Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Rorty, The Promise Of American Life, Patriotism

I read Richard Rorty's 1998 book, "Achieving Our Country" as a result of two dovetailing considerations. First, I had the good fortune to participate in a philosophy conference on the subject "Metaphysics and Political Thought", and several speakers presented insightful papers about Rorty. Second, I had recently read a novel written in a sharply satirical, angry style offering a broad postmodern criticism of the United States and its history. I reacted strongly and negatively to the book and I knew that Rorty (1931 -- 2007) had criticized other novels with the detached, angry critique of America similar to the book I had read. I wanted to read what Rorty had to say in "Achieving Our Country". This short, eloquently written book is based upon the three Massey Lectures Rorty gave in 1997 at Harvard University together with two earlier lectures on similar themes.

This book has become famous because in a passage in the third lecture "The Cultural Left" which appears to presage the factors leading to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. The passage is indeed remarkable, but I felt the need to dig below the surface to consider not merely Trump but the considerations which made him possible. The angry, divisive politics in the United States, including in Rorty's account cultural politics on the left is not free from blame.

The opening lecture in the book "American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey" is more important to what the book is about than is the possible picture of Trump. Rorty begins his lecture with the same feeling of discontent I expressed at the outset of this review with two critically well-received novels that had drawn a picture of an irredeemably evil United States employing tropes familiar from many books and from popular and intellectual culture. Rorty criticizes this sort of literature as depriving readers of a sense of hope and purpose in the meaning of America. Hope and purpose and their lack by their nature are for nationals and individuals the product of imagination and myth-making rather than an alleged dispassionate analysis of facts. Rorty wants to find meaning and hope and promise in American life. He looks to the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher John Dewey as his primary sources with discussions as well of the Progressive early 20th Century writer,Herbert Croly, William James, and ... the German idealist philosopher Hegel. He sees the criticism resulting from an attitude of detachment and disengagement with America that he finds partial and unjustified.

Rorty looks to leftist activism as practiced in America from the late 19th century through the early 1960s as a source of hope. He finds the New Left that became prevalent in the 1960s soon devolved into a broad cultural critique of America rather than an attempt to work to bring about change where change was possible. Rorty finds the basic value of America lies in its secularism which sees creating the good as within the capacity of the people acting for themselves as opposed to responding to clerics or other-worldly religious or philosophical beliefs. The New Left with its opposition to the War in Vietnam and its cultural critiques of America brought back a sense of sin into American life which Rorty deplores. Prior to the late 1960s, the Left had substantive, realizable political aims. More importantly, the Left was ardently patriotic and loved the United States for its promise if not fully for its actuality. This patriotism, together with secularism, are the most fundamental insights in Rorty's book.

In the remaining two Massey Lectures Rorty fleshes out his distinction between the New Left and its predecessors. Among other things, the lectures include some moving autobiographical reflections together with a great deal of philosophical, anti-philosophical and cultural writing.

As with so much of Rorty, this book is a mix. Rorty writes as an individual committed to left-with Progressive politics. He is eloquent in support of what he sees the Left has achieved for American life, including the accomplishments of the New Left which he also incisively critiques. Rorty has little use for conservatism of any stripe. I think his book would be stronger if he integrated his insights with some of the insights of people coming at political questions from a non-Leftist perspective. I see no reason why this could not be done.

I love the way Rorty talks about philosophers such as Dewey and James and poets such as Whitman. Rorty has a love-hate relationship with philosophy and metaphysics and many academic philosophers have mixed responses to Rorty. I see Rorty as a philosopher in spite of himself. I admire Rorty for the courage of his secularism, which I largely share. Again, I think his position could be stated with somewhat more openness to sources not fully secular.

This book is not so much an advance criticism of President Trump as it is a warning of how the United States was losing a sense of itself and of confidence in its possibilities and of what Rorty sees as the United States' truly exceptional character -- the first society to be formed as an experiment on a secular model. The book is partial because, even with its critique of the New Left it appears to read out more conservative Americans and that is unnecessary and unjustified. Still in its optimism, sense of meaning, and celebration of Whitman, Dewey, and Lincoln, among others, Rorty's book offers an excellent guide to the spirit of the United States and to the recapturing of something of the American dream and of what Herbert Croly described in his famous Progressive book of 1909 as "The Promise of American Life".