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Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America Paperback – September 1, 1999
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Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.
How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities--from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue "High Theory" at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future.
In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for "achieving our country."
- Print length176 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1999
- Dimensions5.75 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100674003128
- ISBN-13978-0674003125
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert Croly and their allies. What Rorty has written―as deftly, amusingly and cleverly as he always writes―is a lay sermon for the untheological… [Americans] do not need to know what God wants but what we are capable of wanting and doing… [Rorty argues] that we would do better to try to improve the world than lament its fallen condition. On that he will carry with him a good many readers.”―Alan Ryan, New York Times Book Review
“Richard Rorty is remarkable not just for being a gadfly to analytical philosophers, but for his immense reading, his lively prose and his obvious moral engagement with the issues… The conversation of philosophy would be much poorer without him… Achieving Our Country is a valuable addition to Rorty’s writings… He has things to say that are important and timely… They are said powerfully.”―Hilary Putnam, Times Literary Supplement
“In his philosophically rigorous new book, Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty raises a provocative if familiar question: Whatever happened to national pride in this country? …[and] he offers a persuasive analysis of why such pride has been lost.”―Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
“The heart of Achieving Our Country is Professor Rorty’s critique of the ‘cultural left.’ Barricaded in the university, this left has isolated itself, he asserts, from the bread-and-butter issues of economic equality and security and the practical political struggles that once occupied the reform tradition… Controversies are seeded like land mines in every paragraph of this short book.”―Peter Steinfels, New York Times
“Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is short, comprehensible and urges a civic and political agenda―the re-engagement of the Left… Rorty seeks to revive the vision of Walt Whitman and John Dewey, and what he sees as the real American Dream―a compassionate society held together by nothing more absolute than consensus and the belief that humane legal and economic agreements stand at the centre of democratic civilisation.”―Brian Eno, The Guardian
“[In this] slim, elegantly written book…Rorty scolds other radical academics for abandoning pride in the nation’s democratic promise; in their obsession with ‘victim studies,’ he argues, they have neglected to inspire the ‘shared social hope’ that motivated every mass movement against injustice from the abolitionists to the voting rights campaign.”―Michael Kazin, Washington Post Book World
“A succinct, stimulating, crisply written book… Rorty proposes a return to the liberal values that animated American reform movements for the first two-thirds of this century: from the long struggle of labor unions to obtain better conditions for workers, to the efforts of leaders like Woodrow Wilson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson to redistribute the nation’s wealth more equitably… Although Rorty is an academic philosopher, in this book, addressed to the general reader, he employs clear, vigorous language that makes reading a pleasure rather than a chore.”―Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor
“Achieving Our Country criticizes academic theorists and reminds us that left-wing reformers in previous periods of American history either made their careers outside the university or, at least, developed strong links with the decidedly non-academic labor movement… Rorty’s distinction between a ‘cultural Left’ and a ‘reformist Left’ is useful. As Freud replaced Marx in the imagination of academic theorists, Rorty explains, a cultural left―one that ‘thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed’―came into being.”―Alan Wolfe, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“It is refreshing to find so hard-hitting a portrait of the contemporary academic Left in the work of one of its own.”―Peter Berkowitz, Commentary
“On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so much either agreement or disagreement as an overpowering sense of So what?, the eminent philosopher Richard Rorty has composed a marvelous philippic against the entrenched irrelevance of much of the American left… Rorty’s most important insight is into the political worldview of the academic left: that it is essentially nonpolitical… He offers a withering comparison of the core beliefs of the current cultural left with those of one of its forebears, Walt Whitman.”―Harold Meyerson, Dissent
“Mr. Rorty calls for a left which ‘dreams of achieving’ America, a patriotic left he recognises from the days of the New Deal and which he remembers from the early 1960s when, for example, people campaigned for civil-rights laws to make their country better. Where, he wonders, has such reformist pride gone? In place of ‘Marxist scholasticism’, Mr. Rorty wants a left which makes reducing inequalities part of a ‘civic religion’. Yet material differences are not the only sort of thing that bothers Mr. Rorty about the contemporary United States. On a communitarian note, he argues that the ‘civic religion’ he advocates should include commitment to shared values that rise above ethnic or minority loyalties.”―The Economist
“Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery… If we [scoff] at Rorty’s patriotic American leftism, we may find that it sets off some doubts that will come back to haunt us. When we quibble over his interpretations of our favourite thinkers, are we not confirming his stereotype of left pedantry? When we sniff at him for keeping company with rightists and renegades, do we not bear out his idea of a Left that is keener on its own purity than on fighting for the poor? As we look down our noses at the etiolation of socialism in America, should we not reckon the costs and benefits of European mass movements, and reflect on the political history of the anti-Americanism that comes to us so easily? Before leftist subjects of Her Majesty get snooty about American democracy, we might stop and wonder whose interests are served by our unshakable optimism about the past. The unguarded naiveties of Achieving Our Country are not quite as negligent as they look, and the book may well turn out to be one of the first signs of a long-delayed breaking of the ice in socialist politics following the end of the Cold War. The fact that Rorty’s old-style American leftism is closer to British New Labour than to good old socialism may prove not that he is confused, but that it is time to reset our political chronometers.”―Jonathan Rée, London Review of Books
