ABSTRACT
Richard Rorty's critics have had problems with his thinking that self-creation and human solidarity are separate but compatible motives. The intellectual culture of the ironist utopia Rorty supports is, post-metaphysical and anti-foundationalist; the metaphysician, the type he describes, being the ironists intellectual opponent in the contest between the two competing vocabularies. Rorty contends that it is characteristic of liberals, who he describes as people who are more afraid of being cruel than of anything else, to want to extend it in this way to the whole of humanity. The non-liberal Rousseau, on the other hand, explains this tendency not as liberal but as human or natural. The society Rousseau describes in his Letter to his fellow Genevans would be a society without slaves, that is, which respects conditions of natural freedom and equality, and is composed of self-sufficient patriarchal nuclear families which would be the building-blocks for a society.
