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Achieving Our Country
- Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
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Publisher's 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 Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers 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.
In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for "achieving our country".
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- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.
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Historical Liberalism on deathbed
- By Mehran Asdigha on 11-13-20
By: Pankaj Mishra
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Democracy Matters
- Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
- By: Cornel West
- Narrated by: Cornel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Democracy Matters is Cornel West's bold and powerful critique of the troubling deterioration of democracy in America in this threatening post-9/11 age of terrorist rage and imperial overreach, and an inspiring call for a resurgence of the deep democratic tradition in our country, which has waged war on the forces of imperialist corruption throughout our history.
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Well written, a refreshing voice of inspiration
- By Gabriel on 07-06-05
By: Cornel West
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We Stand Divided
- The Rift Between American Jews and Israel
- By: Daniel Gordis
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Relations between the American Jewish community and Israel are at an all-time nadir. Since Israel’s founding 70 years ago, particularly as memory of the Holocaust and of Israel’s early vulnerability has receded, the divide has grown only wider. Most explanations pin the blame on Israel’s handling of its conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s attitude toward non-Orthodox Judaism, and Israel’s dismissive attitude toward American Jews in general. In short, the cause for the rupture is not what Israel is; it’s what Israel does.
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Jews Will Argue With Each Other
- By Benzion N. Chinn on 09-12-19
By: Daniel Gordis
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The Light That Failed
- Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy
- By: Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political history, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of Communism turned out to be only the beginning of the age of the autocrat.
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Great text
- By Safronov on 05-03-21
By: Ivan Krastev, and others
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Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
- Thinkers of the New Left
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.
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Deconstructing the New Left
- By Wayne on 01-17-20
By: Roger Scruton
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The Smallest Minority
- Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics
- By: Kevin D. Williamson
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”
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Brutally honest, accurate and relevant
- By Sean on 09-19-19
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The Voice of Reason
- Essays in Objectivist Thought
- By: Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.
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Explains Everything Of Today
- By L. Nicholson on 11-20-15
By: Ayn Rand, and others
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The Long March
- How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
- By: Roger Kimball
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The architects of America's cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
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The Long March
- By Suzanne on 05-16-06
By: Roger Kimball
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Last Call for Liberty
- How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
- By: Os Guinness
- Narrated by: Os Guinness
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.
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Thought Provoking Work On Liberty In America
- By Ezekiel on 05-28-19
By: Os Guinness
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Fascism: The Career of a Concept
- By: Paul Gottfried
- Narrated by: Kevin Moriarty
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces the word's polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles.
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Refreshing scholarly treatment of a widely misused concept
- By Minister of the Posterior on 01-15-24
By: Paul Gottfried
What listeners say about Achieving Our Country
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philip
- 11-25-23
Rorty Inspires
I experience Rorty as a simultaneous calming breeze and an inspirational fire. I experience him as one of few great intellectuals that write from a place of almost perfect balance: being sincerely invested in large and important issues, and yet somehow managing to clearly and dispassionately articulate the entire scope of these issues. He writes in a way I find endlessly engaging; sincere, humorous and, ultimately, hopeful.
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- David Tyree
- 12-08-18
I needed this.
I delayed listening to this because I realized that I couldn't get what I wanted out of it treating it as a casual listen. Once I turned the speed down and really focused and made a steadfast point to understand in depth what the author was trying to convey I found a book which answered many questions I've had and not been able to conceptualize. I really never found a sufficient framework for reasoning about the left and my place in it and how I contribute to our politics - I'm very glad I listened to this. I don't tend to read many political works so for readers who read a wider variety of political works they not find this as useful as I did.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Andrew Parsons
- 11-27-18
great great love it
great great love it you will too got to read this got to read this
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-16-23
At times amazing
Some of the story was difficult to follow: some terminology and the huge list of source philosophers. But some stunning moments as Rorty offered predictions about modern America that we are living through today. And bits of hope that American Democracy can survive.
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- Bill Storage
- 04-26-18
Eloquent yet misunderstood pragmatist
Few would have believed in 1979, when Rorty was the most famous philosopher in America, that 40 years later he could be essentially written out of history. The right then despised him for being a leftist, despite his fervent anti-communist, anti-Marxist stance and defense of the cold war. The left now despises him for assessing cultural studies as “victim studies” and his pointing out the implausibility of the left’s opposition to capitalism and free markets. Rorty made no friends on the left when he claimed – as a “good leftist” – that the academic left needed to put a moratorium on the naïve theorizing and futile attempts to philosophize itself into political relevance. Further, Rorty riled philosophers by holding a position that was neither moral absolutism/universalism nor moral relativism.
In this book, written toward the end of his career, he suggests that anti-humanist sentiment has harmed the liberal agenda and argues that the left, like the religious right, now seeks desecularization of knowledge. He predicts a disgusted, mocking left who finds America unforgivable and a university system that exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics. He finds that as long as left is incapable of national pride we will not really have a political left but only a cultural left that casts votes.
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12 people found this helpful
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- A structural engineer
- 05-03-17
Everyone should take this book
My title quotes (or maybe paraphrases) the guys from A Partially Examined Life podcast. I followed their advice and agree.
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3 people found this helpful