The Real American Dream/Philosophy and Social Hope/Achieving Our Country/The Future of American Progressivism
Delbanco, Anrew & Rorty, Richard & Unger, Roberto Mangebeira & West, Cornel
BOOKS Missing: The vision thing Eugene McCarraher he spiritual fatigue...
...These are ridiculous misrepre- The futility of pragmatism as a basis architecture of creation...
...Not that Rorty like poisonous mushrooms on every is the hope and not the conscience of a would see it that way...
...Besides, while Dewey recurred world in the grip of mammon should Country, he identifies sin with "self- to "values" (just as Rorty goes on about be scandalized by this degeneration...
...asserts in Philosophy and Social Hope...
...the "inlectual culture, where the gray-flanneled tices" that characterize the advanced sec- dustrial democracy" and "guild socialgravitas of a Reinhold Niebuhr did more tors of contemporary capitalism...
...port with the moral and metaphysical fering...
...If the market is to be "democratized," in Philosophy and Social Hope, "only to the extent to which you feel it is your country...
...Melville's hipness that is the official culture of in- bles, is a symptom of moral decline," he work especially unveiled "the dirty little fotainment capitalism...
...calls for a revitalized American Left that more action...
...Among their sweeping "flexible" the rest of us will be...
...West (Harvard professors and renowned lates the libertarian elitism of the "pro- To achieve these utopian hopes, Rorty social theorists and political activists) want ductive vanguards...
...In simple, but profound language a hope-bearing civil religion must sepit breaks open for us the paradox and shows the way to a arate the "fraternity and loving kindness" enjoined by the gospel from "the new style of leadership we have been searching for...
...We are witnessing, they argue, ican quest for self-realization through the death of an American capacity for The Real American Dream "God," "Nation," and "Self...
...social endowment shouldn't the resources now monopoing feature of contemporary culture is accounts" on which individuals could lized by the lap-topocracy be the properthe unslaked craving for transcendence," draw for education, housing, or entre- ty of all...
...written in clear and profoundly challenging This enlistment of saints in the long words...
...As Andrew Delbanco puts it Leftist' Thought in tive of hope, forged in Revolutionary nain The Real American Dream, Americans Twentieth-Century America tionalism and constructed around the find it increasingly hard to conjure up by Richard Rorty ideal of "citizenship in a sacred union," "any conception of a common destiny Harvard University Press, had partially supplanted the religious worth tears, sacrifice, and maybe even $12.95, 176 pp...
...11 better...
...He John Milbank has put it so well, where- Press...
...Grounded in gospel values, res, as members of a single movement...
...Blending DelDelbanco's God is thoroughly Protes- By describing as "religion" the practical banco's national ideal with the utopianism tant and even more thoroughly Puritan, and experimental ways in which Ameri- of nineteenth-century Europe-"the noas are his models (Edwards, Winthrop) cans approach technology and personal blest imaginative creation of which we of religious cultural criticism...
...even beloved...
...But in the process of resistance...
...Boston, Massachusetts 02111 repudiation of metaphysics authorized 1-800-225-1534 • Fax: 617-423-2354 by Dewey and James...
...A reliEugene McCarraher teaches humanities at tions about Christianity that all of us gious and specifically Christian appeal Villanova University and American history should take to heart...
...Rorty wants to live off committed to Servant Leadership the moral interest of the faith without tending to the metaphysical principle...
...Servanthood gives us a new paradigm, Servant Leadership...
...A nice enough philoso- es against much of the Christian social orty's description of his phy for nice people like Dewey, Bourne imagination of our time: mush about labor-left nationalism as a wrote, pragmatism buckled when faced "compassion" and "social justice," proR "civic religion" points to the with avarice, bloodlust, and the "new posals to "mitigate" the brutalities of religious concerns that ani- tastes for power that are springing up the market...
...Rorty contends that solutions to economic, population, and ecological problems will require "top-down, technobureaucratic initiatives," an assertion he illus"That's the difference between me and you...
...Albert H. Ottenweller, Retired Bishop of Steubenville idea of supernatural parentage, immortality, and providence...
...Delbanco's intellectual and for self turned increasingly inward...
...If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways...
...trates infelicitously with China's one-childper-family policy...
...We who know that our faith mate his social hope...
...The ideal of "nation" banco documents the relentless privati- heralded as the container of multitudes, that galvanized Progressivism, the New zation of middle-class life, "the impover- the "vanguard of a global egalitarian Deal, and the Great Society could also ishment of our children's capacity to utopia," is "in danger of losing its soul...
...the "self-management" to paralyze than electrify social hope...
