Richard Rorty is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of the landmark work
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Summary
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."
Table of Contents
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
