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Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
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...more
Paperback, 159 pages
Published
September 1st 1999
by Harvard University Press
(first published 1998)
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Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country attempts both to establish a distinction between the "Old" and "New" Left in American politics and to try to protect and reinvigorate the former from the assaults of the latter. His complaint is that the Old Left, also called the "Reformist Left," suffered setbacks in the sixties as a New Left emerged that felt the Old Left was complicit in the greatest of crimes, namely, the Vietnam War. While the Old Left was thoroughly anticommunist, the New Left has adop...more
What is it, exactly, that makes Richard Rorty a fairly easy read? I would equate it, not only to the conciseness of his prose, but to his uncanny ability to draw up perfectly lucid dichotomies. ‘Dichotomy’ has become something of a bad word in contemporary philosophy. The word is often associated with a sense of anti-gradation, usually into an idea which has become ‘over-determined’ and thus, worth ‘deconstructing.’
Rorty draws dichotomies, not to essentialize some thought-system, but to communi...more
Rorty draws dichotomies, not to essentialize some thought-system, but to communi...more
This short 1998 book based on a series of lectures by Richard Rorty, the famous pragmatist philosopher, tries to do two things. First, to restore a left-wing version of patriotism, or national pride, in spite of America's shameful history of racism, inequality, genocide, etc. It does this by invoking the civil religion of Dewey and Whitman, which defines America not by its historical record but by its aspirations toward a "decent society" in which all citizens will be ensured of dignity and well...more
What a general crock of shit this book is. Rorty's basic message is that we should embrace his idealized version of American leftism as a sometimes flawed and unfinished project, while rejecting others because they were flawed...? For instance, we should never forget what the Poles suffered under a communist regime and therefore turn our backs on Marxism. However, at the same time we are supposed to forget about slavery, Native genocide, Vietnam, etc. because why dwell on what went wrong domesti...more
Because it is written to a broader audience, this book by Rorty is much easier to read than his famous Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In it, he compares "the Left" in the U.S. before and after the 1960's.
He suggests that there has not really been a politically active Left in the past several decades because there has been a shift from a focus on helping people "who were humiliated by poverty and unemployment" to helping people "who are humiliated for reasons other than economic status" (80...more
He suggests that there has not really been a politically active Left in the past several decades because there has been a shift from a focus on helping people "who were humiliated by poverty and unemployment" to helping people "who are humiliated for reasons other than economic status" (80...more
Argues Left has sold out the working class/poor by focusing on the politics of sex and identity. He's right, but fails to convince (me, at least) that we can't care equally for both.
This book made me remember why we have to accept our allies as just that. For many years, I've been seeking purity in my allies, rejecting the Kennedy boys for their Cold Warrior mentality that inflicted the Viet Nam War on us, but I should have been grateful that their vision made the Civil Rights successes possible. For those who have been seeking purity in their allies, rejecting atheists or socialists because we do not agree with some of their tenets, the time has come to reassess our world...more
This book would not have been satisfying to my 20 year old self, or my 25 year old self. I would have (mis)read Rorty, as some people have, as an apologist for America. I would have conflated his insistence on treating America as an unfinished democratic project with a legitimation or denial of the awful atrocities that have been carried out by America. Some people (mis)read this book in those ways. And I would have been one of those people until the last few years. When I first read this book i...more
Lucid, eloquent defense of the "reformist" Left, combined with an impassioned critique of the "cultural" Left. Rorty's central theme is that the Left has become, since the 1970s, mainly one of cynicism and spectatorship, rather than active engagement in pragmatic methods of reform. He wants the left to return to reformist politics, to achieve justice within the capitalist system through the transformation of laws and policies, rather than revolution.
My main problem with the book is Rorty's snark...more
My main problem with the book is Rorty's snark...more
This is a great argument against pessimism and fatalism on the left, a response to the "I told you so"-ing that follows something like Vietnam or Iraq. He convincingly and clearly argues that those impulses arise from a sense of the tragic the left got from Marxian determinism and American Puritanism and makes a pretty thrilling case that the traditions of Dewey's pragmatism and Whitman's dynamic secularism offer something more hopeful. He says liberals should be inclusive -- that FDR and ER and...more
It was interesting to learn a bit about the history of the Left in the USA, as I didn't have much knowledge about it before. I like Rorty's writing style, but I think he errs slightly when making guesses about the future.
The five essays in this little book speak more directly to me now than when I first read them about ten years ago: about leftist patriotism, the risks and benefits of cultural studies, Dewey and Whitman, and what about literature, philosophy and politics still offers excitement and hope.
Read this in Contemporary Political Thought. Very non-foundational. Did not agree with it, as it helped provide a progressive Christian morality without Christ, but interesting and thought provoking nevertheless.
Good division between the old and new Left; the class-system, economic Left and the stigma-based, cultural Left.
Some great one-liners.
Some great one-liners.
Politics,Philosophy
is it weird that i agree so much?
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Got interested in Rorty while reading the recent appreciations after his death. My philosophy colleague recommended this as a good place to start: an accessible and clear discussion of leftism in the late 1990s. Rorty wants the left to drop the obession with culture and get back to the hard work of reforming market capitalism.
Read this in College. I remember thinking it was extremely reasonable and well written. Must re-read but I do recommend it to those out there thinking about the political country we live in.
A very short, yet powerful, book about not losing sight of hope.
great, wise, cheering essays.
Apr 27, 2013
Hevel Cava
marked it as to-read
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Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which...more
More about Richard M. Rorty...
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