Since the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature1 Richard Rorty has been challenging the traditional understanding of the purpose of philosophy, which he views as engaged in an impossible and fruitless exercise to get at reality. In practically every publication since then he has been insisting that any attempt to give foundations to our "knowledge" of reality is a misguided enterprise. Moreover, he views any effort to clarify, or even to talk meaningfully about the notions of an ultimate reality and the ultimate meaning of human existence, as a relic of a platonic past when philosophy understood itself as capable of giving us such metaphysical comfort. Philosophy, he has continued to claim in all his most recent publications, can not and should not bother itself with such questions. Philosophy, in our post-metaphysical age should be "therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic". Its sole purpose should be to "make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program."2 The edifying philosophy he advocates gives up on the search for foundations for our beliefs and abandons the traditional concern with figuring out the ultimate nature or essence of reality. Its main purpose is "to keep the conversation going rather than to obtain the objective truth".3 Instead, it defines its task as one of fostering "an awareness  of different possibilities of coping with the world, of different life-options and, indeed, of new modes of self-description".4 Needless to say that Rorty's views on the nature and purpose of philosophy have not received universal approval within the analytic and continental traditions he has straddled since the publication of his much discussed book.5 

Rorty's understanding of philosophy and its role in our social live permeates every aspect of his thought. This is particularly evident in his approach to social and political issues6, which have appeared prominently in his concerns of the last fifteen years. In this paper I will be concerned with an issue that has become increasingly central to Rorty's thought in the last decade: the prospects of social hope for someone who claims we can no longer ground our utopian aspirations in either a foundationalist view or in a meta-narrative that can make sense of it all. Rorty echoes the concerns of many with the fate of utopian dreams in the wake of the collapse of the last meta-narrative to have sustained the aspirations for a more just world and asks whether is it still possible to subscribe to the social hope that things will get better for the victims of injustice, that the aspiration to a more egalitarian society can be achieved. Rorty thinks that it is still possible to hope. However, he cautions, any attempt to talk credibly about our own personal and social hopes can no longer be secured by a theory that claims to give us an account of reality, or a universally acceptable understanding of human nature, or our figuring out the course of History. In the midst of the insecurity that accompanies our impossibility to be sure about the way things are or are supposed to be, we must hold on fast to a hope, a social hope that seeks no comfort in knowledge or in its special relation to a transcendent power that cares for human well-being, a hope that is a fragile and contingent as our historical existences. He is convinced of the loss of the traditional metaphysical comforts philosophy always saw itself as capable and obligated to provide us with. All we have left to do in the wake of our loss of confidence in the foundationalist enterprise and the attempt to produce a meta-narrative that will make things clear is to finally come to accept that we must "substitute hope for knowledge";i.e. give up on the search for the comforts and security of having knowledge "of God's Will, [the] Moral Law, the Laws of History, of the Facts of Science", and concentrate instead of the type of utopian dreams that will guide us towards the construction of "an ideally decent and civilized society."7  Social hope, groundless social hope, is the only thing left to us according to Rorty. This paper examines the success of his attempt to hold on to a social hope that seeks no security or comfort in foundations; a social hope that he claims can endure the demise of our conviction that we can "figure out" the facts of human nature, or the course of history. The critical assessment of Rorty's position will first proceed by drawing on the distinction between hope and optimism and will examine Rorty's views in terms of that distinction. It will be examined whether Rorty conflates the two attitudes towards the future and whether in conflating them something is lost; i..e. does he still have a credible account of social hope? In the end, the paper will question whether it is possible to expect that the type of groundless social hope that Rorty proposes can generate the energy, commitment and inspirational enthusiasm for social justice that he advises we should continue to pursue. Can Rorty expect that a narrative without the type of metaphysical commitments of the New Testament and The Communist Manifesto generate the type of energy and commitment necessary to pursue social justice? 

