ABSTRACT
In Federalist 49, Publius praises Thomas Jefferson for displaying equally "a fervent attachment to republican government and an enlightened view of the dangerous propensities against which it ought to be guarded." This chapter offers the conflict by tracing the "romantic" elements contained in the works of Richard Rorty and Hannah Arendt. More ambivalent than hostile to the enterprise of Romanticism, Rorty begins by endorsing those Romantic poets who "claimed for art the place in culture traditionally held by religion and philosophy, the place which the Enlightenment had claimed for science". The notion that Romantic "philosophy might replace science as a substitute for religion," Rorty maintains, "was a momentary, though important stage in the replacement of science by literature as the presiding cultural discipline." In his book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty may be closer to offering just such an American romance, one that dissolves or evades the problems of the past by cashing in on liberal hopes of the future.
