Rating: 
Summary: Insightful and hopeful
Review: Achieving Our Country is both an historical account of the shifts in the ideas underpinning the American Left and a recommendation for how to improve what Rorty perceives to be its decayed state. Should you read it? Yes. The historical account has an almost revelatory character -- to read it is to have one's eyes opened to the left's increasingly theoretical bent and the consequent loss of vigor. Success in leadership, politics and government is, after all, measured by action. Rorty's recommended way to solve the degeneration of the left, of course, flows from his diagnosis of the problem. In addition, this book displays much skill with blending seemingly unrelated kernels of information in suggestive ways to show problems, trends, etc. that weren't detected otherwise. This weaving character makes the book enjoyable to read irrespective of its content - one must admire the Rorty's technical skill. This book is not without its flaws. Foremost is Rorty's overly simple diagnosis of the left's problem. Achieving Our Country is a collection of lectures, so arguably oversimplified presentation may be expected and excused. At bottom, this book informs the reader about the past and about choices to be made in the future, and it does so in a pleasant and readable.
Rating:
Summary: Pointers to increasing the relevance of the left
Review: As even the negative reviewers of this book point out, the intellectual left of the US has become stagnant, overly theoretical, and is stuck ruminating on the mistakes of the past (whether those are mistakes of the Left, like the willful ignorance of repression in the USSR, or mistakes of the right, like McCarthyism, hardly matters). Rorty argues, and I don't see many people disagreeing, that from the relevance and good works of the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, and voter registration campaigns, the left has retreated to the ivory towery, deconstructivist literary theory, and apathy towards the actual day-to-day lives of the world. His examples of his own personal conflicts growing up as a "red daiper baby" (see the review "Red Daiper Baby Still in the Dark") serve to illustrate this growing irrelevance, and he admits that issues like these, which he once championed, have grown stale.Rorty's lectures in this book are aimed at finding a way out of the dead end of abstract theory and "cultural politics," and into an applied social justice campaign. Let's drop the whole "leftism is dead" and "theory of culture" prattle, and move on to doing things about people starving in our streets, he says. Now, this is where the negative reviewers really begin to skewer him-- he suggests that the answer lies in pragmatism and a sort of 'secular religion.' I'm not convinced that he's correct, however, and I think that although he's right about the need to preserve our government as a secular one, I think that he really ignores the benefits of religion in civil society. Regardless of whether you agree with his prescription, however, his history of American leftism, and his analysis of its problems today, are insightful.
Rating: 
Summary: It's up to the Left to achieve our country
Review: In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty details the roots to leftist thought, exploring the dawning of the modern era and the pragmatic approach, the glorification of the American ideal and American story as one that would continue onward and upward, and the role of the intellectual Left to be the agent of hope and progress as opposed to maintaining the status quo. Unfortunately, events in the 1960's created a schism in the Left from which neither side have succeeded in counteracting a unified Right that sunk its claws into the haunches of America. It is up to the Left to coalesce once again into a unifying force to continue the American story and achieve the country. The loss of American pride is another key element. Rorty derives this from two modern thinkers, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, whose beliefs sharply contrasted with that of the finite, absolute, divine-centered beliefs of the Victorian pre-modernists. Whitman passionately exalted the more humanistic approach to truth and self-discovery caused by the floodgates opened by Darwin's theory of evolution. As a result, the divine standard to which men held to was replaced by secular humanism and humanistic standards. Both Dewey and Whitman saw "America" and "democracy" as synonymous with being "human." Dewey too placed "America" and "democracy" on a visionary scale. But where Whitman described the American way as "the last and greatest vision of the American potential," Dewey saw "democracy" and thus America's story as "a great word, whose history... remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted". As a result, Rorty asserts that Dewey and Whitman would advocate American pride despite blacker moments in America's history such as the Vietnam War. This was why the Left lost its effectiveness in carrying out its intellectual role--its spectatorial preoccupation with sin. According to Rorty, a Dewey-Whitman counter to this indulgence in self-disgust would be that "there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible to regain self-respect." Another group of thinkers Rorty drew upon was the "reformist Left," progressives who as champions of the downtrodden, strove to make political and social changes within a constitutional and democratic edifice. This reformist Left consists of two groups: the powerful, financially secure leftist elite launching top-down initiatives, (Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the Wagner Act) and the second group, consisting of the financially insecure and disempowered "little man" and grass roots organizations (Marcus Garvey, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Stonewall riots.) Rorty contends that the reinforcement of the bottom by the top was the glue holding the two groups until 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the denial of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention created a rift in the Left. The solution, according to Rorty, is a unification of the Lefts, as the Cultural Left is "unable to engage in national politics... [or] deal with the consequences of globalization." That is something the pre-Sixties left is able to do, i.e. "piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy." Rorty also wants to wean the Cultural Left from addictions such as theorizing, philosophizing, abstract systems, and self-disgust. In its place, he proposes activism, concrete solutions, a focus on people and pressing issues, and national pride, the latter two which the grass roots conservatives used to push the Right in power. The job of this Brand New Left, a union of the reformist Left, Cultural Left, and in support of the little man, is to create a new ideology and hence a new utopia that will engage and mobilize a hitherto disillusioned populace into political participation waiting for specific solutions. The Brand New Left will be an intelligentsia practicing pragmatism. Proud as Dewey and Whitman are in their assertion of America, bowing to no other authority, not even God, I am disturbed by one application of their assertion. This statement corresponds with American unilateralism, the concept of the United States being above the auspices of the United Nations, whose vision is more inclusive and unbiased towards any one nation. I also agree, that yes, it is beneficial to be aware of the darker moments of American history, and to learn not to make the same mistake and move forward to what one would hope to be a better tomorrow. But what is the line between proper awareness and a prosaic, token, and trendy "awareness month" or "awareness week"?
