Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

by Richard Rorty

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."

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Essays, American, Theory

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

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 the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too long after the 2016 presidential election, a passage from Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998) went viral on social media. Rorty, that amicable bulwark of the Old Left and purveyor of pragmatist philosophy had, so we were told, predicted the election of Donald Trump from beyond the grave in a prophetic passage dating from 1998. The passage was reprinted by such prestigious publications as the New York Times, Vox, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Slate, and Rorty’s ostensible soothsaying skills had the effect of catapulting Achieving Our Country—a minor work that paled in comparison to his epochal Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)—to the top of every Leftist academic and journalist’s reading list. So high was demand for the book that it prompted Harvard University Press to reprint the book for the first time in nearly a decade.

It is worth quoting the passage here:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers [...] are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots […]. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion […]. All the resentment which badly educated American feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. (p. 89-90)

Rorty had foreseen, or so it was claimed, that the shift from Old Left to New, and the influence of the postmodern philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard & co. would alienate the working class and give rise to the post-truth politics of the Trump era. The irony of this diagnostic is that the attention Rorty's passage has received is itself a product of the post-truth media clickbait culture in which reality has become a commodity to be shopped around for in building one's preferred narrative. What the above-cited passage leaves out, often by a well-placed ellipsis, is that Rorty is not speaking in his own voice. Rather, he is glossing Edward Luttwak’s The Endangered American Dream (1993). Rorty did not predict Trump’s rise to power. If anyone did, it is Luttwak—and even then, this would be a dubious claim, as the passage immediately preceding the first makes clear: "Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are headed into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments." (p. 89).

The diagnosis that the working class was being alienated was thus not a prophetic vision by any stretch of the imagination. It was a common verdict not only among thinkers of the Old Left from the 1980s onward at least, but even among writers like Luttwak, who is not a Leftist by any stretch of the imagination. With the mystique of Rorty’s proclamations thus swept aside, the question arises: if so many could see Trump’s rise to power from a mile away, then why has the Left done so little to correct the deviations that were already, two decades ago, causing it to alienate the working class on whose support socialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre could still count in the 1950s and 1960s? One answer is to point to the very fragmentation that Rorty warns about throughout the book. The completely unproductive debate around Achieving Our Country is itself a case in point: the Left-Liberals attack the postmodernists, the Marxists attack the Left-Liberals, the postmodernists attack the Marxists, and all of them attack Rorty, thus foregoing any kind of real engagement with the far-right agitators and religious fundamentalists whose political adversaries they are, I am told, supposed to be.

Achieving Our Country assembles a series of three lectures sketching out Rorty's political thought. Rorty is the philosopher of the narrative par excellence. “Competition for political leadership,” he says, “is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness” (p. 4). His fear is that the identitarian current of Leftist thought—which is, unfortunately, increasingly identified with the Left as such—has abandoned all symbols of greatness, turned its back on electoral politics, and chosen instead to languish in a fruitless political spectatorialism. The point of his first lecture is to provide the Left with a new, more useful narrative that could show it the way out of its impasse. According to the story he weaves, American Leftism has its roots in the writings of John Dewey and Walt Whitman, whose vision is defined primarily by its thoroughgoing secularism. For both of these thinkers, there is “no standard, not even a divine one, against which the decisions of a free people can be measured” (p. 16). Their ideal of America was therefore thoroughly democratic: national self-understanding was not to refer to the will of a divine Creator, but to the democratically achieved consensus of free and equal human beings.

The result was to replace to divine knowledge of “what is already real with social hope for what might become real” (p. 18). From this perspective, the concept of progress loses its reference to any predetermined standards and becomes a matter of “solving more problems” (p. 28). On the resulting picture, social organization has as its purpose the pragmatic goals of reducing suffering and creating “larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” This, Rorty believes, can be achieved through a “classless and casteless society—the sort American leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct” (p. 30). With these symbols of greatness in hand, Rorty hopes to give the contemporary Left the tools it needs to understand itself as part of a larger narrative in which it can take pride. Of course, that narrative is not without its blemishes. But from the perspective of a thoroughly secularized national self-understanding cleansed of any concept of sin, mortification and self-flagellation are to be replaced with the sober consciousness that one cannot alter the past and the resolute hope to do better in the future: “The left by definition, is the party of hope” (p. 14).

In his second lecture, Rorty gives an account of what he calls the “reformist Left” and the “New Left.” In his terminology, the "reformist Left" refers to those who, from 1900 to 1964, struggled "within the framework of constitutional democracy." In contrast, the "New Left"—which finds its contemporary expression in the identity politics that led you to shut down your Tumblr account—refers to those “who decided, around 1964, that it was no longer possible to work for social justice within the system” (p. 43). His goal, here as elsewhere, is narrative in nature. He aims to undercut what he thinks is an unhelpful distinction between leftism and reformism, thereby giving both a common narrative and—one hopes—countering the pervasive trend toward sectarianism. Despite Rorty’s obvious concerns about certain trends in the New Left, his approach is admirably conciliatory. He highlights the New Left's positive contributions in addressing some of the reformist Left's blind spots regarding such issues as gender, race, and sexuality, and seeks to give each party its due: “The honours should be evenly divided between the old, reformist left and the New Left of the Sixties” (p. 71).

In the third and final lecture, by far the most interesting of the three, Rorty presents his critique of the New Left and his plea for a reunification of the Left against the Right. The cultural Left, he says, “thinks more about stigma than about money” (p. 77). As a result, it has very little in common with the reformist Left and its emphasis on remedying economic inequality via policy. This is particularly worrying given that, since the rise of the cultural Left, globalization has led to increased economic inequality and insecurity. This, Rorty worries, will open the way for right-wing demagogues to take advantage of the growing gap between rich and poor. And then the infamous prediction, which of course, is proving right (pun somewhat intended) the world over: “[T]his process is likely to culminate in a bottom-up populist revolt” (p. 83). He makes two proposals about how to remedy this problem this. The first is for the Left to “kick its philosophy habit” and “put a moratorium on theory." The second is for it to “[shed] its semi-conscious anti-Americanism” (p. 98). This latter means toning down the cultural Left’s insistence on difference: “Only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections” (p. 101). I find it hard to disagree with either point.

Alas, Achieving Our Country is not the oracular revelation it has been lauded as. It is a perfectly fine, sometimes even illuminating statement of a typical late-20th century diagnosis of the state of Leftist politics. Rorty’s erudition is considerable. His analyses are lucid if at points outdated, and his turns of phrase are infinitely quotable. The three lectures contained in this book should by rights have been relegated to the bookshelves of university libraries and professors' offices, yet they have now acquired a strange sort of afterlife. Ostensibly, this is because of Rorty’s now-famous “prediction.” But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think that Rorty tells us exactly what so many of us want to hear right now—and, more importantly, what we think others need to hear. As we witness the recent “blue wave” and its more extremist manifestations in the rise of the neo-Nazi alt-right and the election of Donald Trump, several of us have suspected that the excesses of identity politics are partially to blame for the widespread appeal of the Right to the general public, and in particular to the working classes. Rorty's diagnosis gives voice to these suspicions. However, whether his call for unity points to a workable solution in the present state of political fragmentation remains an open question.

