what counts as rational ormoral action in particular circumstances. As a prag-matist, however, he cannot—and need not—appealto any neutral, context-independent principles orcriteria for determining the outcome of specific con-flicts. At most, he can recommend a possible locus ofpublic deliberation while supplementing this recom-mendation with a narrative describing its potentialbenefits and the potential dangers of competing al-ternatives. In politics, as in other areas of inquiry, theloyal pragmatist construes "rational" or "just" poli-cies as those which emerge as a result of "undistortedcommunication" or "free and open encounters ofpresent linguistic practices and other practices withsuggestions for new practices" (Rorty 1989a, 60, 67).The actual resolution of particular conflicts can thusoccur only through free-and-open public delibera-tions, not through the development of ahistoricaltheories of morality, politics, or justice.

This response might be credible if Rorty eitherconvincingly demonstrated that "undistorted com-munication" or "free-and-open encounters" were in-deed accurate descriptions of current political dis-course in America or if he offered detailed analyses ofcurrent impediments to such encounters, along withproposals for curbing or remedying them. But Rortyrejects both of these options. He concedes openlythat for all of American liberalism's virtues, there isstill a clear and undeniable gulf between the ideal offree-and-open encounters and current political reali-ties. Yet he also fails to examine those social practicesand institutions that inhibit the development of amore free, open, inclusive, and democratic publicdiscourse. Instead, he offers vague suggestions thatcircumvent entirely the difficult practical issues. Forexample, he says that "discoveries about who isbeing made to suffer can be left to the workings of afree press, free universities, and enlightened publicopinion" and that "the only way to avoid perpetuat-ing cruelty within social institutions is by maximizingthe quality of education, freedom of the press, edu-cational opportunity, opportunities to exert political

influence, and the like" (1989a, 63, 66-67). Suchstatements may, as far as they go, be true, but theyelide all the troublesome questions about the partic-ular measures required to realize these abstract aims.Can one, for instance, seriously hope to maximize thequality of education and educational opportunitieswithout improving teacher-to-student ratios, withoutpaying teachers salaries comparable to those in otherrespected professions, without increasing the num-ber of days a year that children are sent to school andwithout providing the necessary equipment for in-struction?12 And if not, how does one finance thesereforms in an age of fiscal crisis and increasing voterdistrust of government generally? In short, Rorty'sUtopian dream of "building new and magnificentlyequipped schools in the inner cities" may be anhonorable one (p. 7); but this only raises further andconsiderably more contentious questions about thetypes of political, economic, cultural, and institu-tional transformations that might be required to makethis Utopia a reality and about the forms of collectiveaction that are likely to be the most effective instru-ments of such changes.

These, of course, are only a few of the many issuesthat arise as soon as one moves from the level ofabstract sentiments to the terrain of social and polit-ical action, yet Rorty's narrative repeatedly stopsshort of any serious or systematic exploration ofthem. In place of a detailed interpretation of the socialcontext and genesis of problems like the "crisis ineducation," Rorty offers sweeping and unsupportedgeneralizations about "an increasingly greedy andheartless American middle-class" that lets "the qual-ity of education a child receives become proportionalto the assessed value of its' parents real estate"13 orthat "is unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to givepoor blacks a decent education and a chance in life"(1989b, 7; idem 1990b, 642). Such claims are them-selves deeply contentious, yet even if one grants thatmiddle-class greed and racism are indeed part of theproblem, this too would seem to require furtheranalysis and interpretation: Is the American middleclass as fully unitary as Rorty assumes, or is it acomplex collection of different social groups andcommunities (white, African-American, Asian-Amer-ican, urban and rural, northern and southern, maleand female, white-collar and blue-collar, Christian,Jew, and Muslim) with disparate and frequentlyconflicting interests, sensibilities, and social sympa-thies? Was it just a matter of "chance" or "accident"that this class, or segments of this class, becameincreasingly greedy, selfish, and racist during thepast 15 years? Was this a matter of "choice"? And ifnot, what are the social, political, economic, institu-tional, and historical sources of this shift in socialsensibilities? Unfortunately, Rorty never pursuesthese questions. Instead, he quickly closes off theconversation by declaring that "it seems to me a fact[that] we need no fancier theoretical notions than'greed', 'selfishness', and 'racial prejudice' to explainthese phenomena. . . . When I am told that to appre-ciate the significance of these facts I need a deeper

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understanding of, for example, the discourses of powerof late capitalism, I am incredulous" (1990b, 642).

