ABSTRACT
The simplest statement of Richard Rorty’s solution to the worry that radical pluralism leads to relativism would claim that the worry over relativism makes sense only within the context of Modernist or Enlightenment vocabularies. His idea of solidarity harbors that which Jean-Francois Lyotard warns against in his discussion of consensus, namely a kind of universalizing of totality which amounts to terror. Rorty argues that truth is a property of sentences, and since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, then so are truths. He worries that the coincidence of irony and theory, poetry and public policy, has devastating public effects. In his defense of elitism, in his attempt at reconciling liberalism and ironism, Rorty has argued that “one must side with the Romantics and do the best to aestheticize society, to keep it safe for the poets in the hope that the poets may eventually make it safe for everybody else”.
