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 Countrytraces 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."

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.

Politically progressive academics should consider carefully Rorty's arguments...They pose important questions about American politics and public intellectual practice.

A deeply considered diagnosis, a vital set of prophecies.

Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Countryis 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.

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 Countryis a valuable addition to Rorty's writings...He has things to say that are important and timely...They are said powerfully.

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 Countryare 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.

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 Countrya 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.

Achieving Our Countrycriticizes 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.

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 philosophywould be much poorer without him...Achieving Our Countryis a valuable addition to Rorty's writings...He has things to say that are important and timely...They are said powerfully.

Achieving Our Countryis 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.

Achieving Our Countryis an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitions ofEmerson, 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 arecapable 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.

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 andnecessary 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 brushaside 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 theconversation 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 verygood thing.

'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 ofSo 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 politicalworldview 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.'

It is refreshing to find so hard-hitting a portrait of the contemporary academic Left in the work of one of its own.

"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.

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 "he 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.

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, Rorty 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.

Richard Rortyis Professor of Comparative Literature at <>Stanford University. He is the author of the landmark works Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and The Consequences of Pragmatism.