Here again, Rorty's legitimate suggestion (thatthere is a point at which further analysis of pressingsocial problems can become an evasion of, or substi-tute for, rather than a supplement to, political action)obscures the larger question of whether his remark-ably vague proposals, along with his global claimsabout the causes of current social dilemmas, areaccurate, compelling, or pragmatically useful (in Ror-ty's own sense of identifying a "pressure point forinitiating change" [1990b, 643]). As I have argued,Rorty's recommendations not only fail to help iden-tify pressure points for change, they represent a flightfrom that very task. In this respect, his originalDeweyan ambition of transforming philosophy intoan instrument of moral and political change—ofbringing it back into "the conversation of man-kind"—is abrogated by his own reluctance and inabil-ity to explore precisely those questions which aremorally and politically urgent. Oddly, Rorty's preoc-cupation with avoiding a return to foundationalism,metaphysics, and Truth have left him so resistant toall forms of systematic analysis that his alternative tofoundationalism is in many ways every bit as alooffrom the complexities of ongoing social and politicalissues as the foundationalist philosophy which hesought to replace.

CONCLUSION

To return to the questions I posed at the outset, Ihope to have shown that "redescription," as well asthe broader Deweyan aim of reinvigorating socialscience and philosophy, must involve somethingmore than just overcoming foundationalism or theo-retical hegemony. It also means creating a space forthe development of detailed portraits of our institu-tions and practices, of how they develop, of theeffects they produce, and of the issues to which theygive form. In addition, this means recognizing thatthe absence of an Archimedean point implies thatissues of power are always potentially at stake inconstituting, sustaining, or transforming our socialpractices. Rorty's own work is a testament to the factthat one can all too easily fuse sophisticated viewsabout epistemology and philosophical foundational-ism with political positions that are, however wellintentioned, at best misconceived and at times self-stultifying. If we hope to avoid these problems,perhaps the approach to take would be to combinepostmetaphysical insights on the status of knowledgenot simply with "thin," global stories about the pastbut with detailed histories of practices and power.

NotesI would like to thank Richard Ashcraft, Carole Pateman, LyleMassey, and Bert Dreyfus for helpful comments on an earlierversion of this essay.

1. Rorty describes his desired polity as both "postmod-

ernist bourgeois liberalism" (1991a, 197-202) and, more re-cently, as a "liberal Utopia." In a recent essay, however, heexpresses regrets about his use of the term postmodern (which,following Jean-Francois Lyotard, he defines as "distrust ofmetanarratives"), primarily because it is now "so over-usedthat it is causing more trouble than it is worth" (1991b, 1).

2. Using case studies from the history of science, I haveoffered such an argument (Topper 1994, chap. 1). It should benoted that if (pace Rorty) it is sometimes possible to argue foror against the introduction of a new vocabulary, then thecrucial question becomes one of deciding when, in the courseof an ongoing exchange, it may become unreasonable orabsurd to continue arguing. As Jacques Bouveresse hasrightly stated: "II n'est pas contestable qu'il arrive en philos-ophie, comme d'ailleurs egalement dans n'importe quelleautre entreprise intellectuelle, un moment ou il est deraison-nable et absurd de vouloir continuer a argumenter. . . . Maisla difficulty est, comme toujours, de reconnaitre le point oul'on doit s'arreter" (1992, 47).

3. As Rorty explains, humiliation is a particularly devas-tating form of nonphysical cruelty, one that is tied closely tothe ironist's preoccupation with redescription. Here, too,Rorty borrows from Judith Shklar's (1984) discussion in Ordi-nary Vices. For his account of humiliation and especially hisreasons for thinking that irony and redescription must be keptprivate (in part because they have the potential of humiliatingothers), see Rorty 1989a, 90.

4. Although Rorty himself never appeals to such argu-ments, nonfoundationalists have also sought to answer thecharge of relativism by pointing out that today many of thetenets of liberal democracy are almost universally accepted asprinciples of political legitimation, even if they are violatedfrequently in practice. This, they claim, makes the charge ofradical relativism moot as a practical issue. See, e.g., Taylor1992, 38.

5. The first three chapters of Contingent/, Irony, and Soli-darity are "The Contingency of Language," "The Contingencyof Selfhood," and "The Contingency of a Liberal Communi-ty-"

6. For an even more explicit link between contingency and"chance events," see the "possible world" sketch of Heideg-ger's life in Rorty 1990a. It should be emphasized that there isan important difference between asserting, for example, thatthere was "no particular reason why this ocular metaphorseized the imagination of the founders of Western thought"(Rorty 1979, 38) and simply declining to offer any reason(s).

7. This dichotomy between voluntarism and determinismhas a corollary in Rorty's attempt to defend (1) the physicalistidea that "one day we will be able, 'in principle', to predictevery movement of a person's body . . . by reference to themicrostructures within his body" and (2) the existentialistcommitment to the idea of radical freedom (1979, 354, 376-79). Interestingly, Rorty's effort to preserve both freedom anddeterminism by claiming that these are different descriptionsof a single event or bodily movement is remarkably similar toKant's attempt to reconcile moral freedom and natural neces-sity by viewing them as both true under different aspects ofreality. See Bhaskar 1989, 164-65.

