American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey The Eclipse of the Reformist Left A Cultural Left Appendixes Movements and Campaigns The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature Notes Acknowledgments Index
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) authored several landmark books and essay collections, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Consequences of Pragmatism; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. He taught at Wellesley College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University.
Richard Rorty [is] John Dewey’s ablest intellectual heir and one of
the most influential philosophers alive… In lively prose,
[Achieving Our Country] offers a pointed and necessary reminder
that left academics have too often been content to talk to each
other about the theory of hegemony while the right has been busy
with the practice of it. If those criticized in the book dismiss it
the way they brush aside the Blooms and D’Souzas of the world, an
opportunity will be lost. Rorty invites a serious conversation
about the purposes of intellectual work and the direction of left
politics. I wouldn’t want him to have the last word, but the
conversation should be joined. If it is conducted with the verve of
Achieving Our Country, and if it shares Rorty’s genuine commitment
to revitalizing the left as a national force, it will be a very
good thing.
*The Nation*
Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals to
abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left
and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert
Croly and their allies. What Rorty has written—as deftly, amusingly
and cleverly as he always writes—is a lay sermon for the
untheological… [Americans] do not need to know what God wants but
what we are capable of wanting and doing… [Rorty argues] that we
would do better to try to improve the world than lament its fallen
condition. On that he will carry with him a good many readers.
*New York Times Book Review*
Richard Rorty is remarkable not just for being a gadfly to
analytical philosophers, but for his immense reading, his lively
prose and his obvious moral engagement with the issues… The
conversation of philosophy would be much poorer without him…
Achieving Our Country is a valuable addition to Rorty’s writings…
He has things to say that are important and timely… They are said
powerfully.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In his philosophically rigorous new book, Achieving Our Country,
Richard Rorty raises a provocative if familiar question: Whatever
happened to national pride in this country? …[and] he offers a
persuasive analysis of why such pride has been lost.
*New York Times*
The heart of Achieving Our Country is Professor Rorty’s critique of
the ‘cultural left.’ Barricaded in the university, this left has
isolated itself, he asserts, from the bread-and-butter issues of
economic equality and security and the practical political
struggles that once occupied the reform tradition… Controversies
are seeded like land mines in every paragraph of this short
book.
*New York Times*
Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is short, comprehensible and
urges a civic and political agenda—the re-engagement of the Left…
Rorty seeks to revive the vision of Walt Whitman and John Dewey,
and what he sees as the real American Dream—a compassionate society
held together by nothing more absolute than consensus and the
belief that humane legal and economic agreements stand at the
centre of democratic civilisation.
*The Guardian*
[In this] slim, elegantly written book…Rorty scolds other radical
academics for abandoning pride in the nation’s democratic promise;
in their obsession with ‘victim studies,’ he argues, they have
neglected to inspire the ‘shared social hope’ that motivated every
mass movement against injustice from the abolitionists to the
voting rights campaign.
*Washington Post Book World*
A succinct, stimulating, crisply written book… Rorty proposes a
return to the liberal values that animated American reform
movements for the first two-thirds of this century: from the long
struggle of labor unions to obtain better conditions for workers,
to the efforts of leaders like Woodrow Wilson, Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson to
redistribute the nation’s wealth more equitably… Although Rorty is
an academic philosopher, in this book, addressed to the general
reader, he employs clear, vigorous language that makes reading a
pleasure rather than a chore.
*Christian Science Monitor*
Achieving Our Country criticizes academic theorists and reminds us
that left-wing reformers in previous periods of American history
either made their careers outside the university or, at least,
developed strong links with the decidedly non-academic labor
movement… Rorty’s distinction between a ‘cultural Left’ and a
‘reformist Left’ is useful. As Freud replaced Marx in the
imagination of academic theorists, Rorty explains, a cultural
left—one that ‘thinks more about stigma than about money, more
about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow
and evident greed’—came into being.
