Hope for Solidarity in Richard Rorty

In Rorty's liberal political discourse, hope does have a central importance. Hopefulness, which is fed by the increase of human solidarity, implies faith and belief in a better world and better people. This belief is intended to increase our susceptibility to the suffering and degradation of other people, in other words to extend the "we-feeling” to maximum extent. Extension of this emotion always manifests itself in the form of an inclusion that does not unify the other and does not interfere with the other in official ways. In such an inclusion, each person treats the other as "one of us" and the limits of the segment considered as "one of us" gradually widens. Training of such manipulation of emotions makes this extension possible. Art and literature products occupy a dominant place in such training. Thus, the rational culture of the Enlightenment leaves its place to – a poetized culture - the culture in Rorty's liberal utopia. At this very point, the hope to believe that the world could be made a more liveable place by the human effort or in other words, by being hopeful, constitutes the Archimedes' point of Rorty's liberal utopia. He justifies that hopefulness and reality, which are an argument for our ability to create better worlds and people, always depend on our active contributions, attentions and goals. In this context, if we have faith in hope and our own light, Rorty believes that our democratic values will increasingly grow. So, once democracy is comprehended as a development of political and ethical consequences, hopefulness which is arm-in-arm with the ethical impulse in the heart of Rorty's liberal utopia emerges as democracy. Declining the 'obedient players' conception immanent to the traditional philosophy, Rorty places the notion of 'we, the mankind, can make the difference', to the center of the liberal utopia. Here, the notion of thinking that we can make such a difference emerges as a hope in Rorty's liberal utopia