Rating:
Summary: a useful work for all Americans
Review: In this book, one of America's leading philosopical lights, is trying to clear a space for the political left to reassess its goals and its practices. He believes that the internecine warfare between the cultural and political left, and the New Left and Old Left must be halted, that a new rearticulation of the goals of the left is necessary for that to happen. He maintains that the New Left, the one that engages in the cultural project of identity politics, must find a way to see the Old Left managed to put together a number of clear victories, and put aside the issues of "purity" which paralyzed it. He offers a context and a framework and a lot of pragmatic wisdom as to how to move forward. He also does not stint in his criticism of the Left. Here's some quotes from the books that illustrate some of his thinking: 'The difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. ' p.9 'Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to ultimate significance in a finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and non-human.' p.17 Quoting Whitman:
'And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious
about God.' 'Americans,' he [Whitman] hoped, would spend the energies that past human societies had spent on discovering God's desires on discovering one another's desires. ' p.16. They (Whitman and Dewey) wanted that utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire. They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul." pg.18 According to Rorty: "Other nations thought of themselves as hymns to the glory of God. [in America] 'We redefine God as our future selves.'p.22. 'Whereas Marx and Spencer claimed to know what was bound to happen, Whitman and Dewey denied such knowledge in order to make room for pure, joyous hope.' (not sure what page). Rorty quotes Wm. James (fellow pragmatist): 'Democracy' Wm. James wrote, 'is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture.' p.9. (The "croaker's picture" by the way, would be the view of someone who always sees everything negatively, who takes delight in seeing despair and death around every trope.) But this yearning for a democratic utopia is not not the same as a 'passion for the infinite' which in Rorty's view as destructive in its Platonic idealism. Rorty would also class Marxism and "Spencerism" as this kind of idealism. I think it's helpful to add these theories are also deterministic, which is also antithetical to the practice of democracy as envisioned by Dewey and Whitman, although Rorty doesn't pursue this particular line of thinking, (Platonic) Virtue seeks ultimate things, and is not temporal. Rorty says "Dewey sought the "temporalization" of nearly everything." On a practical level, Rorty suggests it is better to have campaigns (which are finite) than movements (which are a passion for the infinite). He asks us to further imagine if history were told as a series of overlapping "campaigns," not movements such as the Enlightenment, Modernism and Post-Mod). He says this periodization creates a false drama that -- a kind of horse race view which places some artists or thinkers in the avant garde and some in the pack, and some left in the dust. Similarly, movements tend to sort people into the pure and impure, to partake of religious or idealist discourse of the sacred and profane. He would argue that this division into the pure and impure is what the party of history (the conservatives) do, and that the party of hope (the Left) should cease engaging in it. 'The Foucauldian academic Left in contemporary America is exactly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be
passed in order to make a better future.' p.139 Frederic Jameson & US literature teachers '...substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over failures of the past for better visions of the future.' p.12. Better, Rorty believes, to put those resentments aside, to acknowledge that awful things were done in the past to Africans and Native Americans (and the other victims in the past) and move forward. "Bloom sees them (the Jamesonians) as converting the study of literature into what he calls 'one more dismal social science'--and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for reform, and ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon." pg.127 Rorty says "[Mark] Edmundson seems to me right in describing what is going on in....literature departments as part of the latest attempt by knowing philosophers to gain supremacy over inspired poets. " 138. Rorty says: "I think it is important to distinguish between the know-nothing criticism of the contemporary American academy -- the sort of thing you get from George Will and Jonathan Yardley, and politicians like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney -- from the criticisms currently being offered by such insiders as Bloom and Christopher Ricks. The first set of critics believes everything they read in scandalmongering books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Lehman and others. They do not read philosophy, but simply search out titles and sentences to which they can react with with indignation. Much of their work belongs to the current conservative attempt to discredit the universities -- which itself is part of larger attempt to discredit all critics of the cynical oligarchy that has bought up the Republican Party." Following Rorty, I would suggest that that a first step by the Left to regain its focus would be to heap shame on the once-great Republican party, the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt, which has become the party of the oligarchy. Kevin Philips and John McCain have already arrived at this conclusion, so it is not that unlikely a project.
