a critique of liberalism

Reading Richard Rorty’s embrace of liberalism (in Achieving Our Country, and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and Philosophy and Social Hope) you’d be forgiven for thinking that pragmatism’s close links with the deconstruction of Derrida implies that these two programmes of rejection of foundationalism naturally embrace liberalism (phew; I can’t believe I wrote that!). Thankfully, help is at hand, in the guise of Michael Sandel and his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I’m seeing now that liberalism as per Sandel reaches it limits at its conception of the person – the autonomous, free though strangely transcendent agent that traditional (Rawlsian) liberalism posits. This struck me as an interesting (in a nerdy kind of way) critique of liberalism, which hitherto I’d felt some allegiance to, via Rorty and inferentially via Derrida. So maybe I’m no longer a liberal? Right now I need to find out how Sandel’s communitarian views fit with deconstruction, it at all, as well as the impact his critique has on Rorty’s liberal conception. For this I’m reading Sandel and the intriguing symposia proceedings from Critchley, Derrida, Laclau & Rorty called Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Wouldn’t it be great to build a communitarian based critique not just of liberalism, but of deconstruction and pragmatism? I suspect deconstruction will come out clean.