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two people recommended this book: a somewhat younger friend and my son-in-law. Actually the friend gave it to me. The idea behind today's recommendations of this book, which was published in 1998, is that it predicted the election of Trump or someone like him.

I recently got hold of an audio version of the book in its least expensive version, an mp3 CD from Amazon (unless of course your library has it--but mine didn't have the hard copy, much less any e-versions), and that has enabled me to get it read. The question is, did I know what I'd heard? Even with reference to the book, I wasn't sure. The narration was workmanlike but overly idolized what was being read, in the manner of a student looking up to a teacher, so missed any irony or tongue-in-cheek parts, assuming they were there. Plus, there were the occasional mispronunciations, such as "Tillich" ending in the "ch" sound instead of "k." At any rate, I let it wash over me, but it wasn't enough.

Only when I was rereading did I become clearly aware of the subtitle. Ha--Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America!

Rorty died in 2007, but his book came to life following Trump's election, when we elites were trying to figure out what hit us. Twenty years ago, Achieving Our Country had predicted that populist uprisings would imperil liberal democracies--that the left-behind working class would in a wave of resentment put a strongman who promised a remedy into office.

That is not all. He argued against a reflexive anti-Americanism and in favor of American civic pride, for agency as opposed to spectatorship, campaigning and gaining power over protest, hope and exertion over condemnation and passivity (James Baldwin over Elijah Muhammad).

There is an excellent discussion of the compatibility of civic pride with past mistakes, even barbarism--in fact, the case for giving up the concept of sin in favor of a secular antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope, and regarding self-loathing as a luxury which agents--either individuals or nations--cannot afford.

He saw that--already--leftists in the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to public debate.

He saw that the left was (already) cannibalizing itself as the further left condemned the liberals. Warning: language has changed and often requires translation.

He already saw the pitfalls of identity politics, although that name for the phenomenon hadn't yet emerged as the winner.

I find his overall presentation similar to Francis Fukuyama's "Against Identity Politics" in Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/...
Responses and rejoinder here: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/...

His emphasis on agency as action vs. spectatorship, purity, and blame is closely related to Timothy Snyder's concept of a politics of eternity. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

His view of the Left as good and the Right as bad seems to have very recently become antiquated, as suddenly it falls to the Center Left and Center Right to hold the fort against the illiberal extremes.

His view of the persecution of the other as "sadism" also seems off target, as though it were just being done for fun, rather than having a dynamic behind it.

For current reading on the state of the Left, see this link, beginning with the three Paul Berman articles at the bottom of the page: https://www.tabletmag.com/tag/the-ame...

Hard for me to rate, considering the translation issues, but either four stars or five!

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Rorty, The Promise of American Life, and American Patriotism

I read Richard Rorty's 1998 book, "Achieving Our Country" as a result of two dovetailing considerations. First, I had the good fortune to participate in a philosophy conference on the subject "Metaphysics and Political Thought", and several speakers presented insightful papers about Rorty. Second, I had recently read a novel written in a sharply satirical, angry style offering a broad postmodern criticism of the United States and its history. I reacted strongly and negatively to the book and I knew that Rorty (1931 -- 2007) had criticized other novels with the detached, angry critique of America similar to the book I had read. I wanted to read what Rorty had to say in "Achieving Our Country". This short, eloquently written book is based upon the three Massey Lectures Rorty gave in 1997 at Harvard University together with two earlier lectures on similar themes.

This book has become famous because a passage in the third lecture, "The Cultural Left", appears to presage the factors leading to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. The passage is indeed remarkable, but I felt the need to dig below the surface to consider not merely Trump but the considerations which made him possible. The angry, divisive politics in the United States, including in Rorty's account cultural politics on the left is not free from blame.

The opening lecture in the book "American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey" is more important to what the book is about than is the possible picture of Trump. Rorty begins his lecture with the same feeling of discontent I expressed at the outset of this review with two critically well-received novels that had drawn a picture of an irredeemably evil United States employing tropes familiar from many books and from popular and intellectual culture. Rorty criticizes this sort of literature as depriving readers of a sense of hope and purpose in the meaning of America. Hope and purpose and their lack by their nature are for nationals and individuals the product of imagination and myth-making rather than an alleged dispassionate analysis of facts. Rorty wants to find meaning and hope and promise in American life. He looks to the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher John Dewey as his primary sources with discussions as well of the Progressive early 20th Century writer,Herbert Croly, William James, and ... the German idealist philosopher Hegel. He sees the criticism resulting from an attitude of detachment and disengagement with America that he finds partial and unjustified.

Rorty looks to leftist activism as practiced in America from the late 19th century through the early 1960s as a source of hope. He finds the New Left that became prevalent in the 1960s soon devolved into a broad cultural critique of America rather than an attempt to work to bring about change where change was possible. Rorty finds the basic value of America lies in its secularism which sees creating the good as within the capacity of the people acting for themselves as opposed to responding to clerics or other-worldly religious or philosophical beliefs. The New Left with its opposition to the War in Vietnam and its cultural critiques of America brought back a sense of sin into American life which Rorty deplores. Prior to the late 1960s, the Left had substantive, realizable political aims. More importantly, the Left was ardently patriotic and loved the United States for its promise if not fully for its actuality. This patriotism, together with secularism, are the most fundamental insights in Rorty's book.

In the remaining two Massey Lectures Rorty fleshes out his distinction between the New Left and its predecessors. Among other things, the lectures include some moving autobiographical reflections together with a great deal of philosophical, anti-philosophical and cultural writing.

As with so much of Rorty, this book is a mix. Rorty writes as an individual committed to left-with Progressive politics. He is eloquent in support of what he sees the Left has achieved for American life, including the accomplishments of the New Left which he also incisively critiques. Rorty has little use for conservatism of any stripe. I think his book would be stronger if he integrated his insights with some of the insights of people coming at political questions from a non-Leftist perspective. I see no reason why this could not be done.

I love the way Rorty talks about philosophers such as Dewey and James and poets such as Whitman. Rorty has a love-hate relationship with philosophy and metaphysics and many academic philosophers have mixed responses to Rorty. I see Rorty as a philosopher in spite of himself. I admire Rorty for the courage of his secularism, which I largely share. Again, I think his position could be stated with somewhat more openness to sources not fully secular.

This book is not so much an advance criticism of President Trump as it is a warning of how the United States was losing a sense of itself and of confidence in its possibilities and of what Rorty sees as the United States' truly exceptional character -- the first society to be formed as an experiment on a secular model. The book is partial because, even with its critique of the New Left it appears to read out more conservative Americans and that is unnecessary and unjustified. Still in its optimism, sense of meaning, and celebration of Whitman, Dewey, and Lincoln, among others, Rorty's book offers an excellent guide to the spirit of the United States and to the recapturing of something of the American dream and of what Herbert Croly described in his famous Progressive book of 1909 as "The Promise of American Life".

Robin Friedman

[Julian Worker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in the late 1990s based on Richard Rorty's William E Massey Snr lectures in the history of American civilisation from 1997.

Some interesting talking points:

This conception of the purpose of social organisation is a specifically leftist one. The Left , the party of hope, sees our country's moral identity as still to be achieved, rather tan as needing to be preserved. The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact.

