In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.

Preface xi (2)
 Introduction xiii
 Part I: Contingency 3 (70)
 1 The contingency of language 3 (20)
 2 The contingency of selfhood 23 (21)
 3 The contingency of a liberal community 44 (29)
 Part II: Ironism and Theory 73 (68)
 4 Private irony and liberal hope 73 (23)
 5 Self-creation and affiliation: Proust, 96 (26)
 Nietzsche, and Heidegger
 6 From ironist theory to private allusions: 122 (19)
 Derrida
 Part III: Cruelty and Solidarity 141 (58)
 7 The barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on cruelty 141 (28)
 8 The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell 169 (20)
 on cruelty
 9 Solidarity 189 (10)
 Index of names 199