The significance of hope in human experience has been for the most part the concern of theology, although philosophy has paid attention to it also. In Christian theology hope has played a very important role as one of the three theological virtues, the other two being faith and love. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas devote significant attention to this Christian virtue stressing the reference of hope to the divine. Aquinas stresses the dependence of hope on faith, and since the object of faith is the divine, he "simultaneously holds that hope contemplates the possible, but that the possible is only attainable through the divine in which we hope, not purely human efforts".8

In modern and contemporary times, hope has received significant attention from philosophers as diverse as Immanuel Kant, Gabriel Marcel and Ernst Bloch. In the case of Kant and Marcel hope is considered within a theistic frame. Theirs is mainly a concern with a hope that is ultimate in the sense that it is directed and dependent on God as the ground of meaning and human security. Kant, much more than Marcel, devotes significant attention to the foundations of the social hope for an ethical commonwealth and the advent of perpetual peace, but I will not be elaborating on Kant's view in this essay.9 In the case of Bloch, who situates himself within the secular tradition of Marxism, hope is neither ordered nor dependent on God. His is an explicitly atheistic account of human hope that is mainly concerned with articulating the social hopes of societies rather than individuals. In Bloch's analysis hope is linked to social and historical processes and nothing more.10 In the case of Marcel all hope, in the end, is a hope for salvation.11

Hope is prominent in our lives, both at the personal and at the social levels. The grounds for such hopes, of course, vary. For some, hope is dependent on the trust that they have placed in a divine power that cares about humans; for others, hope is anchored in the access, through knowledge they have attained, to the underlying dynamics of events which guarantee an outcome that may not seem evident at the present moment. But independently of the grounds that sustain it, hope always refers to the aspirations that we have in relation to the future. Hope always projects us into a desirable future that is possible for us, albeit not free of obstacles and difficulties. Hope issues and is sustained by a trust, that in spite of all the difficulties and adversities of our present situation, our deepest aspirations will be realized in a future that escapes our control. At the personal level, hope projects and structures the life and aspirations of an individual towards his own personal future; at the social level, the common life and aspirations of a community. In the secular environment and sensibility of Modernity, social hope has increasingly been understood as a credible account of human progress. Social hope and social progress have gone together in Modern thought, and social progress has being measured by the levels of social justice attained. In one of his most recent publications, Philosophy and Social Hope,12 Rorty voices this relationship when he defines hope as our ability "to construct a plausible narrative of progress".13 This "plausible narrative of progress", however, does not need to be grounded in anything transcendent to serve us, nor is it dependent on the discovery of an essential human nature. He believes that in fact the case for such a plausible narrative of human progress can be made, but this progress has nothing to do with knowledge and everything with sympathy, with a growing awareness, albeit always fragile, that cruelty is the worst thing we can do to one another. Moral progress, he stresses, is not the outcome of knowledge, it is the achievement of sympathy. 
Rorty's understanding of the significance of contingency and the radical historicity of human existence has none of the associations with despair and meaninglessness characteristic of the philosophers who first wrestled with the consequences of a radical challenge to essentialism and foundationalism .14 Rorty tends to be very dismissive of those who still cling to the religious impulse that links "the awe of something greater than ourselves, and the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance."15 For Rorty, the cultivation of such longings amounts to a "lack of intellectual courage" or a "failure of nerve."16 However, things may not be as simple as Rorty wants us to believe. His relationship and attitude towards contingency and its consequences is not as unproblematic as he often, nonchalantly, is prone to claim. When he proposes that liberal society and its culture "should aim at curing us of our 'deep metaphysical need"17 he doesn't seem to give enough weight to the multiple ways in which human beings throughout history and in the present continue to give expression to their transcendental yearnings. To dismiss it all as the misguided habit of our Platonist past, as "a lack of intellectual courage" or "failure of nerve" seems to me to be, at least, premature. In fact, a significant number of thinkers do not seem to be so convinced, as Rorty is, that there is no "truth", no "knowledge", no "God". Neither are they convinced that we should not bother with those issues. For a man who is so committed to contingency and uncertainty Rorty often seems pretty convinced and certain of the irrelevance of most of the philosophical questions and concerns that have occupied most of the participants in our tradition. But these concerns, to my knowledge, do not seem to bother Rorty. He doesn't think that we should wrestle with any of those questions anymore, or with "getting at reality", or the "essence of man". He may be right that the way our tradition often framed these issues in terms of "getting at essences", of explaining "human nature", is misguided, but the questions that energized our concern to make sense of the world and our place in it are not as easily dispensed with as he seems to believe. Rorty, it seems to me, is a bit self-indulgent when he suggests that we either give up on the traditional concerns of philosophy and embrace the type of edifying, ironic exercise consistent with our post-metaphysical age, or continue the same "fruitless" pursuits of traditional philosophy. But are these our only options? He seems to believe that in the absence of "essences" to get at, philosophy should content itself with being a source of edification for our lives. In the absence of "reality", we must accept that all we do when we think and talk about the world is to describe and redescribe without being able to settle which of our descriptions are "true" in the sense that it accurately captures or discloses what is being described. But even conceding to Rorty the point that the search for "essences," is a misguided and useless pursuit, I am not sure that philosophy needs to surrender its traditional concern with "the big questions", its attempt and conviction that it can  make the world, reality, the human situation, more clear. Thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Habermas, among others, who take very seriously the historicity and contingency of human experience, are evidence that it is still possible for philosophy to play a role continuous with the concerns of the tradition that goes back to the Greeks, without making the type of essentialist commitments Rorty thinks we can no longer make.