“Politically progressive academics should consider carefully Rorty’s arguments… They pose important questions about American politics and public intellectual practice.”―Harvey Kaye, Times Higher Educational Supplement
“There is much to be debated, much that will probably infuriate, in Rorty’s picture of contemporary Left intellectuals… Achieving Our Country is meant to be pointedly polemical, and Rorty…[has] succeeded at stirring up emotions as well as thoughts.”―Vincent J. Bertolini, American Literature
“Richard Rorty is an inspirational writer who makes a valiant effort in this book to create an atmosphere of cooperation among those he characterizes as ‘the Reformist Left.’ He wants us to return to the ideals of John Dewey and Walt Whitman and achieve the greatness that is possible in a country of our wealth and dominance.”―Edward J. Bander, Bimonthly Review of Law Books
“Rorty offers a resolute defense of pragmatic and reformist politics, coupled with a sophisticated rereading of the history of 20th-century American leftist thought. The result is a book that ends up reaffirming the great achievements of American left liberalism―strong unions, Social Security, and the principled regulation of corporate power―even as it illuminates the ways in which the cultural myopia of today’s academic left has placed those achievements in jeopardy… In his insistence that there is a great American tradition of leftist reform, and that this rendition can be reinvigorated only by a return to the idea of the nation, Rorty has constructed as humane and as hopeful a defense of patriotism as one can imagine.”―James Surowiecki, Boston Phoenix
“A bracing tonic against the jejune profundities and the self-centered talking points by the far Right that find their way into the media. In sharply etched arguments Rorty weaves in philosophical and historical perspectives… His message isn’t one of resignation, rather of hope grounded in the Left’s potential for reinventing itself. He thinks it’s time for the Left to stop demonizing capitalist America and to develop once again a political program of its own.”―Terry Doran, Buffalo News
“For many years now, Rorty has been one of the most important American pragmatists, defending the experimental modes of inquiry first propounded by John Dewey from both traditionalists and postmodernists… In Achieving Our Country, a brief but eloquent book, Rorty begs his academic colleagues to return to the real world. ‘I am nostalgic for the days,’ he writes, ‘when leftist professors concerned themselves with issues in real politics (such as the availability of health care to the poor and the need for strong labor unions) rather than with academic politics.’”―Jefferson Decker, In These Times
“Richard Rorty is considered by many to be America’s greatest living philosopher. That assessment is firmly supported in this short, profound, and lucid volume. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty does what many of us think philosophers ought to do, namely, lay a foundation and establish a framework within which we as individuals and as a society can conceptualize and fashion operational theories by which to live and prosper together… I can think of no more important book that I have read in recent years or one that I could more fervently recommend to the readers of this journal that Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.”―Thomas R. DeGregori, Journal of Economic Issues
“‘Achieving our country’ (the phrase is culled from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) isn’t just a redeemable aim, it’s what good radical politics has always been about.”―Gideon Calder, Radical Philosophy
“Rorty’s new book urges a return to American liberalism’s days of hope, pride, and struggle within the system… Subtle without being dense, good-natured in its defiance of a whole spectrum of conventional wisdoms, Achieving Our Country is a rare book. It should be compulsory reading―if that weren’t contrary to all it stands for.”―Richard Lamb, The Reader's Catalog
“A deeply considered diagnosis, a vital set of prophecies.”―Publishers Weekly
“[The] book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have encountered…[Rorty’s] book is worth revisiting as the Democratic Party smarts from losses in recent special elections and considers how it might win back the House in the 2018 midterms.”―Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
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- Publisher : Harvard University Press; New Ed edition (September 1, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 176 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674003128
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674003125
- Item Weight : 8.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #337,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Pragmatist Philosophy
- #106 in Radical Political Thought
- #724 in Political Philosophy (Books)
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This book has become famous because a passage in the third lecture "The Cultural Left" appears to presage the factors leading to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. The passage is indeed remarkable, but I felt the need to dig below the surface to consider not merely Trump but the considerations which made him possible. The angry, divisive politics in the United States, including in Rorty's account cultural politics on the left is not free from blame.
The opening lecture in the book "American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey" is more important to what the book is about than is the possible picture of Trump. Rorty begins his lecture with the same feeling of discontent I expressed at the outset of this review with two critically well-received novels that had drawn a picture of an irredeemably evil United States employing tropes familiar from many books and from popular and intellectual culture. Rorty criticizes this sort of literature as depriving readers of a sense of hope and purpose in the meaning of America. Hope and purpose and their lack by their nature are for nationals and individuals the product of imagination and myth-making rather than an alleged dispassionate analysis of facts. Rorty wants to find meaning and hope and promise in American life. He looks to the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher John Dewey as his primary sources with discussions as well of the Progressive early 20th Century writer,Herbert Croly, William James, and ... the German idealist philosopher Hegel. He sees the criticism resulting from an attitude of detachment and disengagement with America that he finds partial and unjustified.
