Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country

...This "spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left," Rorty writes, "is not the only Left we have, but it is the most prominent and vocal one...

...There lurks in Rorty's formulations the implication, at least, that with socialism in eclipse throughout the globe, the only sensible recourse for the entire "reformist" left is the scaled-down campaign freed from the taint of any larger movement...

...He may have failed to evoke the left we need, but he has most artfully dispatched a left we don't...

...Rorty has a fairly precise image of what an engaged academic left would look like: the social science departments of the Progressive Era Midwestern universities, where scholars like John Commons devised the social insurance models on which New Deal liberals would later build...

...And surely, part of the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr...

...But here, the gap between Rorty the intellectual historian and Rorty the social historian becomes apparent...

...To be sure, Rorty affirms the value of race- and gender-study programs, wishing not to abolish but to augment them with class-study programs as well...

...Absent a movement or movements that can grapple with the market forces that are everywhere eroding the powers of government, the prospects for discrete progressive campaigns are correspondingly bleak...

...What Rorty offers is a kind of latter-day amalgam of Eduard BOOKS Bernstein and John Dewey: the final vision, the idea of a final vision, is a distraction at best...

...The enshrinement of otherness that pervades the cultural left, he argues, couldn't have been more alien to America's greatest nineteenth-century other...

...Which is to say, Rorty's political compass conks out altogether once it has guided him through the thickets of the academic left...

...Consider, for instance, Rorty's warm but highly idiosyncratic appreciation of this very magazine and its founding editor...

...The task of the socialist, Howe wrote in such essays as "The Near and the Far," was to offer a perspective that could inspire and instruct activists both for the particular campaign and the broader social context in which it was situated, as well as to accommodate that perspective to the new realities that campaign might produce...

...And so he links, in order of decreasing plausibility, Michael Harrington and John Kenneth Galbraith, Angela Davis and Jane Addams, Eugene Debs and Woodrow Wilson...

...Its mission, rather, is to unmask and decode the texts that the system produces, in the comforting belief that this somehow advances the revolutionary cause...

...For Rorty, it is not enough to note that both the liberal and socialist lefts of earlier decades would be at odds with the spectatorial left he decries...

...He also revisits American left history and transforms many of its leading movement activists and thinkers into pragmatic problem solvers trundling from one campaign to the next...

...He notes approvingly such "bottom-up Lefist initiatives" as the Pullman Strike, the Flint GM sit-down, and "Marcus Garvey's black nationalist movement...

...The CIO would have been stillborn without the zealous ministrations of thousands of communists and socialists who believed in both the historic mission and the moral claim of the working class...

...The moral arc of the universe is long," King cried, "but it bends toward justice...

...Rorty's most important insight is into the political worldview of the academic left: that it is essentially nonpolitical...

...There has always been more in the heaven and earth of building a campaign, in short, than Rorty's philosophy admits...

...They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of 108 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 campaigns...

...ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by Richard Rorty Harvard University Press, 1 998 159 pp $1 8. 9 5 0 N 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 irrelevence of much of the American left...

...On the question of how class lost its centrality to the American left, he is right to note the New Left's disaffection from the Old during the Vietnam War, but he greatly understates just how vigorously much of the Old Left shoved the New Left away...

...The problem, I think, is a peculiarly instrumentalist view of political movements, in which an activist's or a tendency's involvement in a particular campaign, rather than any distinctive set of beliefs, becomes its defining attribute...

...Nor is Rorty content simply to conclude that the proper pursuit of political man is involvement in campaigns rather than movements...

...But while historian Jacoby considered the institutional changes that led to the increasing insularity of American intellectuals, philosopher Rorty focuses more on the doctrinal and methodological changes that have stranded otherwise perfectly useful disciplines on desert islands of inconsequence...

...Whitman had no interest in preservation or protection [of distinct cultures from the incursions of other cultures...

...But he so convincingly savages the actual intellectual work of the typical cultural-left academic that his call for harmonic convergence falls somewhat flat...

...There, the expansive concerns of an Alfred North Whitehead were supplanted by 106 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 BOOKS the close analytical work of an A.J...

...Weekly...

...This may be the fate that awaits literature departments...

...And yet, whatever Rorty's shortcomings in his newfound roles as political strategist and social historian, his power as a critic of ideas— and the power of his critique of the academic left—is undiminished...

...His appeal for reconciliation between the surviving wings of Old Left and New is mildly bewildering, not only because the realpolitik tendencies of both, greatly aided by Michael Harrington, already achieved a rapprochement during the seventies and eighties...

...I NDEED, THE most glaring flaw of Rorty the social historian is his failure to understand that even reformist campaigns are made by movement people...

...And it differs from all hitherto existing American lefts in that it has no agenda for action, is untroubled by its lack of agenda, and, indeed, does not really believe in such an agenda...

