13 - Richard Rorty: liberalism, irony, and social hope

Summary

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was born in New York City to a family of progressive intellectuals. Shortly after his birth his parents broke with the American Communist Party after realizing how much it was controlled by Moscow. Yet they remained firmly on the left, arguing for economic redistribution and social reform. In an autobiographical essay published in 1992, Rorty writes, “I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists.”

Rorty writes that his political views were formed as a child when, working as an office boy, he read press releases detailing the injustices regularly meted out to labor unions. Yet he also speaks of his having “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests.” These focused initially on collecting wild orchids during childhood summers spent in rural New Jersey, but gradually turned to imaginative literature, in particular to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. A theme that runs through his political writings is the relationship between one's private hopes and one's public responsibilities. Attending the University of Chicago from the age of fifteen, he writes: “Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me – in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats – ‘hold reality and justice in a single vision.’”