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Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
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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."
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Product details
Series: The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies (Book 10)
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; New Ed edition (September 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674003128
ISBN-13: 978-0674003125
Product Dimensions:
5.8 x 0.5 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.7 out of 5 stars
49 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#70,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I must have purchased this book over three times; the friends I lend it to never seem to return it. This book by Richard Rorty does not have the impact of his masterworks such as "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" or "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," but deserves its place on the bookshelf of any student of Rorty, Pragmatism, or liberal politics in America. Every time I read this book it instills a sense of pride in American intellectualism and leaves me feeling an optimistic political agent.This book is a collection of lectures and should not be treated as if it were to be a rigorous work in philosophy. For this reason I find it quite enjoyable. I do not find myself picking up "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" very often, but I tend to pick this off the shelf once a year. The prose is quite eloquent and easy to read, which results in an enjoyable, but thought provoking experience.The interesting thing about this book is that, despite being a work of political philosophy, the heroes often championed are not just philosophers, but literary writers such as Walt Whitman. Although not a central argument to the book, is does reflect Rorty's belief that philosophers have no exclusive domain over the realms of political thought and the truth. For this reason I believe this book is even great for the non-philosopher; it's prose is more accessible as a lecture, but also practices philosophy with a sense of humility.In terms of content the most poignant for me is not the question of left vs. right, but what Rorty calls the "progressive left" and the "critical left." The critical left being the side that views the sins of America as an unforgivable impasse which is stuck in the mode of a spectator. The progressive left, on the other hand, acknowledges these wrong-doings, but believes that our ideal country can still be achieved. The progressive left is that of the political agent; those that still have a hope for a more just world.Overall I highly recommend this book to philosophers and non-philosophers alike. For a book of such intellectual depth, it is quite a leisurely and interesting read; perhaps that has to do with some of the more anecdotal accounts of Rorty once served snacks to John Dewey and Carlo Tresca at a Halloween party his parents hosted during his childhood. This book is great to have on your own shelf, but also great to gift to the young political thinker.
Achieving our Country is a series of lectures written and compiled by the esteemed philosopher Richard Rorty in 1998, with the aim of illuminating the problems associated with modern American Leftism and Liberal thought. The book is now famous for predicting the rise of Donald Trump (page 89) as well as underscoring the rise of "the social justice warrior society" obsessed with the politics of shame, guilt, and identity. Far more important, however, is Rorty's focus on creating a pragmatic leftist movement, that takes pride in the American system, and seeks to encourage reform rather than dwelling on the crimes America has committed in the past.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.
In many ways, it is easy to see where such movements as feminism or liberalism in general have lost their way on some things. Most notably, the left in recent years has bent over backwards to shame itself and America for its past "sins," with an almost religious fervor. However, Richard Rorty saw through this roughly twenty years ago when he put together the lectures that make up this book. The left often gets criticized for idealism and utopian thinking, but such thinking is necessary in order to achieve the kind of progressive change that many want to take place in America. It means having pride in what we can be as a nation (but not to the point of jingoistic nationalism). One particularly prophetic passage on pp. 89-90 describes what will happen once people realize the government isn't doing anything (meaningful) to address the negative results of globalization, which would result in the election of a strongman. Well, it's 2017 and it's happened. However, there's much more to the book than that. The first lecture uses the philosophy of Whitman and Dewey as a springboard to discuss a better way to think of America, one evident in their writings. There was also an enlightening lecture on the "Cultural Left" (as opposed to the reformist/progressive left) that ended up sharing a lot in common with Thiel/Sacks THE DIVERSITY MYTH. Put together, this was an excellent diagnosis of problems with the left that also provided a decent roadmap of where to go if people want to achieve that kind of change that was possible in the first two thirds of the 20th century. It was prophetic then, but it's still useful now. Highly recommended.
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