In this slim volume (from a series of lectures), eminent liberal
political theorist Rorty passes judgment on the state of the US
left. And he is not amused. Beginning from familiar places for him,
John Dewey and Walt Whitman, Rorty (Humanities/Univ. Of Virginia)
argues that the faith of these men in what the US might become,
their dismissal of all closed systems of thinking, their turn from
religious authority to secular joy in the contingent process of
democratic creation are all aspects of leftist thought missing from
today's left, much to its detriment. In place of the search for
amoral identity that will inspire and unite us, the left today -
what he calls the "academic" or "cultural" left - has opted instead
for a "detached spectatorship," condemnation without action or
hope. Rorty traces the origins of this spectatorship to theorists
such as Foucault, who insists on the irresistible ubiquitousness of
power. The appeal of such spectatorship he traces to the US New
Left and its experience with the Vietnam War. In Vietnam the US
"sinned," became beyond redemption, and so the New Left turned its
back on ever reforming such a place. The Left retreated to
academia, theory, culture, and spectatorship. This is all, however,
a very familiar scenario by now (if argued in an interestingly odd
way), and one wonders why it needs repeating, Rorty seems only to
be using the New Left as a straw person here, and his depiction of
the "academic" Left is caricature. Assertion substitutes for
analysis. Lapses in logic occur: He chastises the Left, for
instance, for being both Marxist and "postmodern," yet the two
tendencies stand mostly opposed to each other. Like an obscure club
recording from a major jazz musician, this is a minor work from a
profound thinker that perhaps only true devotees of Rorty will find
of value. (Kirkus Reviews)
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."
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