Rating:
Summary: Informative and Inspiring Essays on Renewing "the Left"
Review: In this collection, which includes his three Massey lectures delivered in 1997 and two related essays from 1995, Richard Rorty argues that the once vital "left," to which America is deeply indebted, has sadly rendered itself irrelevant. Rorty critiques members of the (post)modern left who, embittered by pervasive injustice, have eschewed meaningful campaigns for political change in favor of too-abstract theory, too-utopian "movements" and too-pessimistic contempt for those who would work "within the system" for necessary reform. The American Left, Rorty argues, has become "spectatorial" rather than "participatory," able to comment upon the nation's descent into oligarchy but stymied by view that our nation's sins are so ingrained as to place us beyond redemption. Drawing on figures such as Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Abraham Lincoln, Irving Howe, Herbert Croly, and Harold Bloom, Rorty conjures an inspiring vision of a left that reconciles economic and cultural progressivism and becomes once again a participatry, progressive, and relevant force in American politics.
Rating: 
Summary: If you don't know Leftist lingo and literature forget it
Review: Rorty is talking to the initiated, people who know their Cornell West, Walt Whitman, JP Sartre, Marx, Chomsky, Croly et. al. True to his title, he compares leftist thinkers throughout the ages and especially the 20th century. To his credit he considers communism a massive failure and says he is optimistic about America. He points out that these views separate him from many of his colleagues on the Left. What should the Left's agenda be today? As best I can tell -- Rorty would rather use other's words than his own -- it includes achieving a classless society, a casteless society, "social justice," which may be another name for the same things, and "an end to sadism" such as has been systematically experienced by women, gays, minorities, etc. etc. Rorty appears trapped in a time warp. He perceives groups, not the people of whom they consist, and society's ills as the evils (immiseration, to use his word) imposed on one group by another. Wasn't this the classic flaw in Marxist thinking? To deny the humanity of the individual by treating all as groups? Proletariat good, Kulaks bad, capitalists worse, and members of the Party, without flaw until we liquidate you? The science of our day has been moving away from Rorty for several decades. The premise that people are in any way uniform in their innate abilities, character, personality traits and all other measures has been exhaustively studied and found to be untenable. Marx notes as much in saying "from each according to his abilities." Dramatic developments in the studies of genetics and evolution point to facts that were once observed and accepted as common knowledge, that there are meaningful differences among groups of people as well. The core question is, given that people and groups of people are differently endowed with the talents that result in success in modern society, what is social justice? Rorty does not take the first step, which is to recognize that inequalities in social position, wealth, etc. correlate at least to some degree to discrepancies in industry, intelligence and other personal traits. Instead he puts the blame on other groups in society: "Sadism was recognized as having deeper roots than economic insecurity. The delicious pleasure to be had from creating a class of putative inferiors and then humiliating individual members of that class was seen as Freud saw it-as something which would be relished even if everybody were rich." It's still kill the kulacks and capitalists time as far as Rorty is concerned. The argument he needs to make, but cannot find, is to define what social justice means in a society whose individual members are differently endowed. It surely starts with legal justice: equal protection under the law. It surely also must go further, to provide some safety net for members of society whose talents are not in demand in the labor markets, whether due to genetic inheritance, injury, age or whatever. The nature and level of that safety net must be a matter of public debate, as must the question of what to do with sociopaths and others dangerous to their peers. Rorty missed a turn on the road of philosophy. Those with something meaningful to say in this age are knowledgeable about science. Start with Darwin and go through Dennett, Dawkins, Gould, Hrdy, Summers, Carvalli-Sforza and others, at least see what Jensen, Murray and Herrenstein have to say, and wind up with Pinker's amazingly good "The Blank Slate." Poor Rorty is dealing with the cold ashes of dead philosophies.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific
Review: Rorty, as he recounts in the book, grew up in a family very active in leftist politics during the Thirties and Forties. His was a Left superior, he believes, to today's academic Left in at least two ways: it wasted no time on theory so far removed from specific reform proposals as to be useless, and it saw anticommunism as an obvious leftist position. Rorty longs for a politics inspired by Whitman and Dewey, one that acknowledges the mistakes made by America in the past - including the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of blacks, the Vietnam War - but one that does not retreat into theorizing and imagine that the more abstract a theory is the more it becomes "subversive." Rorty thinks we should acknowledge past and current flaws while actively working to make a better future, and that we should take pride in America if (as Rorty believes) that is what is needed to motivate action. "The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms," Rorty writes. "Emphasizing the continuity between Herbert Croly and Lyndon Johnson, between John Dewey and Martin Luther King, between Eugene Debs and Walter Reuther, would help us to recall a reformist Left which deserves not only respect but imitation - the best model available for the American Left in the coming century." Rorty thinks that the current