Rorty's understanding of hope, we have seen, is emptied of any transcendental or foundational dimension. The hope he is talking about is not the theological virtue of the Christian tradition and it has none of its transcendent moorings either. It does not even have the immanent grounding found in the most comprehensive account of secular hope outside the Christian tradition.18 For Rorty all talk of hope is limited to a consideration and concern with what we can safely aspire to as social and political beings. But, one must ask, what becomes of this hope once it is no longer dependent on a source outside ourselves? Is Rorty reducing hope to a more or less positive outlook towards the world that is better characterized as optimism rather than hope? It has been argued that Rorty is probably conflating the two, at least in "The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope", where he explores the consequences for social hope of the failure of the type of Historicist thinking associated with the Marxist tradition.19 Given his philosophical commitments he has no choice but to end up conflating the two dispositions towards the future that other thinkers have generally distinguished. For anyone wishing to preserve the distinction Rorty can be said to be confusing, or at least conflating, the two dispositions towards the future.20 Optimism issues from our confidence in our capacity to control the outcome of our lives. Hope, on the other hand, is sustained by the conviction that the outcome of our individual and common lives escapes our control. The optimist is someone who is confident on the capacity of human beings to solve the problems and challenges of human life without any recourse or dependence on the transcendent or divine; optimism does not depend either on being able to know the way things are. Patrick J. Deneen puts it best in his discussion of Rorty's essay when he says that an "optimism without hope"  involves a "disposition that human problems are tractable without needing to resort to any appeals to transcendence or the divine in their solution";  while a "hope without optimism" issues from "a fundamental mistrust in the belief that humans have the ability to solve political and moral problems." From the perspective of this distinction Rorty is an "optimist without hope" in the sense that he believes that human beings, properly educated to have sympathy and solidarity for one another, can slowly progress to overcome many of the scourges of human societies. Contingency is always a problem and a warning of the insecurity and provisionality of all human achievements21, but the proper "sentimental education" can go a long way to ensure our confidence in our capacity to bring about a world that is more humane, egalitarian, and fair. The hopeful, on the other hand, is convinced that in the end, human capacity, effort, ingenuity, even goodness, is severely deficient and in need of "a transcendent source -through hope- (which) can serve as a guiding standard, as well as an encouragement to action, but at the same time a source for humility and caution in that attempt".22 Hope, in the words of Vaclav Havel, "transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons". 23 But Rorty will have none of that "metaphysical" talk. All we have is a hope that is permanently fragile and ungrounded. In light of what has been said it is even difficult to view Rorty as an optimist. One wonders whether what he calls hope is better characterized as wishfullness rather than as optimism? Can he meaningfully talk about hope given his uncompromising commitment to contingency? 