...His book, essay titled "Looking Backwards from metaphysics: that is, in a belief that cre- Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse the Year 2096," he cheers that the "so- ation is good because a God who is love in Modern American Social Thought, has cial-gospel theology of the early twenti- has crafted an "ontology of peace," as just been published by Cornell University eth century has been rediscovered...
...nity that is more just, more free, and of neighbor to transcendence in God...
...Unwilling to end his medthat people are now willing tg cross pick- pret "the real American dream," a spir- itation on so downbeat a note, Delbanco Commonweal 2 5 May 19, 2000 hastens to observe that "the most strik- Feingold reforms...
...In a wonderful to social hope grounds its demands in at the University of Delaware...
...The fact redemption, Delbanco sets out to inter- Vietnam War...
...and that "Christianity and civil religion," preneurial ventures...
...And Richard Rorty-whose on the Puritans and especially The Death facile at this point, the key culprits in work has been vilified by the Left and the of Satan (1996), one of the finest accounts the current narcissism seem to be conRight as an apologia for amorality and of evil and its vicissitudes in American sumerism and the erosion of faith in insouciance-writes of our Second Gild- culture...
...The hope for a beloved com- inspiring economic development and pomunity, now consigned to that lotus- et lines, and are unwilling to ask who litical reform, national aspirations also bin called "the sixties," gives way to the makes their clothes or picks their vegeta- revealed a lethal ruthlessness...
...But Rorty atones with some un- cedes only religion does: hold "reality characteristically sympathetic observa- and justice in a single vision...
...Elsewhere, Leadership for the Third Millennium Servanthood he dreams of the day when our descen- Bennett J. Sims Eru!m5+nk r, 7Mid.VA!rmdants "will think of Saint Agnes and 1-56101-145-2 • 183 pp - paper Rosa Luxemburg, Saint Francis and Eugene Debs, Father Damien and Jean Jau- "A marvelous book...
...Still, while Rorty argues that this leftist patriotism will eventually "achieve our country" (a phrase he borrows from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time), his putative popular front of democratic bards (Walt Whitman), pragmatist philosophers (John Dewey and William James), and the labor-union movement isn't always the radically democratic vista he imagines...
...Rorty justifies this separation in Philosophy and Cowley Publications Social Hope by invoking the pragmatist 28 Temple P1...
...Del- Rorty sermonizes that the nation once a killing machine...
...In the first social hope: the withering of passion for phase, exemplified by the Puritans, hope A Meditation on Hope what the populists once called a "coop- by Andrew Delbanco for the self lay in what one divine called erative commonwealth," " the erosion of Harvard University Press, "a holy despair in ourselves" that led, any willingness to envision a commu- through humility, submission, and love $19.95.143 pp...
...We all know In Achieving Our Country, he argues that patriarchy does not work any longer...
...But the insufficiency of pragmatism as cowley@~cowley.orr • www cowley.org a basis for political hope and action was Commonweal 2 7 May 19, 2000...
...Shifting his sight here from sin to public institutions occasioned by the ed Age with eloquent outrage...
...In Achieving Our hand...
...and the reorganiza- Rorty apparently thinks so, and that though weakened, "remain the bedrock tion of Social Security into a social in- lends his own reflections on hope a freshof our culture...
...Redemption is sentations, and the maternal grandson for social hope lay, in other words, in its the grandest, most realistic, and most of Walter Rauschenbusch ought to know inability to do what Rorty himself con- political hope of all...
...death...
...If Delbanco, Unger, and West offer its the intellectual and imaginative re- guards," at "flexibility" and "decentral- Americans either smoldering embers or a sources on which we could draw for so- ization" in labor markets and produc- cut of the profits, Rorty wants them to cial hope...
...Roberto Unger and Cornel West note the social progress for inspiration and ex- In recent decades the American quest political disenchantment of college youth tension...
...Sister Nancy E. Westmeyer, OSF, challenge he poses to the Christian so- co-director of Vision Time, an organization cial imagination...
...My brother, Bennett, has given us a gem of a book...
...Likewise, Delbanco's Emer- tion, and at the "flattened hierarchies," have it all: the "worker ownership" and sonian watch seems all too aestheticized "fluid job definitions," and "constant re- "union control of the workplace" ideals and reminiscent of postwar liberal intel- shaping of products, services, and prac- of anarchism and syndicalism...
...Neither his nor Bourne, who noted the alacrity with and penetrating realism...
...sanction slavery, racial segregation, and imagine the future," and the corporate It is to save the nation's soul that the the imperialism that slaughtered Native colonization of our leisure and fantasy...