*The Chronicle of Higher Education*
It is refreshing to find so hard-hitting a portrait of the
contemporary academic Left in the work of one of its own.
*Commentary*
On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic
writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so much
either agreement or disagreement as an overpowering sense of So
what?, the eminent philosopher Richard Rorty has composed a
marvelous philippic against the entrenched irrelevance of much of
the American left… Rorty’s most important insight is into the
political worldview of the academic left: that it is essentially
nonpolitical… He offers a withering comparison of the core beliefs
of the current cultural left with those of one of its forebears,
Walt Whitman.
*Dissent*
Mr. Rorty calls for a left which ‘dreams of achieving’ America, a
patriotic left he recognises from the days of the New Deal and
which he remembers from the early 1960s when, for example, people
campaigned for civil-rights laws to make their country better.
Where, he wonders, has such reformist pride gone? In place of
‘Marxist scholasticism’, Mr. Rorty wants a left which makes
reducing inequalities part of a ‘civic religion’. Yet material
differences are not the only sort of thing that bothers Mr. Rorty
about the contemporary United States. On a communitarian note, he
argues that the ‘civic religion’ he advocates should include
commitment to shared values that rise above ethnic or minority
loyalties.
*The Economist*
Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey
are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery… If we
[scoff] at Rorty’s patriotic American leftism, we may find that it
sets off some doubts that will come back to haunt us. When we
quibble over his interpretations of our favourite thinkers, are we
not confirming his stereotype of left pedantry? When we sniff at
him for keeping company with rightists and renegades, do we not
bear out his idea of a Left that is keener on its own purity than
on fighting for the poor? As we look down our noses at the
etiolation of socialism in America, should we not reckon the costs
and benefits of European mass movements, and reflect on the
political history of the anti-Americanism that comes to us so
easily? Before leftist subjects of Her Majesty get snooty about
American democracy, we might stop and wonder whose interests are
served by our unshakable optimism about the past. The unguarded
naiveties of Achieving Our Country are not quite as negligent as
they look, and the book may well turn out to be one of the first
signs of a long-delayed breaking of the ice in socialist politics
following the end of the Cold War. The fact that Rorty’s old-style
American leftism is closer to British New Labour than to good old
socialism may prove not that he is confused, but that it is time to
reset our political chronometers.
*London Review of Books*
Politically progressive academics should consider carefully Rorty’s
arguments… They pose important questions about American politics
and public intellectual practice.
*Times Higher Educational Supplement*
There is much to be debated, much that will probably infuriate, in
Rorty’s picture of contemporary Left intellectuals… Achieving Our
Country is meant to be pointedly polemical, and Rorty…[has]
succeeded at stirring up emotions as well as thoughts.
*American Literature*
Richard Rorty is an inspirational writer who makes a valiant effort
in this book to create an atmosphere of cooperation among those he
characterizes as ‘the Reformist Left.’ He wants us to return to the
ideals of John Dewey and Walt Whitman and achieve the greatness
that is possible in a country of our wealth and dominance.
*Bimonthly Review of Law Books*
Rorty offers a resolute defense of pragmatic and reformist
politics, coupled with a sophisticated rereading of the history of
20th-century American leftist thought. The result is a book that
ends up reaffirming the great achievements of American left
liberalism—strong unions, Social Security, and the principled
regulation of corporate power—even as it illuminates the ways in
which the cultural myopia of today’s academic left has placed those
achievements in jeopardy… In his insistence that there is a great
American tradition of leftist reform, and that this rendition can
be reinvigorated only by a return to the idea of the nation, Rorty
has constructed as humane and as hopeful a defense of patriotism as
one can imagine.
*Boston Phoenix*
A bracing tonic against the jejune profundities and the
self-centered talking points by the far Right that find their way
into the media. In sharply etched arguments Rorty weaves in
philosophical and historical perspectives… His message isn’t one of
resignation, rather of hope grounded in the Left’s potential for
reinventing itself. He thinks it’s time for the Left to stop
demonizing capitalist America and to develop once again a political
program of its own.
