Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
Richard Rorty
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0674003128
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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."
Practice. claim in the past, and again. Instead, between agents and I shall I shall I not use end by returning spectators with which I began. I said earher that we now have, among many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, rather than a Left This is mocking Left which dreams of achieving our country. not the only Left we have, but it is the most prominent and vocal one. Members of this able, as Baldwin did. and Left find America unforgiv- also.
Impossibility, unreacha- —may be useful to in our individual quests for private perfection. up our public responsibilities, however, the some of us When we take infinite and the A CULTURAL LEFT unrepresentable are merely nuisances. Thinking of our responsibilities in these terms is as much of a stumbling-block to effective political organization as Em- the sense of sin. is phasizing the impossibility of meaning, or of justice, as Derrida sometimes does, democratic poUtics.
Novel. But as Baldwin's narrative of self-creation unfolds, we watch him combining a continued unwillingness to forgive with a continuing iden- with the country that brought over his ancestors in tification chains. "I am of the Americans first not," he writes, "a to arrive on ward of America; I am one these shores."^ In another passage Baldwin says, "In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here become identity, a nation — if we our maturity, book.
Ment nor said, "is neither a form of govern- a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the rela- tion of man and his experience in nature."'^ For both Whit- man and Dewey, the terms "America" and "democracy" shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human conception which has no man authority, consensus and in among human Steven Rockefeller is room for obedience to a which nothing save cratic life."'^ nonhu- freely achieved beings has any authority right to say.
Served by — the peo- forestalling such change. I do not think that subsequent American have made leftists any advance on Dewey's understanding of the relation be- tween the individual and Foucault that the subject sive practices minds and ety is go hearts. society. is the all Dewey was as convinced as a social construction, that discur- way down to the But he insisted that the only point of soci- to construct subjects capable of ever richer, bottom of our more novel,.