ABSTRACT
I explore the strengths of Rorty’s liberal ironist as a model for twenty-first-century peace-making. I review the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, and fallibilist commitments underlying Rorty’s project and show how understanding these three commitments helps foreground the community-widening, solidarity-building elements of the provocatively titled “ethnocentrism” that drives liberal irony. Without a good grasp of these commitments, Rorty’s rhetorical urging of ethnocentrism can be mistaken either as too weak, that is, as a collapse into relativistic refusal to be responsive to any ethical and epistemic commitments at all, or as over-stated and imperialistic, that is, as an endorsement of pernicious ethical and epistemic patterns, including settler colonialist violence. Rorty characterizes his view as anti anti-ethnocentrism, which I argue, demands a commitment to peace understood as a literacy or phronesis, a skill-set about which we need discipline and strategy. We ought to be liberal ironist peace warriors. It is a self-description that carries with it more ethical weight than is sometimes imagined, at the same time that it demands epistemic humility. It will come as no surprise to the pragmatists among us, that it also requires practice and the building of new habits.
