Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 6, Issue 2, 2003

Rorty’s Country, Rorty’s Empire
Adventures in the Private Life of the Public

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinction and renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practice and a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire.