Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Christian Century, Dec 9, 1998 by Marty E. Martin

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. By Richard Rorty. Harvard University Press, 159 pp., $18.95.

Few would dispute the designation of Richard Rorty as America's preeminent public philosopher. Positioning himself on the political left, he cannot but be a bit forlorn as he surveys the many ideologies whose promise has failed in the course of the Never heavily committed to the Marxist style his parents embraced, and apparently never positively influenced by the Christian Social Gospel beliefs of his grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, Rorty is evidently trying to jump-start the mild left. Can it move again?

The two main sources on which he draws are poet Walt Whitman and public philosopher John Dewey, with whom he has previously identified himself. And he speaks well of Herbert Croly's almost forgotten The Promise of American Life.

Such writers and thinkers belong to a tradition that Rorty sees corrupted and even dead-ended in much academic leftism today. The intellectuals who retreated from Vietnam-war-era activism to academic safety come across as cynical and lacking in vision. They have vacated the public scene, leaving it to ominous forces on the right.

Rorty's book is curiously dated in respect to religion. He dismisses virtually all forms and expressions of religion as having been beside the point all along, or having nothing to say now, or having survived chiefly as the Religious Right. He overlooks the many potential religious allies that cannot be stereotyped.