100 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Historical perspectives played a significant role in freeing one from theological and metaphysical assumptions that something 'definatory* of the human being lies concealed or inadequately revealed beneath historical civilisation. However historical perspectives have, and this is central to Rorty's new way of looking at things, created the equally strong but erroneous belief that socio-historical practices along with the purposes/goals they generate and satisfy can qualify as candidates capable of generating that commonality of interest usually regarded as indicative of the 'objective* character of goals and values. The legitimacy of social institutions and practices that facilitate these goals and the compulsion to conform to them is similarly founded on this. But the historicist perspective's own positivistic notion of 'objective purpose* must be dissolved. The culture that renounces both the theological/metaphysical and the historicist positivist pitfalls, renounces all fixity of purpose (not to be confused with conviction in pursuing whatever purpose one may chose), and represents a triumph of those tendencies common to German idealism. Romantic poetry and Utopian politics. From this perspective follows Rorty's primary poser—theoretically there is no way of reconciling the vocabulary of self-creation and of social justice; of autonomy and human solidarity. The 'self-creating ironist', the truly contemporary embodiment of liberal values that eschew cruelty above all else, therefore renounces all attempts to formulate criteria of choice between the different final or 'personal' vocabularies in which we prospectively or retrospectively tell the story of our lives. 'The generic trait of ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts about their final vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves. This means that. . . their criterion of private perfection, is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves.' (p.97) Purpose is privatised in Rorty's theoretical compromise (autonomy is not the sort of thing that could ever be embodied in social institutions) to avoid the consequences of some 'social good1 claiming precedence over the 'radical diversity of private purposes*. The ironist 'realises' that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed. We can keep the notion of morality just as long as it is our voice as a community that counts; that it is a sort of thing that we do or don't do that is in question. The ideally liberal society is the one in which the moral, as much as the rational, recognisably loses its enlightenment universalism, and is seen as 'whatever view wins out in free and open encounter.' Uneasiness over whether it is obviously human and creative activity of what Rorty with his bias for literary metaphor calls 'redescription' that entails the loss of more substantial grounds for morality, to say nothing of the notion of truth, than current sociological fashion, is difficult to suppress. The reason is not merely one's