..the New Left accomplished something enormously important, something of which the reformist Left would probably have been incapable. It ended the Vietnam War. It may have saved our country from becoming a garrison state. Without the widespread and continued civil disobedience conducted by the New Left, we might still be sending our young people off to kill Vietnamese.

Richard Rorty also mentions a book called The Endangered American Dream by Edward Luttwak, which correctly predicted the rise of a strongman leader of the USA who had the support of suburban white-collar workers who don't want to be taxed to provide social benefits for other people. There were many other reasons too, so read the book (P90) to find out what. Some people give Rorty the credit for predicting the rise of Trump based on this part of the book.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the resentment which badly educated American feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

So Rorty predicted the rise of the magic pumpkin or something similar to The Donald45. I loved thebeginning piece where Rorty situates the James Baldwin of The Fire Next Time against some straw-ish Foucault. Foucault's ideas aren't represented very well here, nor are those of Marx or Heidegger. Derrida comes off the best, but only as a Romantic. Actually, this isn't a persuasive book, if the Left has abandoned its political calling of social justice, with prophets like Whitman and Dewey and instead aligns itself with the Academic Resentment, imported nihilism, then eventually the angry rural voter will swing matters. Each lecture beckons for a glorious return while acknowledging the ensuing difficulties.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its amazing that this critique of contemporary left-wing politics was written more than twenty years ago: its lessons feel immediately applicable today. Rorty was a stalwart of the old left in the United States and this short book is a broadside, albeit a cultured and civil one, against the chic nihilism that has begun to overtake those who consider themselves leftists. Following the 1960s there was a big transition in left-wing political movements that Rorty describes as a desecularization of the left. The new left won some big victories and focused on ending the casual sadism suffered by many groups in society. But to its discredit it also abandoned the pragmatic reformist tendencies of the older leftist establishment. For one thing, today, in its focus on redressing injustices related to identity the left often neglects to even include economics. Coupled with this is a nihilistic anti-Americanism that is bound to alienate people who do not share this morally-righteous and frankly apocalyptic kind of oikophobia.

A country should be criticized because it is loved, and it should become its best image of itself. Indelible sin and irredeemable guilt, even for the worst collective crimes, belongs to the realm of religion. It is not what left-wing politics was intended to be about: nor is the pointless deification of the evil Communist-branded regimes of the twentieth century. We should not collapse under the weight of the past but work hard to "achieve our country," to quote James Baldwin, as the title to this book does. Anyone interested in American politics or the politics of leftism generally would be well-served to read this bit of sober reflection and guidance.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Andrew]

Boy, this is one I went back and forth on. I'll start with the good. Richard Rorty wants a good, pragmatic, honest Left, and I concur. He is mortified by the culturally obsessed Left, and realizes that much of the impulse of the '60s New Left was an idiotic, egocentric counterculture that wound up producing a whole new – and perhaps particularly vile – breed of dressed-down capitalists. He rightly realizes that a lot of the work of the so-called postmodernists is most valid in the context of shaping one's own personal perspective on the world, not forming a cogent political narrative. But... but but but... is using Walt Whitman as a political idol really a compelling counternarrative? And when Rorty brings up Marx, it's not Marx qua Marx, it's a sort of Stalinist “iron laws of history” strawman that is never invoked by anyone other than the weirdest of tankies.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

A philosopher friend recommended this and promised it was "not as political as it sounds". It's…extremely political! But also mostly consists of literary and philosophical musings on politics, so, no complaints.

Rorty's basic claim, outlined in a series of public lectures from which this is adapted, is that the left is perceived (correctly!) as having given up on America. Patriotism and nationalism have become the property of the right, and the left has adopted a posture of cynical disengagement towards the country. This is obviously instrumentally bad (nothing will ever get fixed this way), but also, Rorty argues, a shift away from an old tradition of American leftist optimism (represented by Whitman and Dewey and William James). (There is also a precedent for "cynical detachment", in the person of Henry Adams.) The biggest change since this was written is that the right, or elements of it, has also come round to the belief that America is bad: its foreign interventions wasteful and damaging mistakes, its institutions corrupt, its ruling class oligarchic and enervated. The left still agrees that America is bad; although the reference example today is probably the first landing of African slaves in Virginia, not a million dead Vietnamese.

Rorty's title comes from Baldwin:

If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others - do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

Whether this is true or not, believing it will make change possible.

Whitman and Dewey both saw America, or democracy (Whitman explicitly says that he uses them interchangeably), as a collective attempt to build a more perfect society. Whitman didn't read much Hegel, but Dewey did (Rorty, as a philosopher, spends more time on Dewey). In Hegel's philosophy of history we are involved in an ongoing process of improvement - God is manifested in time.

(Marx and Engels in an attempt to be scientific very carefully described how this process should go - this was a bad idea. This is an unapologetically anti-Marxist book, and the second lecture is dedicated to undoing the traditional distinction between "left" and "liberal". [As background the author mentions his own upbringing as a "red-diaper anticommunist baby".] Rorty argues that we should instead distinguish between the "Reformist left", which believed change possible within the current system, and the "New left" [exemplified by thinkers like C. Wright Mills and Christopher Lasch], which did not, and which turned a blind eye to the authoritarian excesses of Communism. A good line: "Had Kerensky managed to ship Lenin back to Zurich, Marx would still have been honored as a brilliant political economist who foresaw how the rich would use industrialization to immiserate the poor. But his philosophy of history would have seemed, like Herbert Spencer's, a nineteenth-century curiosity.")

For Dewey the end goal of this process is not clear, it is something which society works out together. It's also possible that it could utterly fail. But the goal is to create, in contrast to the modern idea of multiculturalism - which is just people preserving their cultures and getting along - a vibrant clash of ideas (occasionally violent, as in the Civil War, but generally not), and to find the best. The 60s counterculture possessed some of this spirit, but after the Vietnam War the left turned away from it. It has become a "theorising", cynical left, with no policy suggestions, because it believes nothing can be fixed. "Baldwin believed America unforgivable, but not unachievable".

The final essay takes on the cultural angle of this critique, focusing on the big names of Critical Theory - Foucault, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan. He sees such work as at best a distraction and at worst pulling out the rug from under all political activity: if the very subject is a social construct, what sense does it make to try and improve the world in specific ways? Aware that variations of this critique are most frequently heard on the right, Rorty attempts to distinguish his version: he does think that studying women's history, African-American history, Queer studies, Chicanx studies, migrant studies etc. helps reduce the casual prejudice in society which until recently could be found even in progressive circles; it makes society, in Avishai Margalit's terms, more "decent" and less "sadistic". But he approvingly cites Stefan Collini's line that "cultural studies" means "victim studies" - "such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place." And of course this excludes groups which don't have enough visibility: "nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not "other" in the relevant sense".

