Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)

The Liberal Ironist

10 min readSep 23, 2026

The Contingency of Language, Self, and Community

The architecture of Rorty’s book rests on three parallel arguments, each directed at showing that a domain traditionally thought to require a foundation in fact has none, and that it is none the worse for that. The first domain is language. Drawing on Davidson’s account of metaphor and on the history of science, Rorty argues that vocabularies are not discovered by mapping an antecedently articulated reality but are invented, typically by unpredictable individuals who introduce new metaphors that later die into literal usage. There is no language of nature waiting to be transcribed and no algorithm for generating the vocabulary that will succeed; new ways of speaking simply arise, prove useful or fail to, and are adopted or discarded by the communities that try them. Newton’s mechanics, Darwin’s natural selection, and Freud’s account of the unconscious are for Rorty not approximations to a preexisting truth but successful redescriptions that changed what could be said, and their success cannot be explained by appeal to a fit between vocabulary and world that could be specified independently of the vocabulary itself.

The second domain is selfhood. Here Rorty draws heavily and idiosyncratically on Freud, reading psychoanalysis not as a theory of hidden mental mechanisms but as a further de-universalization of the moral self, one that replaces the Kantian picture of a single rational faculty common to all human beings with a picture of each person as a contingent and idiosyncratic web of beliefs and desires formed by an unrepeatable history of chance encounters. Combined with the reading of Nietzsche and Freud on the will to self-creation, this yields the figure explored at length through Rorty’s treatment of Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence: the strong poet, who does not discover a self waiting to be expressed but makes one by finding a vocabulary sufficiently novel that it cannot be described as a variation on any predecessor’s terms. The fear that organizes this effort is not error but what Bloom calls the anxiety of influence, the fear of dying without having said anything that was not already implicit in someone else’s vocabulary.

The third domain is community, and specifically the liberal community, whose hope of humane and increasingly democratic institutions is, in Rorty’s presentation, no less contingent and no less in need of a philosophical grounding than the other two. Liberal culture’s founding hope, in his gloss on Judith Shklar’s definition of liberals as people who think cruelty is the worst thing we do, requires no metaphysical vindication and none is available, since any attempt to derive the wrongness of cruelty from human nature or from the structure of rationality will encounter the same difficulties that afflict foundationalism elsewhere. The contingency of the community’s most cherished institutions is, on Rorty’s telling, compatible with unqualified commitment to them, since commitment has never in fact rested on metaphysical certification.

The Liberal Ironist: Private Irony and Public Solidarity

The book’s most influential and most contested move is the construction of a single figure, the liberal ironist, who is meant to hold together the contingency thesis and an undiminished ethical seriousness. The ironist is defined by three features, articulated most fully in the chapter “Private Irony and Liberal Hope.” She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered. She recognizes that argument phrased in her own vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve those doubts, since any vocabulary can only be assessed from within some vocabulary or other. And she does not think her vocabulary is closer to reality than any other, because she has given up the notion of a vocabulary’s being closer to reality at all. This self-consciousness about the contingency of one’s own most fundamental terms, which Rorty calls a final vocabulary because it is the set of words beyond which one has no further non-circular argumentative recourse, is the mark of what he calls nominalist and historicist thought as opposed to the metaphysical thought that still seeks a vocabulary answerable to the intrinsic nature of things.

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The liberal is added to the ironist by a substantive ethical commitment that irony alone does not supply: the conviction, again borrowed from Shklar, that cruelty is the worst thing human beings do to one another. The pairing is deliberately uneasy, and Rorty insists on the unease rather than resolving it. Irony is essentially a private and reflective stance, useful for self-creation and for keeping one’s vocabulary from calcifying into dogma, but it offers no resources for persuading anyone who does not already share it, and it can be positively harmful if universalized as a public philosophy, since a citizenry schooled in doubting all final vocabularies could as easily lose its grip on liberal hope as on any other commitment. Rorty therefore insists on a strict privatization of irony: it is a virtue for intellectuals to cultivate in their own self-fashioning and in the company of other intellectuals, but it should not be offered as public philosophy or built into the education of citizens, whose commitment to solidarity is better served by concrete stories of suffering than by philosophical demonstrations of the ungroundedness of cruelty’s wrongness. This privatization has been the single most criticized feature of the book, since it appears to instruct a class of ironic intellectuals to keep their most interesting thoughts to themselves for the sake of a citizenry assumed unable to bear them.

Redescription as the Central Philosophical and Political Tool

Because no vocabulary can be certified as uniquely answerable to reality, the only means available for changing anyone’s mind is redescription rather than argument in the traditional sense, and Rorty elevates this into a general method with both philosophical and political application. Philosophically, redescription is what strong poets, revolutionary scientists, and utopian social theorists do when they offer a new set of terms in which old problems either dissolve or are transformed beyond recognition, winning adherents not by deductive compulsion but by making the new vocabulary sufficiently attractive and familiar that its rivals come to seem stale. Politically, Rorty extends the same method to moral progress, most explicitly in the later essay “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” where he argues that the expansion of moral concern to previously excluded groups has historically been achieved by redescribing them as more like us, through detailed narrative that elicits sympathetic identification, rather than by philosophical arguments demonstrating their possession of some morally relevant common human essence. Redescription in this sense is manipulative in a technical, non-pejorative use of the term, since it works on sentiment and imagination rather than on inference, and Rorty regarded this as simply an accurate account of how moral change has in fact occurred rather than as a defect to be corrected by better argument.

