Achieving Our Country

Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

By: Richard Rorty

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

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".

©1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Rorty Inspires

I experience Rorty as a simultaneous calming breeze and an inspirational fire. I experience him as one of few great intellectuals that write from a place of almost perfect balance: being sincerely invested in large and important issues, and yet somehow managing to clearly and dispassionately articulate the entire scope of these issues. He writes in a way I find endlessly engaging; sincere, humorous and, ultimately, hopeful.

I needed this.

I delayed listening to this because I realized that I couldn't get what I wanted out of it treating it as a casual listen. Once I turned the speed down and really focused and made a steadfast point to understand in depth what the author was trying to convey I found a book which answered many questions I've had and not been able to conceptualize. I really never found a sufficient framework for reasoning about the left and my place in it and how I contribute to our politics - I'm very glad I listened to this. I don't tend to read many political works so for readers who read a wider variety of political works they not find this as useful as I did.

great great love it

great great love it you will too got to read this got to read this

At times amazing

Some of the story was difficult to follow: some terminology and the huge list of source philosophers. But some stunning moments as Rorty offered predictions about modern America that we are living through today. And bits of hope that American Democracy can survive.

Eloquent yet misunderstood pragmatist

Few would have believed in 1979, when Rorty was the most famous philosopher in America, that 40 years later he could be essentially written out of history. The right then despised him for being a leftist, despite his fervent anti-communist, anti-Marxist stance and defense of the cold war. The left now despises him for assessing cultural studies as “victim studies” and his pointing out the implausibility of the left’s opposition to capitalism and free markets. Rorty made no friends on the left when he claimed – as a “good leftist” – that the academic left needed to put a moratorium on the naïve theorizing and futile attempts to philosophize itself into political relevance. Further, Rorty riled philosophers by holding a position that was neither moral absolutism/universalism nor moral relativism.

In this book, written toward the end of his career, he suggests that anti-humanist sentiment has harmed the liberal agenda and argues that the left, like the religious right, now seeks desecularization of knowledge. He predicts a disgusted, mocking left who finds America unforgivable and a university system that exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics. He finds that as long as left is incapable of national pride we will not really have a political left but only a cultural left that casts votes.

Everyone should take this book

My title quotes (or maybe paraphrases) the guys from A Partially Examined Life podcast. I followed their advice and agree.