Author: Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty is blissfully unique among twentieth- century philosophers for his eminent readability. As such, one doesn’t need to approach him only after first digesting several introductory texts but can more or less jump right in. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a bold classic, but if you’re not up for a full book, I’d start with his essay “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” and his autobiographical snippet, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” both available in The Rorty Reader. If you must have an introduction, Alan Malachowski’s slim tome, Richard Rorty: Philosophy Now, fits the bill quite well.
Private Irony and Liberal Hope
The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society . . . consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.”