*Buffalo News*
For many years now, Rorty has been one of the most important
American pragmatists, defending the experimental modes of inquiry
first propounded by John Dewey from both traditionalists and
postmodernists… In Achieving Our Country, a brief but eloquent
book, Rorty begs his academic colleagues to return to the real
world. ‘I am nostalgic for the days,’ he writes, ‘when leftist
professors concerned themselves with issues in real politics (such
as the availability of health care to the poor and the need for
strong labor unions) rather than with academic politics.’
*In These Times*
Richard Rorty is considered by many to be America’s greatest living
philosopher. That assessment is firmly supported in this short,
profound, and lucid volume. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty does
what many of us think philosophers ought to do, namely, lay a
foundation and establish a framework within which we as individuals
and as a society can conceptualize and fashion operational theories
by which to live and prosper together… I can think of no more
important book that I have read in recent years or one that I could
more fervently recommend to the readers of this journal that
Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.
*Journal of Economic Issues*
‘Achieving our country’ (the phrase is culled from James Baldwin’s
The Fire Next Time) isn’t just a redeemable aim, it’s what good
radical politics has always been about.
*Radical Philosophy*
Rorty’s new book urges a return to American liberalism’s days of
hope, pride, and struggle within the system… Subtle without being
dense, good-natured in its defiance of a whole spectrum of
conventional wisdoms, Achieving Our Country is a rare book. It
should be compulsory reading—if that weren’t contrary to all it
stands for.
*The Reader's Catalog*
A deeply considered diagnosis, a vital set of prophecies.
*Publishers Weekly*
[The] book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly
constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have
encountered…[Rorty’s] book is worth revisiting as the Democratic
Party smarts from losses in recent special elections and considers
how it might win back the House in the 2018 midterms.
*The Atlantic*
Richard Rorty [is] John Dewey's ablest intellectual heir and one of
the most influential philosophers alive... In lively prose,
[Achieving Our Country] offers a pointed and necessary
reminder that left academics have too often been content to talk to
each other about the theory of hegemony while the right has been
busy with the practice of it. If those criticized in the book
dismiss it the way they brush aside the Blooms and D'Souzas of the
world, an opportunity will be lost. Rorty invites a serious
conversation about the purposes of intellectual work and the
direction of left politics. I wouldn't want him to have the last
word, but the conversation should be joined. If it is conducted
with the verve of Achieving Our Country, and if it shares
Rorty's genuine commitment to revitalizing the left as a national
force, it will be a very good thing. * The Nation *
Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals
to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left
and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert
Croly and their allies. What Rorty has written-as deftly, amusingly
and cleverly as he always writes-is a lay sermon for the
untheological... [Americans] do not need to know what God wants but
what we are capable of wanting and doing... [Rorty argues] that we
would do better to try to improve the world than lament its fallen
condition. On that he will carry with him a good many readers. --
Alan Ryan * New York Times Book Review *
Richard Rorty is remarkable not just for being a gadfly to
analytical philosophers, but for his immense reading, his lively
prose and his obvious moral engagement with the issues... The
conversation of philosophy would be much poorer without him...
Achieving Our Country is a valuable addition to Rorty's
writings... He has things to say that are important and timely...
They are said powerfully. -- Hilary Putnam * Times Literary
Supplement *
In his philosophically rigorous new book, Achieving Our
Country, Richard Rorty raises a provocative if familiar
question: Whatever happened to national pride in this country?
...[and] he offers a persuasive analysis of why such pride has been
lost. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt * New York Times *
The heart of Achieving Our Country is Professor Rorty's
critique of the 'cultural left.' Barricaded in the university, this
left has isolated itself, he asserts, from the bread-and-butter
issues of economic equality and security and the practical
political struggles that once occupied the reform tradition...
