Abstract
Virtue liberalism requires democratic citizens to possess certain ethical character traits, like open-mindedness, toleration, and autonomy. This puts it at odds with theories, like Rawlsian political liberalism, that seek to minimize liberalism’s ethical demands to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although Rorty endorses Rawls’s theory, his pragmatic liberalism is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good citizenship. Indeed, in contrast to Rawls, Rorty joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life” that deeply affects our characters and our private commitments and projects.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Savage (2002) convincingly makes the case that Dewey is best understood as a “virtue liberal.”
- 2.
Rorty’s most direct discussion of liberal education can be found in Rorty 1999, pp. 114–126.
- 3.
I leave aside here the important questions of when civil disobedience or political revolution might be justified. Suffice to say that I do think both can be justified when levels of injustice reach certain thresholds.
- 4.
Admittedly, Rorty at times seems to suggest that metaphysical/religious beliefs, as long as they are relegated to the private realm, are an acceptable or even desired feature of liberal society (see Rorty 1991, p. 175 et passim). His considered position, however, is that “in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one where no trace of divinity remained” (Rorty 1989, p. 45; see also Rorty 2010, p. 547, where he suggests that we would be “better off” if religion were to “wither away”). For more discussion, see Curtis 2015, pp. 214–234.
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Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Bacon, Michael. 2007. Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and political liberalism. Lexington Books: Latham, MD. This volume, which discusses the relationship between Rorty’s pragmatism and his commitment to liberalism, manages to be both the best introduction to Rorty’s thought while also containing arguments and insights valuable for professional scholars.
Guignon, Charles and Hiley, David R. 2003. Richard Rorty. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Of the many edited volumes on Rorty’s work, this is one of the best, and includes articles by leading Rorty commentators like: Richard J. Bernstein, Michael Williams, and Charles Taylor.
Macedo, Stephen. 1990. Liberal virtues: Citizenship, virtue, and community in liberal constitutionalism. Clarendon Press. Macedo’s Liberal Virtues is a brilliant response to the communitarian critiques of liberalism made by political theorists at the end of the 20th Century. This response was – wrongly in my view – overshadowed by the development of political liberalism, most prominently by John Rawls. “Virtue liberalism” became something of a “path not taken” in liberal theory that I think theorists should reconsider.
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Curtis, W.M. (2023). Rorty as Virtue Liberal. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_56
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