The Critique of Metaphysics and the Final Vocabulary

The concept of a final vocabulary functions in the book as the successor to the notion of a foundational or essential truth about the self and the world, and Rorty’s critique of metaphysics is essentially the claim that the demand for a vocabulary that is final in the sense of being uniquely correct, rather than merely final in the sense of being the one beyond which a given person has no further recourse, rests on the mirror-of-nature picture already dismantled in his earlier work. Metaphysicians, in his taxonomy, are those who believe that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature that a sufficiently careful vocabulary could capture, while ironists have simply given up the hope of a vocabulary that is more than one contingent construction among others. The demand for a final vocabulary in the strong sense generates the recurrent philosophical hope for a theory that would reconcile the private project of self-creation with the public project of justice, a hope Rorty regards Heidegger, Nietzsche, and even Foucault and Derrida as still harboring in sublimated form when they attempt to derive political consequences from their accounts of language and subjectivity. His own recommendation is to give up the reconciliation project altogether and to accept that self-creation and justice are separate language games answering to separate purposes, to be pursued in their own terms rather than synthesized in a single theory.

The Role of Literature and Narrative in Moral Progress

Because moral progress works through redescription and sentiment rather than through argument, the genres best suited to it are not treatises but novels, ethnographies, and reportage, and much of the second half of the book is devoted to readings of Orwell, Nabokov, and Kundera as moral philosophers in this expanded sense. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, on Rorty’s reading, does its moral work not by offering a theory of totalitarianism but by making vivid, through the character of O’Brien, the possibility that cruelty can be pursued for its own sake without any redeeming ideological justification, a possibility Rorty takes to be more instructive than any philosophical account of evil. Nabokov’s novels, and Lolita in particular, are read as cautionary studies of the aesthete’s incuriosity about the suffering of others, the risk that a private project of self-creation pursued without regard for its casualties collapses into cruelty. This privileging of the novel over the treatise as the primary vehicle of moral education became, alongside the liberal ironist, the book’s most widely cited contribution to literary theory, since it offers an explicit philosophical rationale for treating narrative fiction as doing cognitive and ethical work that argument cannot replicate.

The Defense of a Post-Metaphysical Liberal Culture

Rorty’s ultimate aim is not merely descriptive but hortatory: he wants to persuade liberal intellectuals that giving up the metaphysical supports traditionally offered for liberal institutions, natural rights, human dignity grounded in reason, and a common human essence deserving of respect, costs liberalism nothing essential, since these institutions never in fact rested on the philosophical arguments offered in their defense and have historically been sustained by sentiment, habit, and imaginative literature instead. A post-metaphysical liberal culture is one that has, in his phrase, become thoroughly historicist and nominalist all the way down, treating its own vocabulary as one more contingent creation to be judged solely by the kind of persons and societies it helps bring into being. This is the sense in which the book is a work of what Rorty called liberal ironist theory: an attempt to describe a culture whose public commitments are held with full intensity despite being, and being known to be, without foundations. Achieving Our Country, published nine years later, extends the argument from theory to practical politics, urging the American cultural left to trade the spectatorial pleasures of theorizing about power for the reformist work of coalition politics, and it makes explicit the strand of national pride and civic hope that the more abstract argument of the earlier book had left comparatively muted.

Influence on Political Philosophy and Literary Theory

The book’s reception mirrors that of Rorty’s other major works in being immediate, wide, and sharply divided. Within political philosophy, Rorty’s redescription of liberalism as a project without foundations was read by communitarians and by some on the left as confirming the charge that liberal individualism cannot supply the resources for genuine social criticism, while others, notably in later exchanges collected around Rorty and His Critics, argued that the privatization of irony leaves public discourse impoverished precisely where imaginative self-questioning would be most valuable. Nancy Fraser and other feminist theorists questioned whether the private-public distinction Rorty relies on can bear the weight he places on it, given that struggles over gender and sexuality have historically depended on making private matters public. Jürgen Habermas’s continuing dialogue with Rorty, collected in several of the volumes cited below, pressed the objection that a liberalism without context-transcending validity claims cannot explain why its own hopes deserve allegiance rather than mere preference. Within literary theory, the book helped legitimate ethical criticism as a serious mode of reading fiction at a moment when deconstruction and its allied methods dominated the field, and Martha Nussbaum’s subsequent work on literature and moral imagination, though developed from different philosophical premises, shares with Rorty’s book the conviction that novels perform cognitive and ethical functions irreducible to philosophical argument. The concept of the liberal ironist itself entered wider currency as a diagnostic term for a certain kind of politically committed but philosophically skeptical intellectual, cited approvingly by some as an honest description of a common contemporary condition and dismissed by others as an unstable compound that asks its bearer to be simultaneously all the way down a skeptic and all the way through a believer.