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Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2013 APSA annual meeting and in a workshop at the U.Lisbon in the framework of the Poetics of Selfhood Research Project in 2015. I thank the participants in these events, and my colleagues of the CEPS, James Martin, Alessandro Ferrara, and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. Research for this article benefited from the financial support of the FCT of Portugal.
Introduction
Richard Rorty is not only one of the most influential American philosophers of recent decades, but also "arguably the most controversial" among them.1Among his ideas, the separation he postulates between the private and the public realms is certainly one of the most controversial. This separation is the result of a reflection started at the very beginning of his career and which continued for the rest of his life. As he explains in the autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," he started studying philosophy with the hope of finding "some intellectual or aesthetic framework" to (using an expression he took from Yeats) "hold reality and justice in a single vision," where by "reality" we are to understand the "private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests" that give one's own self-image a sense of uniqueness and autonomy and by "justice" the sense of responsibility to fight for a better world. In the same essay he also explains that it is in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (henceforth CIS)--the book in which this question took central stage--that he came to the conclusion that "there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together."2How relevant this split is for Rorty's thought can be immediately grasped by reflecting on the fact that it concerns the two main motives animating it: the defense of a poeticized, ironic culture of individual self-creativity, on the one hand, and of a liberal and progressive democratic society, on the other. But the conclusion he reached--that these two commitments should be held separate--is quite puzzling. As Richard Bernstein has written, it is often difficult to avoid thinking that, despite all his professed progressivism, ultimately Rorty's political theory does not seem to offer much more than an "apologia for the status quo."3This...