Abstract
While Richard Rorty was heavily criticised within most disciplines, his reception within political thought was perhaps the most acrimonious. However, recent work has strongly undermined these often superficial readings. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue by William Curtis fits squarely within this burgeoning literature. Reading Rorty into the tradition of ‘virtue liberalism’, Curtis argues for the theoretical and political significance of the normative political project that undergirded Rorty’s liberalism.
The strength of Curtis’ book is its ability to simultaneously provide a deep reading of Rorty and an original engagement with contemporary debates in liberal political thought. For him, the centre of Rorty’s thought is its ‘comprehensive story and vision of liberal modernity’ (p. 2) which illustrates ‘how it “hangs together,” how its good features are related to and bolster one another, and how it possesses the conceptual resources to manage or resolve its inevitable flaws and shortcomings’ (p. 4). In contrast to Rorty’s own accounts and the critical consensus, Curtis argues that Rorty recommends the construction of an ethical character ideal for liberal democratic citizenship and cultural-political progress.
On the one hand, this dramatically shifts our understanding of Rorty’s liberalism, divorcing it from the Rawlsian minimalism which it is usually ascribed to, pushing it towards ethically thick conceptions of political life. Curtis overall is quite convincing, particularly in his deep engagement with some of Rorty’s most protracted political interlocutors. For example, the reading of Rorty’s relation to Rawls is particularly convincing (pp. 112–124).
On the other hand, situating his reading in an account of the paradox of liberalism – its concurrent attempts to give a normative account of liberal legitimacy and to respect social pluralism – Curtis suggests that Rorty’s anti-authoritarian pragmatic epistemology, when paired with this substantive liberalism, provides important new insights into coping with pluralism in liberal democracies. Particularly, Rorty manages the right balance between commitment and detachment for such a politics. In this, Curtis suggests promising pathways for managing pluralism within contemporary liberal democracies.
The main weakness is around scope. Rorty, despite his own claims, was a philosophical fox, traversing the major distinctions of contemporary thought (e.g. the analytical-Continental divide). Nonetheless, Curtis’ reading of Rorty remains locked within an analytical, liberal frame, rarely engaging his deep engagements of other traditions (e.g. Continental political theory). This is not, in the end, so much a criticism as a limitation to be recognised. Despite the strength of Curtis’ book, there is surely more story to tell about the political significance of Richard Rorty.