remains of the pre-Sixties reformist Left "consists largely of labor lawyers and labor organizers, congressional staffers, low-level bureaucrats hoping to rescue the welfare state from the Republicans, journalists, social workers, and people who work for foundations." Rorty sees Marxism as having done a great deal of harm: "The ideals of social democracy and economic justice . . . long antedated Marxism, and would have made much more headway had 'Marxism-Leninism' never been invented." Marxism, Rorty believes, has contributed to the problems with the current academic Left. Academic leftists demand purity, and prefer bottom-up movements of "the people" where top-down efforts could help. They consider reformists sell-outs, although they do not have any specific revolution in mind and have merely resigned themselves to inaction. They concentrate on America's sins, and invent new theoretical Satans such as Foucault's "power" as justifications for hopelessness. "[I]t would be a good thing," Rorty writes, "if the next generation of American leftists found as little resonance in the names Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as in those of Herbert Spencer and Benito Mussolini. It would be an even better thing if the names of Ely and Croly, Dreiser and Debs, A. Philip Randolph and John L. Lewis were more familiar to leftists than they were to the students of the Sixties." As Rorty tells the story, up through approximately 1964 the left concentrated on helping the poor, and after that point on helping those of oppressed races or gender. Rorty believes both the opposition to selfishness (which involved a lot of political action) and the opposition to sadism (which has involved mostly changes in cultural attitudes) have done a lot of good. He would like to see the two combined: "'The system' is sometimes identified as 'late capitalism,' but the cultural Left does not think much about what the alternatives to a market economy might be, or about how to combine political freedom with centralized economic decisionmaking. Nor does it spend much time asking whether Americans are undertaxed, or how much of a welfare state the country can afford, or whether the United States should back out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. . . . Nobody is setting up a program in unemployment studies, homeless studies, or trailer park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not 'other' in the relevant sense. . . . During the same period in which socially accepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased." What specific actions does Rorty advocate in this book demanding the advocating of specific actions? Very few, and I do not think that diminishes the value of the book. He does say that the top of the list must clearly be radical campaign finance reform. And he names a problem which he says will probably be our biggest, although he confesses he has no solution to it. The problem is this: "Globalization is producing a world economy in which an attempt by any one country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may result only in depriving them of employment." A conflict has developed, in other words, between helping the poor of the world and helping the poor of America. Concentrating too much on the former, Rorty fears, will open the door to a Buchanan-type appeal to the poor of America, an appeal which will be false and will have disastrous results for America and the world. Quibbles: I do not need to feel pride in America to believe that reform should be worked for. Henry Adams was not just a spectator who did nothing, he was also a lousy spectator. I was very glad to see that Rorty thinks a democracy creates "larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals." I had thought he sided with McIntyre in believing democracy to be a compromise, creating mediocre people but avoiding more suffering. I think his new view is right. It seems silly to me to claim that leftists want change and rightists do not. The right wants changes that make things worse. The academic left does not exaggerate the importance of philosophy for politics, but as opposed to politics. Thought is important for politics, but thought that is engaged with politics. Why is it that riches cannot wipe out sadism, but poverty is bound to produce it? I don't believe we have what Rorty calls "individual quests for private perfection," as something separate from our worldly lives.
Rating:
Summary: An important reminder of the true America.
Review: The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time. In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today. What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism. To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right. To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future. This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.
Rating:
Summary: An important reminder of the true America.
Review: The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time. In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today. What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism. To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right. To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future. This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.
Rating:
Summary: setting the left right
Review: There is one thing for certain in a country where it has become embarassing to say one is a social-democrat while almost 50 million people are without health care and the disparity between the haves and the have nots is such that we can certainly talk of a permanent underclass, it is that the concepts and implimentation of those who profess to be 'liberals' or progressives are muddled, disorganized and often self-defeating
(the last presidential election says much about the problem, from Nader to Florida to low income voter turn out).
Richard Rorty addresses the issues and offers broad, clear, macro analysis of the problems and an approach to the solutions.
You may not agree but it is worth the effort to get the questions right.
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