Controversies are seeded like land mines in every paragraph of this
short book. -- Peter Steinfels * New York Times *
Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country is short,
comprehensible and urges a civic and political agenda-the
re-engagement of the Left... Rorty seeks to revive the vision of
Walt Whitman and John Dewey, and what he sees as the real American
Dream-a compassionate society held together by nothing more
absolute than consensus and the belief that humane legal and
economic agreements stand at the centre of democratic civilisation.
-- Brian Eno * The Guardian *
[In this] slim, elegantly written book...Rorty scolds other radical
academics for abandoning pride in the nation's democratic promise;
in their obsession with 'victim studies,' he argues, they have
neglected to inspire the 'shared social hope' that motivated every
mass movement against injustice from the abolitionists to the
voting rights campaign. -- Michael Kazin * Washington Post Book
World *
A succinct, stimulating, crisply written book... Rorty proposes a
return to the liberal values that animated American reform
movements for the first two-thirds of this century: from the long
struggle of labor unions to obtain better conditions for workers,
to the efforts of leaders like Woodrow Wilson, Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson to
redistribute the nation's wealth more equitably... Although Rorty
is an academic philosopher, in this book, addressed to the general
reader, he employs clear, vigorous language that makes reading a
pleasure rather than a chore. -- Merle Rubin * Christian Science
Monitor *
Achieving Our Country criticizes academic theorists and
reminds us that left-wing reformers in previous periods of American
history either made their careers outside the university or, at
least, developed strong links with the decidedly non-academic labor
movement... Rorty's distinction between a 'cultural Left' and a
'reformist Left' is useful. As Freud replaced Marx in the
imagination of academic theorists, Rorty explains, a cultural
left-one that 'thinks more about stigma than about money, more
about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow
and evident greed'-came into being. -- Alan Wolfe * The Chronicle
of Higher Education *
It is refreshing to find so hard-hitting a portrait of the
contemporary academic Left in the work of one of its own. -- Peter
Berkowitz * Commentary *
On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic
writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so much
either agreement or disagreement as an overpowering sense of So
what?, the eminent philosopher Richard Rorty has composed a
marvelous philippic against the entrenched irrelevance of much of
the American left... Rorty's most important insight is into the
political worldview of the academic left: that it is essentially
nonpolitical... He offers a withering comparison of the core
beliefs of the current cultural left with those of one of its
forebears, Walt Whitman. -- Harold Meyerson * Dissent *
Mr. Rorty calls for a left which 'dreams of achieving' America, a
patriotic left he recognises from the days of the New Deal and
which he remembers from the early 1960s when, for example, people
campaigned for civil-rights laws to make their country better.
Where, he wonders, has such reformist pride gone? In place of
'Marxist scholasticism', Mr. Rorty wants a left which makes
reducing inequalities part of a 'civic religion'. Yet material
differences are not the only sort of thing that bothers Mr. Rorty
about the contemporary United States. On a communitarian note, he
argues that the 'civic religion' he advocates should include
commitment to shared values that rise above ethnic or minority
loyalties. * The Economist *
Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey
are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery... If we
[scoff] at Rorty's patriotic American leftism, we may find that it
sets off some doubts that will come back to haunt us. When we
quibble over his interpretations of our favourite thinkers, are we
not confirming his stereotype of left pedantry? When we sniff at
him for keeping company with rightists and renegades, do we not
bear out his idea of a Left that is keener on its own purity than
on fighting for the poor? As we look down our noses at the
etiolation of socialism in America, should we not reckon the costs
and benefits of European mass movements, and reflect on the
political history of the anti-Americanism that comes to us so
easily? Before leftist subjects of Her Majesty get snooty about
American democracy, we might stop and wonder whose interests are
served by our unshakable optimism about the past. The unguarded
naiveties of Achieving Our Country are not quite as
negligent as they look, and the book may well turn out to be one of