And Rorty thinks that there is a direct link between this focus on eradicating sadism and the steady growth in wealth inequality, "as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time". He brings up the standard anti-globalisation lines, about offshoring and the "cosmopolitan rich". Citing Edward Luttwak's uncannily prescient 1994 book The Endangered American Dream, he expresses the concern that the union members of yesteryear will choose to follow a nativist, anti-intellectual strongman type who promises to bring back jobs and scorns smug bureaucrats, overpaid financiers and postmodern professors. [Note: after writing this, I see that every GR review leads with this quote, which seems to have lent this book its 15 minutes of fame.] Interestingly, when Rorty talks about the end goal of all of the "piecemeal reforms" he advocates, he seems to picture some kind of proletarian mass solidarity movement, a type of federation where "American national pride would become as quaint as pride in being from Nebraska or Kazakhstan or Sicily". Globalisation no, but globalism yes? (This also seems a bit elitist - are people not proud of being from Kazakhstan?)

My 2c: with the usual caveats about quoting a Nazi, what I like about Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism is its understanding of the danger of the righteous cause. When you believe that your politics are not just self-interest but the noble unfolding of the Spirit of History, the temptation to avoid compromise and force your views on strangers is overwhelming. A bit of idealism in politics is essential, but it is also valuable to maintain the awareness that people are disappointing, the world is a dark place, and if you try to fix everyone you are basically just opening yourself up to endless conflict to the death. The suggestion that other people's bad ideas ought not to be merely tolerated but seized by the beard and wrestled to the ground reminded me of this. (But this is just an observation on the Deweyan democratic ideal; of course I agree that Adamsian disengagement is just as bad or worse.)

P.S. The second of two appendices contains a good critique of what Iris Murdoch called "dryness" in modern philosophy, in the context of what has gone wrong with the "cultural left" - Frederick Jameson is seen as having brought about a joyless exactitude to the humanities, in contrast to Harold Bloom's "romance", paralleling how analytic philosophy changed between A.N. Whitehead and A.J. Ayer. Whitehead "agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings"; Ayer "regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms". Ayer won out, and so today to get a PhD and be taken seriously you must study "the proper analysis of subjunctive conditional sentences" or some such. Without such "inspirational value", a discipline can continue to create knowledge, but not enthusiasm, and is liable to become "what it was in Oxbridge before the reforms of the 187Os: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass".

[Bram · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the goal of inspiring a resurgent political Left in America, Rorty fails beautifully at uniting every historical left-of-center school of thought and action into a single moral community. A fascinating read, in that I've never before had moments of such passionate agreement and vehement disagreement stumble over each other, often multiple times in the course of a few pages. Rorty's societal priorities are commendable, but his pragmatic push for good old-fashioned reforms and renewed patriotism on the Left seem insufficient at a time (both 20 years ago and even more so today) when global capitalism has both the first and final say on what is politically reasonable, achievable, and even thinkable. Pace the pragmatic Rorty, I'm inclined to agree with Richard Falk, speaking on Palestine and channeling Edward Said, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou, that "the realm of the feasible...cannot address the challenges confronting people existing in circumstances of oppression, occupation and servitude. From their perspective, a dedication to what seems impossible from a realistic viewpoint is, in truth, the only realism with emancipatory potential."

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are several great ideas in this short book. There is a deep passion and patriotism for America that goes way back to Whitman and Dewey. There is the history along with a future hope for political left without Marxism in America. There is the story of the change from the economical and activist left of the first half of the 20th century to the current cultural and theoretical left. There is a brilliant critique of the changes in literature, philosophy, sociology and other academic and leftist fields from the pragmatic, active, Utopian, activist, happy to achieve some of its goals, optimist, open, romantic, and so on - to the current theoretical, post-modern, Gothic, puritan, Platonic, all-or-nothing, centered on sin, abstract, pessimistic, analytic, non-practical, closed, impersonal, and so on. There is the prediction of the Trump election and of all the surrounding extreme right – 17 years before it happened. There is the hope of a great future for America – as centered on active, open, experimental, and non-fundamental approaches initiated by patriotic and socially-conscientious citizens.

[Luna]

This wasnt initially the book i wanted to read by Rorty, but ‘ a cultural left’ caught my attention.
I will not explain too much the content. It’s basically about the advantages and disadvantages of the American left (both reformist left and the new left), and it is also about a longing for an American that reduces sadism and which take care of its people. Isn’t that what we all want from our government, eh?
What I really liked about this book is the simplicity of the wording of ideas, and the complexity of ideas. Rorty is able to communicate a heavy idea in few words and in a simple way, and that made me appreciate this book, even if I usually don’t like reading such topics.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way too easy to paint this one dimensionally and ignore that Rorty gives plenty of credit to movements since the 60s for their part in reducing the total level of sadism in this country. This is not the takedown of the campus politics left that people maybe want it to be, and it’s so much better for that. Instead it frames a very positive reason to rebuild the bridge between the academic class and labor movements and leaders, which feels very much in play right now via Starbucks and Amazon: so, good!

Great, plain writing. This book is to 30-something me what Marx would’ve been to 17-something me, just pushing towards normie politics.

Dude loves him some Whitman, wow!

[Cărăşălu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a short book about how the American Left turned from trade unions, labor rights and protecting the poor to nowadays' cultural or identity politics, focusing on symbolic violence and such. The author argues that unless the Left recovers and starts working for social reform, this will lead to very shitty situation and he kinda „predicts” the rise of a Trump-like figure: „the nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots”.

He deplores the fact that the Left seems incapable of defending both the economically vulnerable and the minority groups and criticizes the futile intellectualism of current Leftist thinkers. For Rorty, as interesting and smart the likes of Foucault are, they are completely useless when it comes to action and practice. In his opinion, postmodernist thinkers are too busy debunking the past and nitpicking the present and have nothing to say about the future. He is against academic detachment, objectivity and dryness. He wants hope and romanticism so that philosophers and social scientists could use their brains to actually improve society.

While he admits that the New Leftists have indeed unveiled some systemic discrimination mechanisms and that political correctness has increased respect towards women and minority groups, he thinks is benefits the super-rich elite. As long as activists and intellectuals argue about stuff like symbolic violence, the super-rich continue calling the shots unchalleged where it matters: economy. Although today everyone feels entitled to make an Orwell analogy, Rorty has one which is actually competent: the rich cosmopolitan elites will be the Inner Party, while the bourgeois intellectuals and politicians will be the Outer Party.

„The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference Since economic decisions are their prerogative, it will en courage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere – to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.”

Rorty draws on Dewey to argue in favor of national pride, he asks intellectuals to be proud of their country and, basically, instead of bitching and moaning to start dreaming and working for a better future. He wants those in humanities and social sciences to argue less about how the past or the present and more about how the future should be. And to learn bloody economics.

[Matthew Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are at all wondering how the hell 2016 happened and align even slightly left of political center, I urge you to take a look at this short book of lectures. Philosopher Richard Rorty offers some fairly amazing explanatory and predictive insights about our current American political reality.

I first learned of Achieving Our Country when a paragraph from the book circulated on social media last month (and even made its way into the New Yorker) which almost miraculously predicted the rise of Donald Trump. I immediately ran to the shelves of the research library I work at only to find every copy of this somewhat obscure book was already checked out, so I borrowed the last copy from another library. I now see what the clamor is about.

Rorty is a thinker raised by parents who were members of the New York socialist intelligentsia of the 1920s and 30s. These were socialist workers who were pragmatic but also opponents of Stalinism and the dark side of communism. This biography is important as it builds the framework for how he describes the split of the American Left circa 1964 with the rise of Vietnam War opposition.

