Richard Rorty's postmodern case for liberal democracy: a critique.

• Author: Bragues, George

1. Introduction

   Liberal democracy was originally founded on the Enlightenment notion that there are principles, accessible to unassisted reason, demonstrating that political life should be dedicated to the protection of rights common to all human beings. These were thought to include the right to life, property, free speech, equal standing before the law, due process in criminal proceedings, along with the right to practice the religion of one's choice. Not to mention the right to choose one's political leaders, and pursue one's own conception of happiness so long as the choices made are consistent with the rights of others and the common good. Our Enlightenment ancestors may have given different justifications for these rights--some grounding them on a deistic conception of God or nature, others on the rational dignity of human beings, and still others on social utility considerations--but they generally agreed that they were best secured by one variant or another of liberal democracy: which is to say, the combination of a politics free from the scheming of religious sects, representative institutions with separated powers regulated by checks and balances, and a commercial economic order, all of it operating within the framework of the rule of law.

   Today, however, it is widely held that no objective framework exists to decide normative and factual judgments. All such judgments are said to reflect the political, cultural, and socio-economic imperatives of the particular time and place in which they are made. This view has been christened postmodernism, which Jean Francois Lyotard has defined as an "incredulity to metanarratives," that is, "any science that legitimates itself with reference ... to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth." (1) With postmodernism, the original Enlightenment legitimation of liberal democracy as the regime that best accords with reason is reduced to a mere cultural prejudice.

   We need not dwell on the debatable claim that the rise of postmodernism constitutes a crisis of the West and that, once it makes its way into everyday opinion, it threatens to sap the loyalty of the public towards liberal democracy. Political and moral theorists wanting to make sense of postmodernism would find more profit in considering whether it requires us to revise the nature of our personal allegiance to liberal democracy. Does postmodernism entail that we view liberal democratic institutions as something to which we should, at best, resign ourselves or, more positively, as something to which we can be wholeheartedly committed? The writings of Richard Rorty, regarded by many as America's leading philosopher, offer a promising medium to explore this question. Rorty's answer ends up falling somewhere between the opposing poles of sullen acquiescence and passionate devotion, though much closer to the latter than the former. In defending democracy, Rorty does not--like Jurgen Habermas, (2) for example--try to resurrect Enlightenment ideals of objectivity. Nor does Rorty, as is the case among various conservative thinkers, suggest we tap into pre-modern traditions, such as Judeo-Christianity or classical political philosophy, to provide objective fortification for the Enlightenment's leaky foundations. (3) What makes Rorty intriguing is that he invites us to consider a postmodern case for democracy. He wants us to believe in democracy, while accepting, and indeed reveling in the fact, that we cannot prove its goodness.

   On the whole, we conclude that Rorty's project fails to convince. While Rorty makes a sound move in attempting to defend democracy on a non-foundational basis, he goes too far in the Sophists' direction, abandoning the socially useful ideals of rationality and objectivity, leaving us with a way of thinking that just does not square with our everyday experience of the world. A moderate skepticism about normative and factual claims, by acknowledging and yielding to traditional notions of truth, presents a more viable form of non-foundationalism. So, too, Rorty's non-foundationalism expresses itself in a historicism that gives way to an overly politicized conception of philosophy, one which unashamedly descends into the most blatant partisanship. It is a brand of historicism that ignores the growing evidence in favor of a partially fixed human nature, gives too much credence to social democratic economics, while vainly trying to ennoble the self-absorption that liberal democracy inevitably encourages and tolerates by passing it off under the exalted guise of self-creation.

2. Sophism vs. Skepticism

   Rorty is not the first figure in the history of Western philosophy to hold that the mind is incapable of grasping the nature of the world as it is in itself. The most prominent advocates of this position in the past have been the skeptics. The ancient skeptics, epitomized by the Pyrrhonists and their leader Sextus Empiricus, lived at a time when truth was seen as the outcome of dialectics, of a dialogue in which statements are constantly challenged until a non-contradictory view of the matter at hand is reached. Accordingly, the Pyrrhonists established their skepticism by showing that no non-contradictory statement is possible, that every claim can be countered by an opposing claim. (4) By contrast, David Hume, the most famous and certainly the most systematic modern skeptic, adopted the Cartesian-Lockean way of ideas, arguing that we cannot break out of our inner mental space to access the world of objects and that, except for our mathematical reasonings, nothing logically connects our ideas to each other. In both views, the mind's limitations are identified by using reason, or rather a certain conception of it, to show that the thinking subject does not come into contact with objects.

   Rorty distinguishes himself from the skeptics by refusing to employ any conception of reason and altogether trying to avoid the subject-object portrayal of our mental condition. In the skeptic, Rorty sees a figure that has cast an insidious spell on philosophers, goading them into coming up with a system claiming once and for all to place a certain set of assertions beyond question. The problem is, according to Rorty, that the skeptic is able to rear his ugly head every time some philosopher develops a new teaching. Thus, the doubts expressed by the Sophists drove Plato to the forms, which was then followed by the Pyrrhonian school which, after having been revived in the Renaissance, led to Descartes' cogito, ergo sum. Hume then appeared on the scene, which brought Kant to the rescue, who subsequently was brought down by Nietzsche's assault on reason. Philosophy just seesaws between skepticism and dogmatism, never reaching any fruitful resolution. It is better, Rorty figures, to set aside the skeptical challenge and articulate a vision that does not rely on reason. Such a vision does not let itself be judged by the rules of reason, placing it beyond the clutches of the skeptic. Hence, "I am not going to offer arguments against the [rationalist subject/object] vocabulary I want to replace," he writes. "Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics." (5) Rorty opts for rhetoric, as opposed to logic, for Gorgias and Protagoras as opposed to Socrates, seeking only to persuade, rather than convey truth. Like Heidegger, Rorty seems to be suggesting that Western thought went wrong early on with Plato, with the difference being that Heidegger thought the Greek philosopher's mistake was to initiate the forgetfulness of "Being" while Rorty believes his unfortunate legacy was to have made the Sophists look bad for two and a half millennia. In fact, Rorty thinks the demotion of rhetoric in favor of logic served Western civilization well for most of that period, particularly insofar as the rationalism preached by the Enlightenment philosophers succeeded in emancipating people from the shackles of the nobility and clerisy. The Sophists were not onto something all along, they were just onto something that happens to be relevant now, for, according to Rorty, the appeal to logic no longer offers a useful tool in furthering the Enlightenment project of freedom and equality.

   If arguments based on evidence and deduction are declared out of bounds, how then does Rorty propose to convince us? A key ingredient of his persuasive power derives from his avid commitment to leftist egalitarian causes dear to much of the West's intellectual classes, especially in the universities, Rorty's habitat. His background from a family of socialists and New Deal activists enhances his moral voice. "My mother used to tell me, that when I was seven I had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader." (6) Another rhetorical advantage comes from his vast erudition, which he unabashedly displays by sustaining a higher per page citation rate of famous philosophers and novelists than anyone else writing in the contemporary academy. In his third volume of essays, Rorty explains the origins of this style in recalling his early days as a professor when he heard Stuart Hampshire asked to summarize the results of a conference. Hampshire responded that that would be no problem "for an old syncretist hack like me." To which Rorty reacted: "At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up." (7) He has definitely realized his syncrestic aspirations with a collection of writings that read like a survey course--and a heavily idiosyncratic one at that--in Western philosophy. Mainly opposing himself to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Russell, and the logical positivists, he advances a revived...