Rorty looks to leftist activism as practiced in America from the late 19th century through the early 1960s as a source of hope. He finds the New Left that became prevalent in the 1960s soon devolved into a broad cultural critique of America rather than an attempt to work to bring about change where change was possible. Rorty finds the basic value of America lies in its secularism which sees creating the good as within the capacity of the people acting for themselves as opposed to responding to clerics or other-worldly religious or philosophical beliefs. The New Left with its opposition to the War in Vietnam and its cultural critiques of America brought back a sense of sin into American life which Rorty deplores. Prior to the late 1960s, the Left had substantive, realizable political aims. More importantly, the Left was ardently patriotic and loved the United States for its promise if not fully for its actuality. This patriotism, together with secularism, are the most fundamental insights in Rorty's book.
In the remaining two Massey Lectures Rorty fleshes out his distinction between the New Left and its predecessors. Among other things, the lectures include some moving autobiographical reflections together with a great deal of philosophical, anti-philosophical and cultural writing.
As with so much of Rorty, this book is a mix. Rorty writes as an individual committed to left-with Progressive politics. He is eloquent in support of what he sees the Left has achieved for American life, including the accomplishments of the New Left which he also incisively critiques. Rorty has little use for conservatism of any stripe. I think his book would be stronger if he integrated his insights with some of the insights of people coming at political questions from a non-Leftist perspective. I see no reason why this could not be done.
I love the way Rorty talks about philosophers such as Dewey and James and poets such as Whitman. Rorty has a love-hate relationship with philosophy and metaphysics and many academic philosophers have mixed responses to Rorty. I see Rorty as a philosopher in spite of himself. I admire Rorty for the courage of his secularism, which I largely share. Again, I think his position could be stated with somewhat more openness to sources not fully secular.
This book is not so much an advance criticism of President Trump as it is a warning of how the United States was losing a sense of itself and of confidence in its possibilities and of what Rorty sees as the United States' truly exceptional character -- the first society to be formed as an experiment on a secular model. The book is partial because, even with its critique of the New Left it appears to read out more conservative Americans and that is unnecessary and unjustified. Still in its optimism, sense of meaning, and celebration of Whitman, Dewey, and Lincoln, among others, Rorty's book offers an excellent guide to the spirit of the United States and to the recapturing of something of the American dream and of what Herbert Croly described in his famous Progressive book of 1909 as "The Promise of American Life".
Robin Friedman
Rorty's analysis divides the Left in the United States into two political movements: the Reformist Left of 1900 to 1960, and the Cultural Left of the 1960s to the present. The Reformist Left was one that took a pragmatic approach to correcting the social ills created by the industrial revolution. One that worked within the democratic and capitalist system, that focused on a wide range of economic and social issues, and achieved many important milestones from helping to give women the right to vote to promoting worker rights. The Reformist Left, exemplified in Rorty's mind by John Dewey and Walt Whitman, believed in an America, that despite its flaws, was capable of becoming a more equal society than any that had come before it.
The Cultural Left, on the other hand, arose out of the Vietnam War with the shocking realization that America was fighting an unmoral war and was committing grave injustice in the name of fighting communism. As such the Left turned away from working within the system and believed that the system was broken and incapable of being fixed. This distrust in the system turned the Left's focus on to cultural issues, especially on the guilt and sin committed through the past actions of american imperialism and capitalism. This focus on guilt and sin has led to the rise of the academic studies of feminism, minority studies, and gender studies. While the study of these subjects is both legitimate and important, Rorty makes the argument that the focus has shifted away from introducing practical legislation to help disadvantaged Americans and more towards a hyper-awareness of America's past sins and our seeming complicity in them. Rorty proposes that the Left should shift away from its cultural focus back to the pragmatic reform-ism that created effective social change. To this end Rorty believes in a Utopian America, not in an explicit Utopia with a specific definition or social goal, but in an America that endlessly strives to be a Utopia. This concept is more about the process of creating a Utopia than in the end goal of what a Utopia would look like. This Utopia would strive to be a better and more equal society for all Americans.
Rorty's book is a timely critique of the problems of modern liberalism and the turn towards political correctness and social justice. However, this book is not without its fault. Many of the arguments are overly simplistic and lack a nuanced approach when dealing with the wide range of leftist thought within the 20th century. The book also references many long dead philosophers and intellectuals that most readers will have little to no knowledge of, and whose complex philosophical arguments may do more to complicate Rorty's arguments than to enlighten them. With that criticism in mind this book is something that every liberal in the United States should read. It envisions a liberal movement that is both inspiring and effective in promoting realistic social and economic reform. A movement focused on pragmatic reform rather than shaming our society for America's past injustices and sins.