...it offers a totalistic worldview likely either to explode on the world or implode on the adherent...

...was his ability to inspire a generation of civil rights activists with the certitude that they were involved in a project of cosmic consequence...

...What this Dewey-eyed view of history does not grasp is that victories in Bernstein's day-to-day struggles have usually been won not (or at least, not just) by Bernstein's adepts, but by more visionary crusaders for whom campaigns are surely important, but not simply in and for themselves...

...our proper task is to find discrete solutions to particular problems...

...The cultural left, writes Rorty, "still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called 'the people.' In this sense, `the people' is the name of a redemptive preternatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named `power' or `the system.' " The logical consequence of the current left epistemology, he continues, is virtually to proscribe political action...

...Rorty fears a similar process is now at work in literature departments, as scholars interested in authorial styles and themes give way to a generation of cultural decoders...

...The very notion of "achieving our country"— Rorty takes his title for this collection of lectures and essays from the concluding passage of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time—is a task, he laments, to which the current academic left is utterly unsuited...

...A quick look at the city halls and statehouses across America makes abundantly clear that incremental liberalism in the most localized of settings isn't faring any better than the world socialist project...

...But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate or a political strategy" In a sense, Achieving Our Country is a companion volume to Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals, which chronicled the decline of social thinkers who wrote largely for public consumption and the rise of academic theorists who wrote chiefly for their colleagues...

...The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be," Rorty notes...

...And as political strategist, Rorty is shakier still...

...Indeed, Rorty is at his most acute in charting the changes in his own discipline, as it is practiced within the philosophy departments of the English-speaking world...

...He wanted competition and argument between alternative forms of human life [resulting in a] new culture [that] will be better because it will contain more variety in unity" But as social chronicler, Rorty is on somewhat shakier ground...

...RORTY ALSO offers a more familiar, though no less accurate, critique of the academic left: that it has largely dropped the banner of class, under which all manner of progressives marched until the sixties, and taken up an armful of other banners, for specific races, genders, and sexual orientations...

...Before such a power, the very notion of an agent of social change is woefully inadequate...

...In the year Dissent was founded, Rorty notes, Irving Howe published an essay in Partisan Review that argued that the belief in the unity of modernism and leftism that had characterized portions of the left in the mid-thirties was plainly no longer sustainable...

...Today's academic left, by contrast, "is exactly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future...

...Emphasizing the impossibility of meaning, or of justice, as Derrida sometimes does, is a temptation to Gothicize—to view democratic politics as ineffectual because unable to cope with preternatural forces...

...The cultural left may contend that this text affirms the system while that text subverts it, but the system itself remains an abstraction, a power that passes, if not all understanding, at least all attempts at reconfiguring...

...But surely Rorty has mistaken Howe's repudiation of the totalistic worldview of a sect, where every question has its answer within the faith, for a repudiation of a democratic movement that offers broad philosophic guidelines to one's understanding of the world...

...More than that, though, Rorty is wary of the movement sensibility as such: it divides potential allies...

...That, in fact, was the very substance of Michael Harrington's life—converting thousands of one-shot campaigners into lifelong movement activists by imparting (and inspiring them with) his understanding of the political and moral meaning of the cause in which they had become involved...

...As a critic of ideas, he offers a withering comparison of the core beliefs of the current cultural left with those of one of its forebears, Walt Whitman...

...What goes on in Anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and then to the culture as a whole," he writes...

...I propose to use the term 'reformist Left,' " he writes, "to cover all those Americans who, between 1900 and 1964, struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong...

...It is also confusing because Rorty's indictment of the cultural left on campus suggests the nonacademic left would do better repudiating than embracing it...

...The UAW under Walter Reuther, perhaps the key institutional bastion of postwar liberalism, was guided by social democrats with a genuine ideological antipathy to capitalism...

...Would that this approach actually worked...

...The authors of these purportedly 'subversive' books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty...

...From this, Rorty concludes that this sundering of a once unified worldview was in fact the very essence of Howe's new publication...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is executive editor of L.A...

...The founding (and subsequent) editors of Dissent "felt able to dispense with membership in a movement...

...To the extent that socialist academics also developed reforms and reformers, they pass muster with Rorty, too...

...Ayer—relegating academic philosophy to the task of "solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems...

...It has no belief in the country's capacity to reform, and, worse, no aptitude for achieving anything even dimly detectable in the real world...

...And contrary to Rorty's assessment, what defined both Howe and such other Dissentniks as Michael Harrington was their belief in democratic socialism and in the need for a socialist movement, and, indeed, in the key role that that movement could play in deepening and invigorating any number of discrete liberal campaigns...

...So eager is Rorty to demonstrate the singularity and futility of the current academic left that he imposes on virtually all previous left and liberal tendencies of this century a common identity that in fact they did not DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 107 BOOKS share...