Richard Rorty was undoubtedly one of the most original and widely discussed philosophers of his generation. Not incidentally, he was also one of the most controversial. Having established himself early in his career as an important figure in the field of analytic philosophy, The publication of his remarkable bombshell of a book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), signaled a decisive shift in his work from largely technical concerns in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind to sweeping questions about the development of modern philosophy and the philosophical enterprise. Almost singlehandedly resurrecting the moribund tradition of American pragmatism, Rorty proposed a radical reorientation of academic philosophy, a stance that earned him both high praise and harsh condemnation. In the last decades of his life Rorty further expanded the scope of his work, writing two books and numerous essays on pressing questions of politics and political theory. Here, too, his work was both visionary and contentious, attracting a broad audience as well as widely divergent assessments of his views.

William Curtis’s Defending Rorty is a lively and often insightful effort, first, to clarify Rorty’s positions on matters of politics and ethics and, second, to defend and “critically extend Rorty’s intellectual project in a patently Rortyan way” (p. 4). Given the widespread acrimony regarding Rorty’s views on politics and ethics, this is a welcome undertaking. In his political writings, Rorty depicts himself as a staunch proponent of liberalism. What he does not systematically do, however, is explain precisely what kind of liberal he is. One of Curtis’s primary objectives is to answer this question by advancing a reading of Rorty as a proponent of “a liberal virtue ethics” (p. 4), a position associated with the work of Amy Gutmann, Stephen Macedo, Thomas Spragens, and others.

In contrast to the ethically “thin” variants of liberalism championed by the advocates of modus vivendi liberalism and political liberalism, advocates of liberal virtue ethics contend that the success of the liberal project requires the development of citizens who possess particular character traits and habits. Like virtue theorists more generally, defenders of liberal virtue ethics hold that abstract moral rules and principles alone cannot provide adequate guidance to complex, highly situational dilemmas of moral and political choice. What is also required, they argue, is a citizenry that is educated and socialized to cultivate the ethical dispositions and character traits that enable it “to do, as best as possible in an often tragic world, the right thing” (p. 5). Reading Rorty as an exemplar of a distinctive type of virtue liberalism—namely, an ethically robust “pragmatic virtue liberalism”—Curtis contends that Rorty’s ethical and political outlook is especially well suited to grapple with the challenges of pluralism today.

In the first two chapters Curtis explicates Rorty’s philosophical and political outlook. Chapter 1 sketches the contours of his pragmatism. Here, Curtis argues that Rorty’s fealty to the tradition of American pragmatism is animated by a clear “normative agenda” (p. 42) and “ethical vision” (p. 33). Consequently, even when he is writing on philosophical matters that seem remote from the urgent normative issues that drive political life, Rorty remains “above all else, a political and moral philosopher” (p. 33). Chapter 2 defends the author’s central claim that Rorty’s moral and political thought is most profitably conceived as a form of virtue liberalism. While acknowledging that Rorty provides neither a “systematic political philosophy” nor detailed policy proposals, Curtis maintains that he offers an “innovative,” “rhetorically idiosyncratic” (p. 89) justification of liberal democracy. The originality of this perspective, Curtis avers, is best revealed through an analysis of the key concepts that configure Rorty’s brand of liberal virtue: cruelty, irony (understood as a civic virtue), the public–private division, and the notion of a “post-metaphysical literary culture” inhabited by a distinctive kind of heroic figure, namely, the “strong poet.” In unpacking these concepts, Curtis shows how they congeal into an antiauthoritarian form of virtue liberalism that eschews philosophical and divine foundations.