Rorty makes a distinction between a Reform Left vs. a New Left (or progressive left vs. cultural left). This new left rose in prominence as a reaction to the horrors of Vietnam. The rationale of breaking from the leftist old guard was that 1) since the Vietnam war was horrific, and 2) the U.S. was fighting communism, then 3) communism must hold some value. This is in direct conflict with the reform left who were raised on economic justice but saw the genocidal tragedies of Stalin's communism. The new left, in his description, has evolved into overly theoretical anti-Americanism as a result of this.

He is admittedly critical of the cultural left for abandoning pragmatic tools of workers' economic justice in favor of elitist imagination about abstract concepts of "power". He laments the irrelevance of Whitman and Dewey in favor of Foucault and Derrida. He keeps everything grounded in real-world problems of workers wages and economic disparity.

If you're curious about why identity politics are currently center stage, or why the super-rich are capitalizing on populist rage, or why notions of social justice are now couched in highly jargonized terms that seem to dismiss working class concerns, or why the left seems to hate the country they live in, take a look at this book.

Spoiler alert: He gives advice on how to unify the left. He suggests toning down critical theory, having a non-jingoistic pride in America that works for everyone, reaching out to trade unions again, and avoiding the traps set by the super-rich that seek to divide American workers along ethnic, racial, and religious lines.

American pride, he argues, should be like a healthy ego. If you love yourself too much you become arrogant and aggressive to others. If you hate yourself too much you become despondent and useless. The left needs a nudge in the direction of pride in country to help create a plan for real justice.

[Intery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Отдавна не бях чела книга, която да ме провокира толкова много, по толкова различни начини. „Да постигнем нашата страна“ ме накара трескаво да чета за разни събития на XX в.; да се чудя дали пък част от внимателно изградения ми мирогледа всъщност не е кух отвътре, и да се блещя, докато Рорти се изказва безкрайно пренебрежително към идеите и последователите на уважавани от мен мислители като Маркс и – немислимото! – Мишел Фуко.

Книгата се състои от няколко обособени части. В първата от тях авторът разглежда „американската национална гордост“ с въпроси като как изобщо е възможно да се гордееш със страната си, ако историята ѝ е изпълнена с толкова кървави продължили с векове несправедливости към цели народи; можем ли да бъдем горди със страната си, без да бъдем шовинисти; и дали прочие националната гордост има какъвто и да било положителен за света смисъл. Верен на битието си във факултетите по литературознание, Рорти се опира на Уитман и Дюи, за да развива тезите си – и двамата автори никак не са ми добре познати и много от изказаното ми се губеше, но дори и така текстът успя да ме настрои позитивно към една визия за националната гордост като двигател за анти-апатия и деен прогресивизъм в противовес на съзерцателния безнадежден и циничен анти-национализъм, на който иначе по-често симпатизирам.

Централните части на книгата обаче се занимават с нещо още по-конкретно – това, което Рорти нарича „залезът на реформистката левица“ и началото на „културната левица“ в родината му. Има фрагменти от историята на САЩ, които познавам в доста детайли, дали вследствие на достъпния американски журнализъм, дали защото някое парче популярна култура ме е накарало да се разровя, или защото англоезичната Уикипедия е най-подробна. "Да постигнем нашата страна" за пореден път ми показа, че дори за тези моменти от американската история, за които се чувствам запозната, има страшно много, което не знам.
Според Рорти през 60-те години американската левица се е разцепила на стара (реформистка) и нова (културна). Старата левица е много обвързана с профсъюзите, с една традиция на постепенно подобряване на икономическото състояние на средната и на работническата класа чрез политически мерки. Новата левица в неговите представи е не политическа, а културна – тя не вярва в социалния прогрес вследствие на нови закони и правителствени програми, а е съсредоточена в себеизразяване чрез изкуство или в апатия и обръща повече внимание на политиките на идентичност, отколкото на икономическото неравенство. Тази идея за новото и за старото ляво изобщо не е нова или въведена от Рорти. Интересното при него е, че той посочва две конкретни събития, които според него са довели или поне са катализирали този разрив.

За първото от тези събития бях чела доста – става въпрос за конгресът на Демократическата партия през 1968 г. в Чикаго. По това време антивоенното движение набира все повече поддръжници, докато настоящият президент, Линдън Джонсън, продължава да твърди, че войната във Виетнам върви добре и скоро ще бъде спечелена. След офанзивата Тет обаче Джонсън става толкова непопулярен, че в хода на предварителните вътрешнопартийни избори за кандидат-президент на демократите се отказва да търси преизбиране и дава подкрепата си на вицепрезидента си Хюбърт Хъмфри, който споделя възгледите му за гражданските права, системите за здравно подпомагане и Виетнам. Другите кандидати са Юджийн Маккарти, чиято платформа е антивоенна, и Робърт Кенеди, който се включва в надпреварата малко по-късно, разцепва антивоенния вот и печели предварителните избори в някои от щатите, включително в Калифорния, където е убит същата вечер, 3 месеца преди конгреса и 2 месеца след покушението над Мартин Лутър Кинг Младши.

Така конгресът, на който партията решава кой да бъде следващия кандидат-президент на демократите, трябва да избере между Хъмфри – един кандидат, който се е кандидатирал твърде късно и почти не е спечелил гласове в предварителните избори, но има подкрепата на настоящия президент и утвърдените фигури в партията; Маккарти, който е спечелил предварителните избори в някои щати, но е аутсайдер с антивоенната си платформа, и Джордж Макгавърн, включил се като заместник на Робърт Кенеди. Конгресът избира Хъмфри и дори гласува против антивоенна резолюция, докато разнородните протести пред мястото на провеждането му са брутално смазани от демократическия кмет на Чикаго. Понеже множество медии присъстват на мястото с камери, за да отразят процеса по избирането на кандидат-президента, кадрите на полицейско насилие над протестиращите се предават из цялата страна (и не само – оттам тръгва скандирането на "the whole world is watching").

За Ричард Рорти това е повратната точка, в която множество левичари, особено младите, губят всякаква вяра в утвърдената левица с нейните вкостенена про-военност и брутално пренебрегване на вътрешната опозиция. За тях няма място за вътрешна реформа; цялата стара левица трябва да бъде изметена в революция. Или пък – политиката е мъртва, да живее изкуството.

