Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

by Richard Rorty

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674003128
• ISBN13: 9780674003125
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An important reminder of the true America.

The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time. In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today. What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism.To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right. To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future. This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.

It's up to the Left to achieve our country

In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty details the roots to leftist thought, exploring the dawning of the modern era and the pragmatic approach, the glorification of the American ideal and American story as one that would continue onward and upward, and the role of the intellectual Left to be the agent of hope and progress as opposed to maintaining the status quo. Unfortunately, events in the 1960's created a schism in the Left from which neither side have succeeded in counteracting a unified Right that sunk its claws into the haunches of America. It is up to the Left to coalesce once again into a unifying force to continue the American story and achieve the country.The loss of American pride is another key element. Rorty derives this from two modern thinkers, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, whose beliefs sharply contrasted with that of the finite, absolute, divine-centered beliefs of the Victorian pre-modernists. Whitman passionately exalted the more humanistic approach to truth and self-discovery caused by the floodgates opened by Darwin's theory of evolution. As a result, the divine standard to which men held to was replaced by secular humanism and humanistic standards.Both Dewey and Whitman saw "America" and "democracy" as synonymous with being "human." Dewey too placed "America" and "democracy" on a visionary scale. But where Whitman described the American way as "the last and greatest vision of the American potential," Dewey saw "democracy" and thus America's story as "a great word, whose history... remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted".As a result, Rorty asserts that Dewey and Whitman would advocate American pride despite blacker moments in America's history such as the Vietnam War. This was why the Left lost its effectiveness in carrying out its intellectual role--its spectatorial preoccupation with sin. According to Rorty, a Dewey-Whitman counter to this indulgence in self-disgust would be that "there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible to regain self-respect."Another group of thinkers Rorty drew upon was the "reformist Left," progressives who as champions of the downtrodden, strove to make political and social changes within a constitutional and democratic edifice. This reformist Left consists of two groups: the powerful, financially secure leftist elite launching top-down initiatives, (Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the Wagner Act) and the second group, consisting of the financially insecure and disempowered "little man" and grass roots organizations (Marcus Garvey, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Stonewall riots.) Rorty contends that the reinforcement of the bottom by the top was the glue holding the two groups until 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the denial of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention created a rift in the Left.The solution, according to Rorty, is a unification

A New Old Left

This book is a most needed refreshment to the stagnation that is the current left. Though Rorty claims to belong to the 'old' or reformist left, rather then the new, identity based left, it is about as believable as his claims to not belong to the Postmodern set. No, instead of completely destroying the New Left, Rorty creates an imazing fusion of the identity politics of the new left, with the class based politics of the old. He manages to weed out the bad in both traditions, clearing the Old left of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, while at the same time bringing economic awareness and positivism to the increasingly pesimistic, overly theoretical New academic left. The prime focus of Rorty's lectures is the shift from what he terms the participatory Left, which was the reformist left that brought on the Progressive Era and the New Deal, to the Spectatorial left, which is the Current "new" left that bemoans the inequalities of the world but only spends its time theorizing about the problems rather than trying to find a solution. In doing this, he creates a view of a new reformist left that embraces the cultural and racial changes the New Left created. Though I do not agree with everything Rorty says, especially his views regarding the Cold War (he uses the word evil too freely for my tastes), he did manage to reinforce many views I already hold and open my eyes to many new ones.

a useful work for all Americans

This book is an excellent and provocative look at the what's wrong with the Left in America today. Rorty's insistence that the Left needs more pragmatic, concrete policy proposals and less abstract postmodern "theory" is a refreshing and powerful insight. What the book points to is not only how to revive the Left, but how to make our country more democratic by breaking the Right's stranglehold on political discourse. So in a sense, the book is a call not only to the Left, but to all Americans who value democracy and a political culture based not on sound bites and stale rhetoric, but on genuine debate between clearly defined policy alternatives.

Resurrecting the "Party of Hope"

In this book, one of America's leading philosopical lights, is trying to clear a space for the political left to reassess its goals and its practices. He believes that the internecine warfare between the cultural and political left, and the New Left and Old Left must be halted, that a new rearticulation of the goals of the left is necessary for that to happen. He maintains that the New Left, the one that engages in the cultural project of identity politics, must find a way to see the Old Left managed to put together a number of clear victories, and put aside the issues of "purity" which paralyzed it. He offers a context and a framework and a lot of pragmatic wisdom as to how to move forward. He also does not stint in his criticism of the Left.Here's some quotes from the books that illustrate some of his thinking: 'The difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. ' p.9'Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to ultimate significance in a finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and non-human.' p.17Quoting Whitman:'And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,For I who am curious about each am not curiousabout God.''Americans,' he [Whitman] hoped, would spend the energies that past human societies had spent on discovering God's desires on discovering one another's desires. ' p.16.They (Whitman and Dewey) wanted that utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire. They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul." pg.18According to Rorty: "Other nations thought of themselves as hymns to the glory of God. [in America] 'We redefine God as our future selves.'p.22.'Whereas Marx and Spencer claimed to know what was bound to happen, Whitman and Dewey denied such knowledge in order to make room for pure, joyous hope.' (not sure what page).Rorty quotes Wm. James (fellow pragmatist): 'Democracy' Wm. James wrote, 'is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture.' p.9. (The "croaker's picture" by the way, would be the view of someone who always sees everything negatively, who takes delight in seeing despair and death around every trope.)But this yearning for a democratic utopia is not not the same as a 'passion for the infinite' which in Rorty's view as destructive in its Platonic idealism. Rorty would also class Marxism and "Spencerism" as this kind of idealism. I think it's helpful to add these theories are also deterministic, which is also antithetical to the practice of democracy as envisioned by Dewey and Whitman, although Rorty doesn't pursue this particular line of thinking,(Platonic) Virtue seeks ultimate things,