1 Certainly Rorty has said many things that make it tempting to regard him as an apologist for ‘our’ social arrangements, for example in ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ (in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 175-96) and in ‘Postmodemist Bourgeois Liberalism’ (Ibid., 197-202). But he has also said things that might count against this, most clearly and recently in ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ (Radical Philosophy 59 [1991] 3-14). It would be wrong to think that this reflects a lack of clarity or resolution in Rorty's commitments. It reflects, in my view, the inadequacy of the categories they are often forced into. In his paper on feminism Rorty endorses a critical social diagnosis which makes apparent the need for change of a fairly deep sort. He also seeks to show, however, how the possibility of such a critique, and of articulating constructive strategies for bringing about change for the better, arise out of commitments he finds embodied in liberal democracy. This, in turn, is to recommend a certain understanding of those commitments, and a certain place for them in our account of ourselves as political beings. Hence the undialectical polarity between Radical Rorty and Apologist Rorty is simply too coarse a device to capture the hermeneutic subtleties of Rorty's own position. There can be no doubt that Rorty's liberal utopia does not entail a commitment to freeze the substantive conditions of life that currently prevail around the North Atlantic. In so far as he is an apologist for liberal democracies, it is because he sees their potential for much needed improvement as built into their political structure. But the presence of this potential is not something he merely reports; it is something he urges. He wishes to contribute to a (self)understanding of our political practices which emphasizes - places at the center - those features of our practices which he thinks make social progress possible. From a Rortyan perspective, it is self-evident that such a change in emphasis, accompanied by progressive use of presently existing political mechanisms, would be reflexive, i.e., that it would change the nature of that political structure itself.

2 Let me deal with a possible ambiguity: if one takes it that Rorty's liberal utopia is just any society whose members confine their search for ‘regulative ideals’ to ‘freedom and forget about truth and rationality’ (Rorty, ‘Truth and Freedom,’ 635), then we do get liberalism straight from Rortyan metaphilosophy. For the admonition to recognize the contingency of who we are and what we do and to let ‘truth and goodness … take care of themselves’ (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989], 84) is simply the recommendation that we buy into Rorty's metaphilosophical diagnosis of the Platonic tradition (Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982], xiv) as crypto-theology. But to simply call the adoption of this recommendation ‘liberalism’ is to cover up the interesting political questions with a label. The issue of significance here is surely what would happen once we do adopt this stance. The question is, what is the relation between Rorty's pragmatic recommendation and the form of life most clearly instantiated by the old NATO democracies with their capitalist economies and individualist ethos? Consequently, I will assume throughout this paper that PBL is more than a metaphilosophical stance, and that it embodies positive political commitments: to individualism, to certain forms of political systems, to (a curtailed) capitalism, and so on.

3 Apparently along similar lines, Nancy Fraser argues that Rorty's ‘framework’ excludes ‘genuinely radical political discourses rooted in oppositional solidarities’ ('Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty Between Romanticism and Technology,’ in Malachowski, Reading Rorty, 370). She bases her claim on Rorty's by now (in progressive circles) notorious dichotomizing of what he calls ‘final vocabularies’ (Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 73) into two domains, the private and the public (Ibid., 34-8; 84-95). However, Fraser's critique of Rorty differs significantly from Putnam's and McCarthy's, in so far as it stays within the terms of Rorty's pragmatic historicism. (Cf. ‘Feminism and Pragmatism,’ 11, n.lS.) Fraser confronts what I have called the second tier of Rorty's case for PBL, and is not trying to ascend from the socio-political to the metaphilosophical. The excluding framework she refers to is not Rorty's uncompromising historicism but his partisan division of final vocabularies. Contrary to Fraser, I do not think this conceptual proposal means that ‘Rorty ends up supposing there is only one legitimate political vocabulary’ (Fraser, 316). But I cannot make the case for this view here.

4 While Guignon and Hiley, too, deserve a detailed answer, this is not the place. Their paper harnesses misgivings about Rorty's utopia for the purpose of bringing into question Rorty's decentering of the subject, the anti-essentialist move that takes Rorty beyond a hermeneutic view of the self as having a meta-essence approachable in terms of what, e.g., ‘Heidegger calls an underlying “essential structure” of self-interpreting activity’ (Guignon and Hiley, 347). Trading on a direct connection between PBL and (an element of) Rorty's antifoundationalism, this is clearly a version of the general strategy that, in spite of its initial promise, I claim won't work against Rorty. But the specifics of this version, the subtle diagnosis offered by Guignon and Hiley and their particular target, is different from Putnam's and McCarthy's, and would require an elaborate, tailor-made reply.

5 I am referring here to the ways in which social and material circumstances might systematically constrain the opportunities of particular groups to have their (re)descriptions heard or heeded. Radical Rorty thinks there may be deep and systematic causes of marginalization and suffering at work, causes that could be theoretically illuminated. Rorty, however, thinks that explanations of such power discrepancies couched in terms of underlying structural features of our society do more harm than good. There is no need at all see this issue as related to the question of the contingency and malleability of either those structures or the language in which we may come to describe them.

6 Thanks to John Tietz for his many comments and suggestions, which made this a better paper than it otherwise would have been. Thanks also to David Carter and his sharp eye.