From the intro to Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, by Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, Sept 1998:

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabularies and language games as possible by acquainting herself with as many novels and ethnographies as she can get her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomes an “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it as a contingent product of the time and place in which she was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desired post-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do” (94). That is, the job of building human solidarity. Hence, we might be able to characterize Rorty’s pragmatist response to the “Nazi question” as consisting of two answers. First, one doesn’t refute Nazis, or any other world-view; one offers a redescription of the world which makes their description look untenable. Second, and Rorty is clear that this consists more of a hope than a guarantee, the properly ironist intellectual, with her wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary which imagines itself to have some privileged relationship to Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.

Yet Rorty also hesitates to claim too much for the political uses of either redescription or ironist self- consciousness. In fact, he notes that “redescription often humiliates” (90); that is, the act of re-casting the world in the terms of a new language game can often have cruel consequences, as the one redescribing the world overwhelms and makes irrelevant the descriptions and language games upon which others had based their lives (which, as Rorty explains, is what O’Brien does to Winston Smith in 1984, and what Humbert does to Lolita in Lolita). Indeed, Rorty cautions that while the desire to craft a new final vocabulary which redescribes the world apart from the language games one inherited is a central activity of ironist self-creation, it is also one which is largely irrelevant to public life. Thus, he suggests that the ironist intellectual enact a kind of cognitive public/private split: that one’s “radical and continuing doubts about [one’s] final vocabulary” (72), and the ensuing attempt to redescribe the world as an act of self-creation, be kept private, while one’s public life remains dedicated to the liberal hope of diminishing cruelty and expanding human solidarity. In short, Rorty’s model intellectual is what he calls a liberal ironist: one who continues to defend and support principles of liberal hope, despite their lack of metaphysical guarantees, by “distinguish[ing] between redescription for private and for public purposes” (91).