Zones d'ombre dans le libéralisme ironique de Richard Rorty : de la posture à la re-création

Under the influence of Marxist materialist historicism, numerous authors have deemed Modernity as the historically necessary and unavoidable result of the development of economies and trade relations that has occurred in the Western World since the late Gothic Ages and the Rinascimento. However, such an explanation can be thought of as erroneous when one acknowledges the fact that previous economic and commercial progress had been achieved in other civilisations without transforming them in Modern societies. In all awareness of this contradiction, other authors have sketched an alternative genealogy of Modernity. They generally hold that the true specificity of 16th and 17th Century Europe is the unique duration and magnitude of a peculiar form of conflict: the Religious Wars or Civil Ideological Wars. This enduring and arduous situation of stasis divided families, opposed neighbours and scotched friendships, thus threatening the mere concept of polity. This brings them to contemplate the birth of the modern political project, later epitomised by Liberalism, as the direct consequence of a collective yearning for putting an end to this new form of historical crisis. The goal then was to find a modus vivendi based on unpartisan, temporal grounds rather than abstract metaphysical doctrines or comprehensive religious conceptions of Good or Salvation.

Hence, politics increasingly relied on the neutral ideals of Reason and Science, eventually leading to an idealisation of the Modern figures of the Law and the Market by traditional liberals such as Adam Smith or Benjamin Constant. These authors attempted to theorise a realistic and mechanical way to ensure the pacific coexistence of individual beings by bestowing upon them the right to act according to their self-interest rightly understood, rather than ideological considerations. Modern liberalism was therefore founded on the aspiration to metaphysical neutrality and the "institutionalisation of moral scepticism" . Two centuries after the advent of Modernity, and following the endeavour of post-modernist authors, richard rorty tries to go even further, attempting to ground his political liberalism on post-metaphysical insights and considerations. In his essay, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he advocates a "liberal ironism" that would genuinely fuse his ironical views about knowledge and the self and his political commitment to a certain form of liberalism.