Второто повратно събитие е конгресът на Демократическата партия четири години по-рано. За него преди тази книга не знаех нищо, а сега се чудя как е възможно да не ми е попадал досега. През 1964 г. предварителните избори в Мисисипи са проведени в условия на сегрегация, при които на чернокожите (по това време 40% от населението на щата) им се отказва право на участие в изборите, противно на федералния закон и правилата на партията. Свободната демократическа партия на Мисисипи (СДПМ), предвождана от афроамериканци и белите им съюзници, организира паралелни предварителни избори и изпраща избрани чрез интегрирани избори делегати на конгреса в Атлантик сити. Там те заявяват, че са единствената легитимна делегация от Мисисипи, тъй като бялата делегация е избрана по незаконен начин. Настроението в конгреса върви към това заявката им да бъде удовлетворена, но Линдън Джонсън решава, че да приеме делегация на афроамериканци ще доведе до загуба на южните щати на президентските избори, и посредством съмишлениците си предлага следното решение: само двама от 68-те делегати на Свободната демократическа партия на Мисисипи да могат да останат на конгреса, при това без право на глас; бялата делегация да запази местата си и при следващи конгреси да не бъдат приемани делегации, избрани в сегрегирани избори. СДПМ не приемат и са изключени от присъствие на конгреса. Ето Уикипедия: „Много активисти от Движението за граждански права се чувстват предадени от Джонсън, Хъмфри и утвърдените либерали. На движението е било обещано, че ако се концентрира върху регистриране на гласоподаватели вместо върху протести, ще бъде подкрепено от федералното правителство и либералното крило на Демократическата партия. Вместо това, според активистите в решаващия момент гражданските права и справедливостта за чернокожите са пожертвани за сметка на политическите интереси на бели политици. Както по-късно пише Джон Люис:
Що се отнася до мен, това беше повратната точка в Движението за граждански права. Напълно съм убеден в това. До този момент, въпреки всеки неуспех, всяко разочарование и всяка пречка, с които се бяхме сблъсквали през годините, все още надделяваше вярването, че системата ще проработи, системата ще чуе, системата ще отговори. Сега за първи път си бяхме проправили път до самия център на системата. Бяхме играли по правилата, бяхме направили всичко, което се предполагаше да направим, бяхме изиграли играта точно както се изискваше, бяхме пристигнали на прага и намерихме вратата тресната пред лицата ни.““

Рорти, въпреки че е привърженик на реформистката левица и оплаква нейния залез, напълно симпатизира на предадените по този начин активисти – и тези за граждански права през 1964 г., и антивоенните през 1968 г. Не се поколебава и да признае постиженията на културната левица – прекъсването на войната във Виетнам и намаляването на „обществено приемливия садизъм“, насочен към цветнокожите, ЛГБТ хората, жените, макар че според него това е било за сметка на основната борба на реформистката левица: „По същото време, когато обществено приемливият садизъм постепенно изчезваше, икономическото неравенство и икономическата несигурност постепенно нарастваха. Изглеждаше, че американската левица не може да се справи с повече от една инициатива едновременно – или трябваше да игнорира петната на позора и да се съсредоточи върху парите, или обратното. Един от симптомите за тази неспособност да се вършат две неща наведнъж бе предоставянето на политическата инициатива, засягаща увеличаващата се пропаст между бедните и богатите, в ръцете на такива цинични демагози като Патрик Бюкянън. … Америка сега пролетаризира своята буржоазия и този процес изглежда ще кулминира в един популистки бунт от типа, който Бюкянън се надяваше да предизвика.“ (стр. 106-107) Именно, Доналд Тръмп, ще си каже настоящият читател – а книгата всъщност е издадена през 1998 г.

Този текст стана доста по-дълъг, отколкото си го представях. Но в тези 200 страници е събрано твърде много и пак остана огромно количество предизвикващи замисляне идеи, които изобщо не съм засегнала. Ще ви оставя с един последен цитат от с. 113, от който съвсем да ви стане зле, че Рорти не доживя настоящите президентски кампании в САЩ:

„...Ако пролите могат да бъдат откъсвани от собственото им отчаяние посредством медийно създадени псевдосъбития, включително отвреме-навреме по някоя кратка и кървава война, тогава свръхбогатите не биха имали от какво особено да се страхуват. Представата за този възможен свят предизвиква два отговора от страна на левицата. Първият – да настоява за смекчаване на неравенството между нациите, и в частност – твърдението, че Северното полукълбо трябва да подели богатството си с Южното. Вторият – да утвърждава, че главната отговорност на всяка демократична държава е към нейните най-бедни граждани. Тези два отговора очевидно са в конфликт помежду си. В частност първият отговор предполага, че старите демокрации трябва да отворят границите си, докато вторият предполага, че трябва да ги затворят*. [* Сблъсъкът между тези два отговора бе добре илюстриран на семинара по проблемите на труда, проведен в Колумбийския университет на 3-4 октомври, 1996 г. Орландо Патерсън, изтъкнат историк на робството, твърдеше, че все някога границата с Мексико ще трябва да бъде затворена, за да бъдат защитени американските работници. Той бе прекъснат от хора, викащи „Ами работниците от Третия свят?“. Чернокожите учени обикновено рядко биват освирквани от една предимно бяла и лява аудитория, но този път се случи. Подозирам, че въпросът, поставен от Патерсън, ще бъде най-спорният и дискутиран проблем пред американската левица на 21. век. Ще ми се да имах някаква добра идея за решаване на тази дилема, но нямам.]“

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely essential for any American with a pulse.

[Blake Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

anti-philosophy philosophy. I dig it greatly

[Adam Gurri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not share Rorty's politics. But I think our country would be in much better health had he been listened to back when this was published in 1998.

Whether or not you share his politics, this is an extremely engaging and informative look at the history of the American left in the 20th century, along with Rorty's own views on how one should engage in politics in the first place. The relevance of the divide between what he calls the old reformist (union organizing and New Deal) left and the new cultural left has never been greater.

It is also short and entertaining. Cannot recommend enough to anyone with even a passing interest in politics.

[Mitch Flitcroft · Rating 4 out of 5]

“National pride,” Rorty writes in the opening line of the book, “is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement”. At the core of Rorty’s argument for national pride is that it creates politically engaged agents, while a lack of national pride creates politically withdrawn spectators.

The American Left in the 20th century embodies this difference between agents and spectators. Rorty proposes the term “reformist Left…to cover all those Americans who, between 1900 and 1964, struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong”. This was a left on the frontline of political change, especially for the working class. Rorty proposes the term cultural Left to cover the post-Vietnam War left, who became so disillusioned with America that they came to see it as irredeemable. This was a left that would “step back from their country and, as they say, ‘theorise’ it… to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice”. This was a left afflicted by pessimism and learned helplessness.

Rorty calls for a return to the national pride, and the political engagement, of the reformist Left. Otherwise, he warns, “something will crack”:

The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots

This quote—written in 1980, now 40 years ago—made the rounds on Twitter for predicting the 2016 election. Demand for the book skyrocketed, so much so that Harvard University Press put it back into print. Many people justifiably believe that national pride can lead to the rise of chauvinistic strongmen. History testifies to multiple examples. Thus, purchasers of the book may have been surprised to read Rorty's argument that national pride doesn't necessarily cause chauvinistic strongmen, but rather can actually prevent them. I agree with Rorty that national pride doesn’t necessarily lead to strongmen, and that positive versions of national pride can actually be beneficial. However, I don’t think Rorty demonstrates as much here.

His central argument that a lack of national pride leads to detached spectatorship is doubtful. Revolutionaries, almost by definition, lack pride in their current system and thus seek to uproot it completely. They lack pride, and yet they are still very much politically engaged. Moreover, many of the recent anti-racism protesters across America would deny having national pride, and yet they are still politically engaged. Thus, I think the link between a lack of pride and spectatorship is wrong. A much more persuasive case for national pride can be made by linking it to fostering a shared identity with fellow compatriots. This shared identity engenders social cohesion and a sense of commonality, both of which correlate with happiness, health, economic prosperity, and virtually everything else we care about. Rorty does mention this link in passing, but doesn’t give the argument its due. Focusing on this link, rather than the link between national pride and political engagement, would have made the book much more compelling. Nevertheless, I still recommend Achieving Our Country, not so much for the argument itself, but for its American history, political pragmatism, and beautiful writing.