Having sketched the central features of Rorty’s liberalism, the next three chapters revisit debates between Rorty and his leading critics. Chapter 3 defends Rorty’s virtue liberalism against attacks from critics on the political Left (Richard Bernstein and Nancy Fraser) and Right (Jean Elshtain). Chapter 4 examines philosophical disagreements between Rorty and Charles Taylor, arguing that Taylor, unlike Rorty, is committed to essentialist views that fuel authoritarianism. In Chapter 5, Curtis explores “the paradigmatic example of the challenge to pluralism” (p. 214), namely, religion. Contesting allegations that Rorty’s discussions of religion are riddled with tensions and inconsistencies, Curtis maintains that his views, properly understood, are both coherent and compelling.

Chapter 6 explores Rorty’s provocative claim that novels “are indispensable for political thinking because they stretch our conventional frameworks of thought” (p. 236). Here, Curtis reads Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island as a fictional depiction of Rorty’s “liberal utopia.” Curtis’s brief conclusion brings his reading of Rorty to bear on contemporary debates about the importance of ethical character and the role of formal liberal education, that is, “an education in the ‘liberal arts’” (p. 260). Asserting that “the ideal of universal, comprehensive liberal education . . . has come under prominent assault” (p. 262) from “pluralist critics” who object to its homogenizing impact and from “realists” who insist that it is neither necessary nor likely to be effective, Curtis argues that formal liberal education is essential to the development of the liberal virtues.

As this summary indicates, the book has the notable merit of combining a wide-ranging investigation of Rorty’s views with a spirited defense of the proposition that Rorty is best understood as an exemplar of pragmatic virtue liberalism. In particular, Curtis’s redescription of Rorty as, first, a moral and political thinker through and through and, second, a virtue liberal, is provocative and illuminating. By emphasizing Rorty’s abiding interest in normative questions, Curtis inverts conventional characterizations of Rorty as a figure whose interest in moral and political affairs emerges only in his later work. Moreover, by bringing Rorty’s views on politics and ethics together with his stance on matters of epistemology and ontology, the author is able to show how Rorty’s pragmatist commitment to antiessentialism, antifoundationism and fallibilism, as well as his rejection of the fact/value dichotomy, constitute interlocked elements of a broader antiauthoritarian conception of philosophy that complements his vision of liberal culture and politics. Finally, by reading Rorty as a virtue liberal, Curtis is able to highlight important distinctions between Rorty’s liberalism and ethically thin conceptions of liberalism.

Among those readers who find aspects of Curtis’s account defective, I suspect that many will focus on his engagements with Rorty’s critics. While these are uniformly interesting, some are more persuasive than others. Of these engagements, the most sustained is Curtis’s analysis of the decades-long debates between Rorty and Taylor. Unfortunately, it is also the least satisfying (full disclosure: I have written on these debates and defended Taylor against Rorty). Part of the problem can be traced to Curtis’s propensity to attribute to Taylor views he does not hold. For example, in a discussion of conflicts between individual rights and cultural goods Curtis sharply criticizes Taylor’s view of the controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), asserting that “Taylor’s desire to respect cultural goods leads him to come perilously close to supporting the censorship of . . . Satanic Verses in Muslim societies” (p. 209). In fact, Taylor states unambiguously that he does not support censorship of Rushdie’s book.

Other issues emerge in Curtis’s analysis of Rorty’s and Taylor’s disagreements about matters of ontology. Here the discussion is plagued, among other things, by bad timing: Taylor’s current views on the topic are most fully articulated in his coauthored book (with Hubert Dreyfus), Retrieving Realism (2015), which was published just two months before Defending Rorty. Consequently, many of Curtis’s charges, like his allegation that Taylor is an essentialist who holds that “there is only one correct way to describe the world” (p. 168), are directly refuted in Retrieving Realism, where the authors write that “we can agree with Rorty that there is no one language for correctly describing nature, while holding, contra Rorty, that there could well be many languages each correctly describing a different aspect of reality” (pp. 153–54).

In short, this book offers an innovative interpretation of Rorty’s moral and political thought, but also contains errors that at times compromise Curtis’s efforts to defend Rorty against his critics. While there is much to learn by reading it, readers should proceed cautiously.