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Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

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Review

“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. I wouldn’t want him to have the last word, but the conversation should be joined. If it is conducted with the verve of Achieving Our Country, and if it shares Rorty’s genuine commitment to revitalizing the left as a national force, it will be a very good thing.”―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“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

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From the Back Cover

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, Rorty 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.

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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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