[Descending Angel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its hard to rate something like this because it really is objective and comes down to why you would read something like this in the first place. Me, I read it because I found it an interesting idea to read a leftist "intellectual" writing a book that had some of self-reflection (something that's missing a lot in today's World) and abit of a critique on leftist thought. But it's not really like bag at all. It's mostly giving you an idea of what the Reformist Left is\was, what the New Left is\was and now what the Cultural Left is\where it's heading and where it should go, not much critique at all really or very lightly, with whichever one of these "movements" clearly being painted the hero in whatever situation no matter what, even when your reading these definitions of sorts by Rorty himself it just seems like each movement is more extreme then the last. It's hard to work with Rorty or with anyone that's bias like this and has a lot of bad arguments. Apart from the parts about Maxism clearly being a dumb idea and a couple other parts of this book, this really didn't have much to say, a lot of quoting other people isn't an argument. As other people have pointed out, in 2016, a part of this book apparently went viral on social media and was printed in whatever publications wanted to uphold the liberal hivemind of parroting Orange Man Bad, I wasn't much paying attention in 2016, I'm not American and I didn't have a side to fall on really, I thought the US had had a lot of bad presidents, recently, Clinton, Bush, Obama. Back to the passage, about a "strong Man" that was someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots- which I don't know why that's something so bad no matter where you land on the scale of politics. It's this part that has people up in arms - "One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion." A bad prediction that didn't come true and isn't even justified in this prediction, there is no reason why all this would happen and Rorty doesn't try to give one. That's my main problem with this book.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short introductory work on Pragmatism. Provides an interesting historical perspective on the left that elevates the progressive pragmatists as the heroes, like Roosevelt and Dewey - and excorciates the religious fanatics - like Marx and Lenin. All in all, reading the book provides a strong theoretical background to what today my be considered Warrenism - the moderated, pragmatic, big tent progressivism of someone like Liz Warren. It also covers a lot more ground in the history of thought - criticizing the nihilism of philosophers like Foucault and Nietzsche. While certainly not a life changing book, it is a good read for those looking for a shot in the arm as we consider the future of the left.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty does two major things in this book. First, he presents a narrative of liberal efforts in the U.S. over the previous century; this provides an essential context under which we can see the current American Left and understand its critical blindspots that must be overcome if it is to lead to political change. Second, Rorty provides genuine motivation and hope about the possibility of political change and our duties to act now. Rorty's writing is beautiful, persuasive, and highly readable. His ideas also go against the grain of the Leftist mainstream today; they are not just further reiterations in an echo chamber. These ideas, moreover, are critical for us to be aware of, in order for there to be actual liberal political progress.

The overall narrative is this. The "old Left" that was active during the first half of the 20th century primarily focused on economic and labour problems. It created labour unions, and focused on and brought about concrete policy changes that favor the poor and vulnerable. The "new Left" arose in the 1960's; facing the horrors of the Vietnam war, and with increased awareness of the U.S's atrocious track record (e.g., its being founded on the massacres of indigenous nations), the new Left focused its energies on changing our cultural attitudes towards minorities. The Left's attention turned toward identity politics and political correctness, and away from labour unions and economic disparities. Another key change was a new essential pessimism of the new Left. Reform is hopeless, and there can only be revolution. The problem is the system itself.

Rorty acknowledges that these cultural changes are very important. But the new Left's attitude leads to some dire consequences. First, this pessimism leads to disengagement with the national political scene; because the system is screwed, we must abandon national politics, and instead hope that "the people" will somehow rise. But this is not strategic for actual social movement. We need top-down changes as much as bottom-up changes for progress. Second, this disengagement with labor movements, and engagement with intellectualist cultural critique, alienates the masses of poor whites. They come to see the Left as a group of elites who do not care about helping them out. They become ever more vulnerable to manipulation by a strongman. Rorty thought this change in the new Left would thereby let a fascist regime take over America.

Rorty provides a path forward. The new Left should return to an attitude of genuine hopefulness and reform. We should work from within the system with piecemeal policy changes; in effect, this can amount to revolution in the long run. We should take seriously and embrace awe for humanistic visions by great thinkers and poets. The new Left should also re-engage with labour movements. Intellectuals need to redirect their energies from critiquing capitalism and elaborating on the narrative that America was conceived in sin and so is fated to evil; and instead focus on concrete alternatives to current economic policy.

Since this book was written, it looks like the new Left has become increasingly aware of economic disparities and the urgency to address these, in addition to cultural issues of racism and other -ism's. That is great. But I still hear all around me the rhetoric of sin and pessimism about the U.S.; I agree with Rorty that this rhetoric will not help, and hope, and attempts at reform that are made possible by such hope, might. I also agree with Rorty that such hope needs to be fueled by a sense of awe and promise of America's possibilities; it will not help us, as the new Left, to diagnose any case of awe as naïveté or as conspiracy with "the system". I do not feel knowledgable enough about the relationship between revolution (I'm thinking of civil disobedience) and reform, but it seems to be that revolution has a critical role to play in the possibility of reform; Rorty's account makes room for that, but he does not focus on this point.

Overall, Rorty sketches out a very solid, high-order attitude that liberal Americans could take towards their nation. It is fundamentally different than the current mainstream attitude, and is very important to take up if we are to prevent this trajectory of fascism and racial wars. Before reading these lectures, I wasn't even aware of the fundamental pessimism that I've internalized from my liberal circles, and how such pessimism is toxic. I strongly recommend any self-identifying liberal to read this.

[Rob Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only got through the first essay before I threw the book against the wall. It's a dumpster fire.

From what I read, Richard Rorty takes the "left" to task for being too cynical and focusing too much on the nation's shame. In essence, this means slavery, racism, sexism, imperialism, capitalism and much of what leftist thoughts ground it's critiques of America and conservatism in. He does a quick comparison of American literature, comparing The Jungle and the Grapes of Wrath to Snow Crash.

Hoo boy.

It's extraordinarily disinegenous to compare the two books, because books like The Jungle, and Grapes of Wrath were written for distinct political purposes, whereas Snow Crash is a very good cyberpunk story with a lot of humor. Rorty reduces them to being either inspirational books or non-inspirational books, which really reduces each novel to it's last four pages. Rorty makes it sound as if The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath weren't as bleak on their own for almost the entirety of their novels. There's also the fact that both novels are meant to take place the time they were published or a few years before. There's also the fact that you're not supposed to take the libertarian capitalist world of Snow Crash seriously.

No seriously, it's a book about a katana-wielding pizza delivery guy. I think these books are at cross-purposes here. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash has far different politics from Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, or that you're pretty clearly supposed to laugh at the world of Snow Crash and not like it.

Not to mention, Rorty never really defines the left, at least in the first essay. He seems to be railing against political correctness and academia for spending too much time on racism, sexism, and labor exploitation. Which, to me in 2017 comes off as an angry old man who's never been dealt the shit hand in America wants everyone else to forgive racist old white men.

