THE IRONY OF IRONISM: A CRITIQUE OF RORTY’S

Solidarity, Rorty attempts to elucidate a mechanism for dealing with the public dissent likely to arise from a group of individuals he terms ―ironists‖. This mechanism, a strong public/private distinction, he hopes will allow for a self proliferating, ever progressing liberal utopia. This paper will reject this distinction as internally incoherent under its own terms, and will assert that even if Rorty‘s distinction is successful, it ultimately attempts to proliferate the type of individual we would like to avoid. In his book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty urges us to rethink our conception of what a liberal society should look like, and which values it should hold and promote. Rorty claims that our current vision of a liberal society is one that is governed by the idea that cruelty, the promotion of suffering, is the worst thing that we as liberals do. In addition to this, Rorty appeals to the idea that a special kind of suffering, humiliation, fo