Achieving our country : leftist thought in twentieth-century America

The Resource Achieving our country : leftist thought in twentieth-century America
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Achieving our country : leftist thought in twentieth-century America
Title remainder
leftist thought in twentieth-century America
Statement of responsibility
Richard Rorty
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
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 this book, a philosopher 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
Member of
Cataloging source
SVW
Dewey number
320.513
Index
index present
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
Series statement
The William E. Massey, Sr. lectures in the history of American civilization
Series volume
1997

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