Download Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America AudioBook Free
Must the sins of America's past poison its expect the future? Lately the American Departed, withdrawing in to the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has clarified yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's primary philosophers issues this lost generation of the Still left to understand the role it might play in the great custom of democratic intellectual labor that started out with freelance writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey. How have countrywide pleasure and American patriotism come to seem to be an endorsement of atrocities - from slavery to the slaughter of Native People in the usa, from the rape of historic forests to the Vietnam Warfare? Achieving Our Country traces the resources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Still left as well as the injury it does to its proponents and also to the country. At the guts of this history is the conflict between your Old Departed and the New that arose through the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty represents the way the paradoxical victory of the antiwar motion, ushering in the Nixon years, inspired a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to go after "High Theory" at the trouble of considering the host to ideas inside our common life. On this decide on theory, Rorty recognizes a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the inclination of the heirs of the New Still left to theorize about the United States from a distance rather than taking part in the civic work of shaping our countrywide future. Inside the absence of a vibrant, active Departed, the views of intellectuals on the American Right attended to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing e book, modified from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, requires the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Still left to the civic engagement and inspiration necessary for "achieving our country".