All this talk of hope that has increasingly appeared in his writings in the last decade is of course connected to the state of the left, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall which to many is another sign of the increasing questionableness of the Enlightenment confidence that has sustained utopian thinking for the last two centuries. Kant and Marx, for example, embodied this confidence that the "steady growth of human reason and the gradual elimination of ignorance and superstition would culminate in the moral and political unification of the entire human race." 24 But the last decade has raised serious doubts, some would even go as far as to say that it has shattered the confidence of progressive thought in its liberal and socialist incarnations. Rorty's interest in the question of social hope issues from the type of rethinking that many on the left have felt obligated to do in light of recent political events, but also in light of the discursive transformations that often go by the name of postmodernism. He, like so many others in the left25, wonders whether there is any reason to hope that things will get better for those who are no longer clear about the mechanisms that may realize our hope for emancipation.26 But the left, he cautions, should stop looking for a substitute for Marxism27 There is no meta-narrative that can explain the source of human misery, no metaphysical insight that will explain human suffering. We should stop looking for it and make sense of the injustices we still hope to correct by means of more banal explanations such as "greed", "selfishness", "hatred".28  Rorty believes that our best chances are with Liberal Democracy. Liberal Democracy is the best we can hope for.29 Liberalism, as he understands it, is not undermined by the demise of the project of the Enlightenment in the way Marxism is. He believes that Liberalism can still retain its appeal without the metaphysical foundations that its Enlightenment theorists thought indispensable to its credibility because it doesn't pretend to be the type of meta-narrative of human progress and hope that Marxism was committed to be. Liberalism, for Rorty is not a theory of human nature, of society, etc., it is simply a commitment to reducing suffering and increasing freedom so people can self-construct in whatever way they choose and pursue whatever goals they choose to pursue in live. Again, I am not sure that Rorty can so easily distance Liberalism from the metaphysical assumptions concerning human beings and society that lead a liberal like him to identify suffering and the lack of freedom as the main problems of human life. Why should we accept that suffering and lack of freedom are the main problems of human life? Isn't implicit in that judgment an assumption about the nature of human beings, of what is best for them? Moreover, it is not clear that Rorty in the end can escape making metaphysical commitments of the type that he recommends that we give up. When he says that nothing has an intrinsic nature, that there are no "essences" to get at, he is making metaphysical assumptions that he may choose not to recognize as such, but which nonetheless are not as unproblematic as he makes them to be because he feels that he doesn't have to argue for the claim. The materialism and historicism he endorses, the contingency that he claims defines all of reality, "is accompanied by metaphysical assumptions that reveal themselves to be based on undefended and seemingly unexamined premises."30 The problem with Rorty's attitude towards metaphysics, is that he seems to assume that metaphysics "necessarily implies the adoption of absolutes."31 In assuming this he makes things too easy for himself.
Rorty's endorsement of Liberal Democracy as the best leftist politics can hope for has not been devoid of controversy.32 Many have been very critical and suspicious of his enthusiasm for Liberalism and of his tendency to make his utopian hopes synonymous with the extension and realization of the ideals of bourgeois liberalism. This means that hope has to do with what Rorty identifies as the defining values of Liberal Democracy: the extension of freedom and tolerance, and reduction of suffering and sadism. He stresses that Liberal Democracy must be freed from the belief that the credibility of Liberal institutions and practices depends on our ability to come up with philosophical foundations.33 Liberals have often assumed that Liberalism needs to be justified, but Rorty flatly denies it. Liberals should concentrate on figuring out the ways to extend and secure liberal practices and give up on trying to find justifications for such practices because there are none that can be credibly given. They should concentrate more on persuasion and less on finding "principles" to back up liberal beliefs and practices. As he understands it, the attractiveness of Liberal Democracy resides in the fact that it eschews any vision of a future towards which humanity is marching. Liberal Democracy, he believes, does not offer such hope, and it is better that it doesn't because it the end, it doesn't need to. Liberal Democracy offers instead a future that is as contingent as our present. According to the Liberal Democrat the commitments to personal freedom and the amelioration of suffering are the best hope we have now that we can no longer put our hopes on a "grand narrative" that will not only make things clear, but also right. In his unqualified endorsement of Liberal Democracy, Rorty doesn't seem to be bothered anymore with questions of whether the social justice and the amelioration of suffering he is committed to can be attained under present economic institutions. In "The End of Leninism" he advises that the time has come for the Left to drop terms like "capitalism", "socialism", "anticapitalist struggle", and banalize its entire vocabulary,34 but the question of whether social progress and justice, of whether hope can be sustained under present economic institutions are not resolved by simply changing vocabularies. As David L. Hall points out, Rorty sidesteps questions about exploitation, class domination, the increasing concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, etc.35 These features of the present economic system, which is intimately connected to Liberal Democracy, whether we refer to it as Capitalism or by some other name, need to be addressed if Liberal Democracy constitutes the best we can hope for. 
