| 
|
|
Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
 |
Browse |
 |
|
|
by Richard Rorty
Harvard University Press
Due/Published
September 1999, 176 pages,
paper
ISBN
0674003128
New in paper. (F99) Adapted from his Massey Lectures of 1997, Richard Rorty challenges the current generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the tradition of democratic intellectual labor, rather than simply withdrawing into the academy to bemoan the nation's shame. Achieving Our Country traces the sources of the 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 era. Rorty describes how the victory of the antiwar movement, ushering the Nixon years, paradoxically encourages 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, he 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 US from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping the national future. "Richard Rorty [is] John Dewey's ablest intellectual heir and one of the most influential philosophers alive. . . . In lively prose, [Achieving Our Country] offers a pointed and necessary reminder that left academics have too often been content to talk to each other about the theory of hegemony while the right has been busy with the practice of it. If those criticized in the book dismiss it the way they brush aside the Blooms and D'Souzas of the world, an opportunity will be lost. Rorty invites a serious conversation about the purposes of intellectual work and the direction of left politics."--The Nation "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 |
|
| |
Review
One of America's most prominent contemporary philosophers issues a call for the dormant Left to head out from the academia and the world of theory and into a more optimistic project of building a new vision for the country. In these lectures, Rorty discusses some of the fissures within the Left that have left it struggling, if not abandoning the effort, to find a place for their ideas in common life. Rorty focuses in on the Vietnam War and the dissension it caused between the New Left and the Old Left as having a dramatic effect on the Left. It produced a new generation of disillusioned Leftists who retreated into critiquing America with high theory rather than with a more active involvement. To remedy the situation, Rorty wants to return to the kind of pragmatic (yet religious thinking -- civic religion) thinking of people like William James, Walt Whitman, and John Dewey. All three certainly had their criticisms of America, but also viewed it as having the potential to be an exceptional country. Indeed, Rorty seems to share these hopes and decries the rather rote criticisms of America that have become so prevalent today among the Left. Rorty's lectures offer us an increasingly rare opportunity: a public intellectual who is keenly aware of his history, the contemporary situation, and the possibility, if not necessity for change.
|
|