8. For a relevant discussion of this issue from the stand-point of art history, see Parker and Pollock 1981. In politicaltheory, writers such as Carole Pateman have appropriatelyasked, "Why is Paine's reply to Burke's polemic against theFrench revolution studied, but not Mary Wollestonecraft'searlier reply? Why have the early socialists, who were con-cerned with relations between the sexes and new modes ofhousehold organization, been dismissed as 'utopian'? Why,more generally, are none of the feminist theorists' writingfrom the seventeenth century onward discussed, when themost minor male figures are given their due?" (Pateman 1987,2-3).

9. It should be emphasized that Rorty's intent is not topreserve patriarchical or sexist social relations or modes ofbehavior. On his account, cruelty is by definition a publicaffair, whether it occurs in the home, workplace, or anywhereelse. Nevertheless, his failure to examine the ways in whichthe public/private distinction has operated historically as a

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bulwark against not only against sexual (and hence civic)equality but also against gays, lesbians, and other minoritiesraises the question of whether his version of the distinction(which in its formal features is almost identical to the classicaldistinction) is the most useful tool for advancing the ideals ofliberal democracy. Given the historical record, it would seemincumbent on Rorty to show how his construal of the distinc-tion would operate in practice to reduce sexual and genderinequalities and to explain why this construal would be moreuseful than the alternative versions proposed by recent fem-inist writers. Compare Will Kymlicka's (1991) recent attemptto apply an interpretation of liberalism to current conflictsregarding the rights of minority cultures.

10. In recent writings, Cornel West (1993a, 1993b) makessimilar criticisms of Rorty. West contends, for example, thatRorty embraces "an aestheticized version of historicism inwhich the provisional and variable are celebrated at theexpense of highlighting who gains, loses or bears what costs"and that he offers "'thin' historical narratives which rarely dipinto the complex world of politics and culture" (1993a, 23,127;see also West 1993b, 177). While the preceding analysisstrongly underscores these remarks, I would perhaps differwith West on two issues. First, West implies that Rorty'serrors are chiefly (contingent) ones of omission, that is, heneglects thick, politically engaged historical description andfails to articulate the social and political implications ofspecific social practices and institutional arrangements (forhints of stronger objections, see West 1993b, 177). I argue,however, that Rorty not only fails to engage in detailed social,historical and institutional analysis but lacks the conceptualresources for such analysis. At a minimum, such an under-taking would require, if not a theory in Rorty's sense, at leasta satisfactory (or prudent and plausible) account or (re)de-scription of power and power relations, something Rorty (likethe classical pragmatists) not only omits but cannot developwithout also revising considerably his understanding of con-tingency. Second, West, like other critics, tends to accent thecelebratory aspects of Rorty's narrative, criticizing it for itsinattentiveness to the everyday miseries and cruelties thatpunctuate the lives of so many Americans. I would maintain,however, that such criticisms are incomplete, for they over-look the fact that Rorty's narratives contain both an effusiveoptimism and a deep and often fatalistic pessimism. Indeed, Itake it that any adequate assessment of Rorty's politicalthought must account for the disconcerting shifts betweenthese binary poles.

11. My sketch of ideological conflict is indebted to JeffKing's discussion (1990, 8-9). While King's analysis accents"the problem of the mutual intrusion or colonization of thepublic and private spheres" (p. 7), my concern is to show thepractical limitations of Rorty's redescriptive efforts, as well ashis conceptual inability to deal with concrete social problems.

12. For some recent efforts to discuss difficult and contro-versial issues of educational reform, see Gutmann 1987 andBarber 1992.

13. The claim that current social ills in the United States aredue primarily to an increasingly greedy middle class is arecurring theme in Rorty's recent work. See Rorty 1990b, 642;idem 1991a, 15, n. 29.

References

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sirables du pragmatisme." In Lire Rorty, ed. Jean-PierreCometti. Combas: Editions de l'£clat.

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Rorty, Richard. 1983. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapo-lis; University of Minnesota Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1986a. The Contingency of Selfhood." LondonReview of Books, 8 May, pp. 11-14.

Rorty, Richard. 1986b. "The Contingency of Community."London Review of Books, 24 July, pp. 10-14.

Rorty, Richard. 1987. "Posries." London Review of Books, 3September, pp. 11-12.

Rorty, Richard. 1989a. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1989b. "Education, Socialization, and Individ-uation." Liberal Education 75:2-9.

Rorty, Richard. 1990a. "Diary." London Review of Books, 8February, p. 21.

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Rorty, Richard. 1991a. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philo-sophical Papers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

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Shklar, Judith. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.

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Keith Topper is Visting Lecturer of Political Science, California State University,Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-4605.

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