the first signs of a long-delayed breaking of the ice in socialist
politics following the end of the Cold War. The fact that Rorty's
old-style American leftism is closer to British New Labour than to
good old socialism may prove not that he is confused, but that it
is time to reset our political chronometers. -- Jonathan Ree *
London Review of Books *
Politically progressive academics should consider carefully Rorty's
arguments... They pose important questions about American politics
and public intellectual practice. -- Harvey Kaye * Times Higher
Educational Supplement *
There is much to be debated, much that will probably infuriate, in
Rorty's picture of contemporary Left intellectuals... Achieving
Our Country is meant to be pointedly polemical, and
Rorty...[has] succeeded at stirring up emotions as well as
thoughts. -- Vincent J. Bertolini * American Literature *
Richard Rorty is an inspirational writer who makes a valiant effort
in this book to create an atmosphere of cooperation among those he
characterizes as 'the Reformist Left.' He wants us to return to the
ideals of John Dewey and Walt Whitman and achieve the greatness
that is possible in a country of our wealth and dominance. --
Edward J. Bander * Bimonthly Review of Law Books *
Rorty offers a resolute defense of pragmatic and reformist
politics, coupled with a sophisticated rereading of the history of
20th-century American leftist thought. The result is a book that
ends up reaffirming the great achievements of American left
liberalism-strong unions, Social Security, and the principled
regulation of corporate power-even as it illuminates the ways in
which the cultural myopia of today's academic left has placed those
achievements in jeopardy... In his insistence that there is a great
American tradition of leftist reform, and that this rendition can
be reinvigorated only by a return to the idea of the nation, Rorty
has constructed as humane and as hopeful a defense of patriotism as
one can imagine. -- James Surowiecki * Boston Phoenix *
A bracing tonic against the jejune profundities and the
self-centered talking points by the far Right that find their way
into the media. In sharply etched arguments Rorty weaves in
philosophical and historical perspectives... His message isn't one
of resignation, rather of hope grounded in the Left's potential for
reinventing itself. He thinks it's time for the Left to stop
demonizing capitalist America and to develop once again a political
program of its own. -- Terry Doran * Buffalo News *
For many years now, Rorty has been one of the most important
American pragmatists, defending the experimental modes of inquiry
first propounded by John Dewey from both traditionalists and
postmodernists... In Achieving Our Country, a brief but
eloquent book, Rorty begs his academic colleagues to return to the
real world. 'I am nostalgic for the days,' he writes, 'when leftist
professors concerned themselves with issues in real politics (such
as the availability of health care to the poor and the need for
strong labor unions) rather than with academic politics.' --
Jefferson Decker * In These Times *
Richard Rorty is considered by many to be America's greatest living
philosopher. That assessment is firmly supported in this short,
profound, and lucid volume. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty
does what many of us think philosophers ought to do, namely, lay a
foundation and establish a framework within which we as individuals
and as a society can conceptualize and fashion operational theories
by which to live and prosper together... I can think of no more
important book that I have read in recent years or one that I could
more fervently recommend to the readers of this journal that
Rorty's Achieving Our Country. -- Thomas R. DeGregori *
Journal of Economic Issues *
'Achieving our country' (the phrase is culled from James Baldwin's
The Fire Next Time) isn't just a redeemable aim, it's what
good radical politics has always been about. -- Gideon Calder *
Radical Philosophy *
Rorty's new book urges a return to American liberalism's days of
hope, pride, and struggle within the system... Subtle without being
dense, good-natured in its defiance of a whole spectrum of
conventional wisdoms, Achieving Our Country is a rare book.
It should be compulsory reading-if that weren't contrary to all it
stands for. -- Richard Lamb * The Reader's Catalog *
A deeply considered diagnosis, a vital set of prophecies. *
Publishers Weekly *
[The] book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly
constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have
encountered...[Rorty's] book is worth revisiting as the Democratic
Party smarts from losses in recent special elections and considers
how it might win back the House in the 2018 midterms. -- Conor
Friedersdorf * The Atlantic *
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