But he also lambasts them for not providing an optimistic vision of the future, or at least one that follows whatever vague definition he calls it by. I'd say Richard Rorty has been blind to most of the late twentieth century's protest movements, but it's clear his head is just up his ass at this point. The early 1990s is the last time we had a serious conversation about single payer healthcare. We were still talking and fighting about rights for LGTBQ+ people. There was the nuclear freeze movement of the 80s, and the World Trade Organization/globalization protests of the late 90s.

At some points, Rorty is either generalizing to the point where his arguments aren't supported by anything, or just outright stretching existing thought to fit a bizarre world view. Maybe it'd come together if I read the rest of the book, but if it's anything like the opening essay it's seriously not worth by time.

[Jean Bosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended for people on the Left who are wondering (rather than merely pointing fingers of blame) how our present situation could have arisen and what can possibly be done about it. While many on the Left certainly have their hearts in the right places, their strategies and actions are often ill-suited to accomplishing the hopes and goals that they have for this society. Bottom line for Rorty: less empty revolutionary talk and philosophizing, more reformist action in specifically figuring out how to get laws changed/passed.

I suspect that some of Rorty's practical advice will sound superficially abhorrent to some Leftists who have grown accustomed to certain ways of thought. For instance:

"If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy - on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences - it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections."

But if people on the Left in general cannot change their rhetoric, methods, strategies, activities, and ways of thinking - so much the worse for the Left's goals and hopes for this society - and so much the worse for most of this society's poor and middle-class people of all colors, genders, religions, sexual preferences, and political affiliations.

And yet, what is Rorty's book but one more philosophical diagnosis (even if it's an effectively useful one)? How and when will new Leftist heroes emerge who can transform the Left's (and, in general, Americans') shame and distrust of its government and national policies into a positive image of national hope for the future - and, more importantly, how can such potential heroes maintain the trust and hope of the people while also performing the necessary compromises involved in politics?

[Jeffrey Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twenty years later and this is just as prescient. A leftist writer critiquing the American Left, Rorty distinguishes between the Reformist Left, which was eclipsed in the 1960s, and the Cultural Left, which has taken over leftist discourse since the Vietnam War.

In short, there are those on the Left who believe America is irredeemable, born in sins that can never be overcome. And then there are those who acknowledge the list of things America should be ashamed of while calling attention to the highest ideals of America. Revolutionaries who want to burn "the system" to the ground have no concrete vision to look to. Alternatively, reformists might actually be best position to continue progress by asserting a specific type of national pride. Make note, this national pride isn't the militaristic chauvinism that is common on the Right, but rather the kind that empowers communities to stand up and become their best selves.

Achieving Our Country is not a point to be arrived at, but a process, in line with the patriotic visions of Walt Whitman and John Dewey. American has made great progress in the name of diminishing human suffering and combatting social injustices. Yet, America must continue its work on that front. According to Rorty, America must make social justice its "animating principle."

In his vision for a liberal democracy includes rejecting the correspondence theory of truth, and in its stead embracing a neo-pragmatist view of truth. We ought to shirk purity politics, dogmas, and creeds grounded in "Moral Law," "God's Will," or abstract reason. Instead, we ought to embrace the language and conceptions of truth that are best suited to address the problems we face in our particular historical moment.

Teaser: as many recent publications have highlighted, Rorty offers an incredibly prophetic warning about contemporary American politics, including the "rise of a strongman" (pages 85-90).

Some quotes that I found particularly enlightening:

“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one's country-feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies-is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.”

“For Whitman and Dewey, a classless and casteless society—the sort of society which American leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct—is neither more natural nor more rational than the cruel societies of feudal Europe or of eighteenth-century Virginia. All that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other, and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals-larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.”

“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of recognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”

“Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place. American leftist academics have a lot to be proud of. Their conservative critics, who have no remedies to propose either for American sadism or for American selfishness, have a great deal to be ashamed of.”

“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychoxexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”

“It [the cultural Left] thinks the system, and not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough. Because the very vocabulary of liberal politics is infected with dubious presuppositions which need to be exposed, the first task of the Left must be, just as Confucius said, the rectification of names. The concern to do what the Sixties called ‘naming the system’ takes precedence over reforming the laws.”

“The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘politically correct’ has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago. Except for a few Supreme Court decisions, there has been little change for the better in our country’s laws since the Sixties. But the change in the way we treat one another has been enormous.”

“For purposes of thinking about how to achieve our country, we do not need to worry about the correspondence theory of truth, the grounds of normativity, the impossibility of justice, or the infinite distance which separates us from the other. For those purposes, we can give both religion and philosophy a pass. We can just get on with trying to solve what Dewey called “the problems of men.”

“The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marx’s philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary casts, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence.”

“The Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for ‘the system’ and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.”

“This strategy [referring to the reformed Left] gave rise to the ‘platoon’ movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side. By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it.”

“If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy—on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences—it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.”

“One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called ‘the people.’ In this sense, ‘the people’ is the name of a redemptive preturnatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named ‘power’ or ‘the system.’ The cultural Left inherited the slogan ‘Power to the people’ from the Sixties Left, whose members rarely asked about how the transference of power was supposed to work. This question still goes unasked . . . . The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.”

“Whitman and Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams—dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society—in the place of knowledge of God’s Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military gian. Without the American Left, we might still have been strong and brave, but nobody would have suggested that we were good. As long as we have a functioning political Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams.”

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this in my senior year of college as an English/some gender studies major I thought it was insulting and patronizing. Now I'm having conversations with liberal friends or my parents and I can't help thinking of sadism vs. selfishness, reform vs. theory, identity vs. campaign, and I don't say anything, I just feel worried and anxious. It is way too easy for people in academic bubbles and liberal cities to dismiss his argument.
I forgot how generous and fair Rorty really is to the academy and the left; he shrugs at the spectatorial Foucauldian rabbit hole and says it's much better than the cynicism of the right as often as he criticizes it. He's obviously read all of both the reformist and the New left literature which seems rare and important for a theorist to do. Re-reading it has reminded me how having to live and compromise with a fairly broad swath of New and Reformist left and center-right people in my day-to-day life over the past 8 years in some rust-belt towns has moved my opinions on the efficacy of campaigns vs movements way towards the former.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 domestically if we can fix it?

Only Poles have the right to speak against their victimization. Native Americans? Nope, because they just don't realize the project at hand.

His insistence that the Left has lost concern for this country is equally stupid. The leftists I believe Rorty is criticizing are interested very much in creating new and better models for society (not just spectating) but that they opt for genuine reasons not to do so under a nationalist banner.

[Mansour]

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

[Simon Brass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall it is certainly not Rorty's finest work. However, his essay on the eclipse of 'reformist left' by the 'cultural left' is simply fascinating and worthy of five stars in itself. Rorty's ability to predict the state of modern day American politics (back in 1998) / how the left's focus on identity over economic considerations would lead to the emergence of a Trump-like figure straddles the line between the incredible and the unbelievable. I found the section riveting and would consider it a must-read for anyone interested in the current state of the American political system