There have been persistent criticisms of Rorty's "liberal ironist" as the postmodern picture of the educated in the liberal utopia. While the modernist (Enlightenment) liberal Thomas McCarthy, who believes in universal rationality as the basis of public morality, criticizes Rorty's view of the liberal ironist for fostering the poverty of public discourse, the social pragmatist Richard Bernstein complains that the ironist's tendency for self-creation is likely to fall into moral relativism and self-indulgent nihilistic aestheticism. Both criticisms seem to target the split between the private and the public, implied in Rorty's portrayal of the liberal ironist. This article presents the author's reconsideration of Rorty's view of the liberal ironist and its implications for postmodern civic education. The author critically examines some conceptual difficulties with Rorty's view of the liberal ironist, which has to do with its assumption of the private/public split. The private/public split in Rorty's view of the liberal ironist is directly derived from his overarching philosophical mantra that the hope for any philosophical foundation of morality is a metaphysical illusion from the past. The author's argument here develops two main theses. One is that Rorty's postmetaphysical ironist seems to suffer (or celebrate) the lack of moral source that would motivate him/her to be socially responsible. The other is that to acknowledge the theoretical irreconcilability between the private and public is one thing but to suppress one's desire to reconcile them in the face of this irreconcilability is quite another. Lastly, the author briefly explores what the critique of Rorty's liberal ironism can imply for postmodern civil education, followed by a preliminary sketch of a modified version of the postmodern view of the educated, which is educationally more plausible as well as socially more responsible. (Contains 6 notes.)