Achieving Our Country

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 Rée * 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 *