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."
