8. Irony as Hope and the Future of the Humanities

Irony has long been the most contested term in CIS, and even Rorty himself has admitted that his concept was flawed.  But it is worth rehabilitating the term to preserve Rorty’s sense of a specific role for humanistic intellectuals in liberal democracies.  The best way to reconstruct irony is to associate it with hope rather than doubt, as Rorty occasionally does.  Refocusing  Rorty’s conception of irony in this way makes it just the sort of defense of the humanities that is needed today to counter the tendency to overpromise that continues to plague efforts to justify them.