In our postmodern age, at the "end of History", Rorty continues, we are left with piecemeal reform and nothing more. He hopes that "we have reached a time at which we can finally get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx that there must be large theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small experimental ways".36 Social hope has to be brought down to the size of the frail, biological, limited beings that we are. We must settle for an incremental strategy to advance justice rather than the revolutionary strategy that has been such a significant part of our moral and political imagination.  Rorty agrees with the conclusion of Francis Fukuyama's widely discussed essay The End of History that the time for total revolution is over, and proposes that the Left should commit itself to the creation and promotion of "bourgeois democratic welfare states and to equalize life chances among the citizens of those states by redistributing the surplus produced by market economies."37 But the Left must abandon the global strategy, the type of world-historical, eschatological thinking that has defined it. Social hope has to be localized. Our projects for amelioration of the lives of children the American ghettos may not be relevant to the misery of children in similar or worse situations in Calcutta. That is the way it is and it is not a failure on our part that we cannot bring under one theory the diagnosis and the solution to the problem for both situations. Rorty goes to argue that this realization is behind the Left's tendency to center its activities in cultural politics rather than in trying to come up with solutions to specific challenges.38 

Before concluding I want to come back to the relationship between hope and narrative. Traditionally the discourse of hope has been grounded in a narrative that legitimizes whatever aspirations are embodied in that hope. In the case of the Christian tradition, for example, Christian hope draws its inspiration and confidence from the biblical texts, the New Testament especially, which the Christian accepts as the authoritative Word of God. In the case of the type of secular hope found in the Marxist tradition, the aspirations and confidence are derived from the human capacity to understand the underlying workings of human history and on the capacity of human beings to shape it and make it respond to their own projects. We have seen that Rorty will not have any of that. He particularly dismisses their pretension to give us a comprehensive, authoritative, account of reality and their tendency to engage in prophecy. The possible enduring value these documents may still retain has nothing to do with how accurate they account for human life, or for reality. A document like the New Testament, in Rorty's estimation is to be read "as saying that how we treat each other on earth matters a great deal more than the outcome of debate concerning the existence or nature of another world."39 On the other hand, he still finds value in their inspirational capacities, in their commitment to the hope for a more just world. He advises that when reading these texts, "we should skip lightly past the predictions, and concentrate on the expressions of hope."40 But in the end, he believes that the Manifesto and the New Testament have been discredited enough to serve as the narrative of human hope that we need to sustain and guide our commitment to a more just world. He thinks that we need a new document "to provide our children with inspiration and hope". This document would have to be a reformist text that would be free of the apocalyptic character of the Manifesto and the New Testament; a text that doesn't demand that things must be made new, or that justice requires a radical overthrow of the existing order. He wants a text with all the inspirational capacity of the above mentioned texts, and without any of its moorings. 41 However, isn't he probably asking for the impossible? Can he still talk meaningfully of hope and of a narrative that articulates it without in some way falling into the type of intellectual and emotional security that can only be drawn from the meta-narratives he advises we give up? Can people be inspired to make the sacrifices he still acknowledges as indispensable for the realization of social justice without framing their actions and choices in an account that gives meaning to what they do? Can hope be sustained by sympathy only? Can people hope without framing that hope within a narrative that makes sense of their lives, the world, their actions, the very type of concerns Rorty advises we give up? He hopes that some day there will be a narrative that will do the job of the traditional meta-narratives without any of the flaws he associates with them (their pretension at prophecy, at universal knowledge, etc.) But is he being fair to these narratives? Isn't his representation of them a bit of a caricature? I don't think that many Christians and Marxists will accept Rorty's description of what is distinctive of these perspectives. He seems to reduce these narratives to some extravagant attempts at prophecy. In doing this he makes things easy for himself. The question still remains of whether we can meaningfully talk about hope if we accept Rorty's assumptions. The fact that we cannot make the world transparent, that we cannot ever come to a full understanding of the truth, is not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, or probably with Marxism either. Hope, in fact, arises out of the ambiguity of our situation. If things were transparent, we would have no need of hope. We would simply be optimistic about our prospects. 