...Servanthood uncovers the meaning of march of hope highlights both the cen- Servant Leadership for the Church and the tral quandary of Rorty's vision and the world...
...You can feel shame nancing of campaigns (a more thorough forgetful of the market's coercive charac- over your country's behavior," he writes reconstruction than the timid McCain- ter...
...BOOKS Missing: The vision thing Eugene McCarraher he spiritual fatigue that itual ideal gradually obscured by a conhaunts America's current sumerist facsimile...
...Noting shrewdly that hope speaks loudly about the malefactors of is "more the consequence of action than f course flexibility, decen- great wealth, wages unashamed class its cause," and appealing to what they tralization, and egalitarian- warfare, and revives the romance of faith call the American "religion of possibili- 0 ism are virtues, not vices...
...authors seek out American traditions of Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese...
...Philosophy and Social Hope This Christian conception could not, Clear away the gargantuan material by Richard Rorty however, survive the solvents of wealth abundance of our time, our authors sug- Penguin, $13.95,288 pp...
...In its utopian quest for a free The Future of American This civic republican ideal of "nation" global market, capital has done more Progressivism animated Tocqueville, Emerson, Whitthan gag unions, repeal regulations, and by Roberto Mangebeira Unger man, Melville, and Lincoln, all of whom mock restrictions on accumulation and and Cornel West believed that the possibilities of the self consumption...
...mentalists marched to the beat of the war erosity of Rorty's social hope witnessdrums in 1917...
...sees (without a trace of awareness that he was beaten to the analogy by Dorothy Day) that "Christian congregations meeting in catacombs" were like unto "work- Servanthood ers' rallies in city squares...
...But in human possibility, under what he calls ty"-an abiding triune faith in democra- what sort of "deep democ- "civil religion...
...Rortys benevolent techCommonweal 26 May 19, 2000 nocrats sound a lot like Unger and West's best explained long ago by Randolph in love is not an ideal but the most lucid productive vanguards...
...For a cou- its eschewal of class politics, and its conbut sensible proposals are: full public fi- ple of leftists, the authors are remarkably tempt for patriotism...
...and the blows of the Enlightenment, and gest, and you find a hopeless spiritual Achieving Our Country by the nineteenth century a new narracondition...
...ness lacking in the others...
...vestment fund...
...and the conceptual bankruptcy of a North moral authority grows out of his work Though Delbanco's history gets pretty Atlantic Left...
...They marvel at "a decaffeinated progressivism of Unger and in The True and Only Heaven (1991), lim- worldwide network of productive van- West...
...By per- relations, Unger and West highlight the have record"-Rorty's social hope both sisting in the Protestant parochialism that mixture of prophecy and wonkery that outshines Delbanco's melancholia and still deforms American intellectual his- has been the glory and the bane of the quickens the blood more readily than the tory, Delbanco, like Christopher Lasch progressive tradition...
...In both of his books, Rorty cy, practicality, and the power of indi- racy" is it (West has a habit of falling for excoriates the academic Left for its imviduals to improve their lives-they offer all things "deep") that allows a handful of mersion in the exotic pedantry of postguidelines for a refurbishment of the pro- Wunderkinder, however "socially con- modernism, its marination in the "identity gressive tradition born in the first decades scious," to determine how "fluid" and politics" of race, sexuality, and gender, of this century...
...The world of money has Beacon Press, $12, 93 pp, could be realized in an expansive and enworn down the power of imaginative ergetic democracy...
...Future of American Progressivism seems demands of 1968, as well as other decenIn contrast to Delbanco, Unger and unaware of the ways this lexicon articu- tralist roads not taken...
...Like secret of the new national religion-the The dilapidation of our social and po- an urbane and secular Jonathan Edwards, fact that the ebullient democracy was also litical hope is evident everywhere...
...We loathing," while in Philosophy and Social "kindness" and "humanitarianism"), must reclaim our own history of hope, Hope he complains that belief in other- there was, Bourne mordantly remarked, compose our own account of possibiliworldly salvation releases Christians "that unhappy ambiguity" as to "just ty, and declare that our dreams comfrom this-worldly efforts to alleviate suf- how values were created...
...account...
...But The ism" of the 1910s...
...I have a positive attitude...
...theirs can be counted on to welcome de- which Dewey and his band of instru- And that is why the vigor and gencentralized workers' control...
...Delbanco's "meditaT prosperity is the chief oc- Books discussed tion"-one he concedes is a story of casion for these books on hope's "diminution"-follows the Amerin this essay hope...
Vol. 127 • May 2000 • No. 10
