Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by Brian May

One could respond to Forster's critical devaluation by invoking the politics of literary reputation. To what extent should a writer's politics determine his or her literary valuation, inclusion in the canon, and so on? It is a fundamental issue, but here I propose to argue--with Rorty's help--that Forsterians simply need not address it. The reason is simple enough. Forsterian liberalism is neither old-fashioned nor contemptible; it is not the silly relic many critics have taken it to be. Rather, Forster's liberalism is chastened and concentrated, and yet made provisional, by the presence of an ironist attitude toward language, the self, and the community. Which is to say, Forster's liberal anticipates in remarkable ways Rorty's neoliberal, the "liberal ironist."

Rorty's liberal ironist should not be conflated with Arnold's liberal humanist. For Rorty, traditional or unreconstructed liberals--those who pursue not only (in Born's simple and useful formulation) "aesthetic contemplation, friendships, [and] spiritual formation" (141), but also "the politics of conscious altruism" (Trilling 123)--are complacent. The problem is not that they are concerned, as Bradbury writes, "with what is decent, human, and enlarging in daily life" (130). Their ambition to create a kinder new self that is also a more "responsive" and creative self (130)--a more "refined sensibility" (Langbaum 38), if one which is yet more capable of "moral action" (action occasionally taking the form of morally principled inaction, a refusal to dictate to the less refined)--that is not the problem. For Rorty the problem with Arnoldian liberalism is Arnoldian High Seriousness. It is not the aim itself but the way it is pursued: so inflexibly that signs of its inefficacy or unethical quality disrupt it.(5) That is why liberals who hope to survive sudden and unexpected contact with these signs need to find a source of staying power that is nonliberal; nothing in the liberal sensibility will prevent its own collapse.

One source of such fiber may come from deliberate contact with the unsettling signs. According to Rorty, the liberal will be better off for realizing early and often that the liberal self is not the autonomous entity usually imagined--that it is a constructed or "contingent" self (CIS 23--43). The premise here is that early and distinct knowledge of our contingency will render its later vagrant intimations less devastating, even more or less quotidian. Wanting to "recuperate" liberalism (Gunn 84), to find a means of rendering liberal sentiment flexible enough to stand up to shocking negations, Rorty prescribes "ironism": the conscious recognition and even acceptance of our contingency (Shapiro 23). In Rorty's view ironists "are never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus their selves" (CIS 74; my emphasis). If ironists become liberals only when they adopt the vocabulary of liberalism as their tentative vocabulary, liberals become ironists only when they recognize "the contingency and fragility" of the liberal vocabulary and self and begin to practice liberalism not seriously but provisionally, well aware that changing conditions could suddenly demand that they abandon it for some more efficacious set of ideas and practices, but also aware that they have every reason to embrace it even amid doubts about its validity, or even a certainty of its invalidity, when no more enabling practice has arisen as an alternative.