									Notes

1 Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 
2 Ibid., p. 5-6. 
3 Ibid., p. 377.
4 Warnke, Georgia. Gadamer:  Hermeneutics, Traditon and Reason. (Stannford: Standford University Press, 1987). p. 157.
5 A good discussion on the topic of philosophy, its role and aspirations can be found in Ed. Joseph Niznik and John T. Sanders, Debating the State of Philosophy., Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).. Also, Rorty and his Critics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). 
6 In Philosophy and Social Hope  (London: Penguin Books, 1999) Rorty questions the assertion that there is a necessary relationship between one's philosophy and one's politics. He says that [t]here will always be room for a lot of philosophical disagreement between people who share the same politics, and for diametrically opposed political views among philosophers of the same school". P. 23.  Yet, at the same time,  even though it is in fact true that people who share in Rorty's brand of neo- pragmatism and non-essentialist philosophy may in fact subscribe to different politics, it is difficult to see how they could commit to a type of politics that systematically restricts freedom, or discriminates over a particular group, etc. It seems to me that the relationship between politics and philosophy is closer that Rorty is willing to admit. 
7 Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 106-107.
8 Deneen, Patrick J. "The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey". Social Research, Vol 66. No. 2 (Summer 1999) 
9 For a discussion of Kant's views on social hope check Perpetual Peace, Critique of Practical Reason, and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. 
10 Marcel addresses the question of hope in a number of instances. A particularly good discussion of his views on this topic is found in Homo Viator. In the case of Bloch, ch. 55 of his massive The Philosophy of Hope is essential reading for anyone dealing with this topic. For a philosophical overview of the question of hope see A Philosophy of Human Hope by Joseph J. Godfrey. 
11 Marcel, Gabriel, Being and Having:An Existentialist Diary (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 75, 80. 
12 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 
13 Ibid., 232. 
14 Thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example, who first struggled with the implications of the radical historicity of human existence saw that together with the freedom that came with it also came a sense of despair, a sense of meaninglessness that needed to be addressed and resolved. Rorty is not bothered by such concerns. He is pretty comfortable in a world that has no reference to the transcendent, a world that has no ultimate meaning. 
15 Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 18. 
16 Ibid., p. 34, 37. 
17 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. 1989). p. 46. 
18 Bloch, Ernst. The Philosophy of Hope.  (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Pr. 1986). 
19 Deneen, Patrick J. "The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel, and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey". Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer 1999).
20 For a more comprehensive discussion and clarification of the distinction between the two, read "A Metaphysic of Hope" in Homo Viator. G. Marcel. Peter Smith. Gloucester, Mass. 1978. 
21 In the essay "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096" in Philosophy and Social Hope Rorty engages in an exercise that means to articulate the fragility of our achievements. In the essay he imagines the history of the U>S. in the 21St. and how the achievements of its Liberal Democracy in the 20Th. Century were undone by prejudice, fear, economic instability, in the 21st. century. 
22 Daneen, "The Politicos of Hope and Optimism", p 578. 
23 Havel, Vaclav. Disturbing the Peace, (New York, N.Y.: Vintage, 1991), p. 181. 
24 Linklater, Andrew, The Transformation of Political Community (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. 1998). 
25 Rorty's credentials as a leftist have been challenged by a number of critics who question his commitment to the type of progressive politics traditionally defining of left politics. For a discussion of Rorty's response to these charges and his slef-understanding as a thinker of the Left see "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy of Social Hope,1999. 
26 Rorty doesn't want to give up on the hope of human emancipation, but he has "no clear sense of what mechanisms might realize that hope". Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. 1998). p. 234.
27 Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 120.
28 Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 235.
29 Ibid., p. 231. 
30 Lom, Petr. "East Meets West -Jan Patocka and Richard Rorty on Freedom." Political Theory, Vol. 27 No. 4, August 1999, p. 452. 
31 Ibid., p. 457. 
32 Check Richard J. Berstein "One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy", and Rorty's response "Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein", in Political Theory, vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 538-580. Also, Honi Haber's Richard Rorty's failed politics". Social Epistemology, vol. 7, No. 1, 61-74. 
33 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 57.
34 Rorty. "The End of Leninism." Truth and Progress, p. 229. 
35 David L. Hall. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the new Pragmatism (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press 1994). 
36 Rorty, Truth and Progress,  p. 228.
37 Ibid.,  p. 229.
38 Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 238.
39 Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 206.
40 Ibid., p. 205.
41 Ibid.,  p. 208.






